D66, SP push for small classes in primary and secondary education to safeguard quality

The D66 and SP want to legally limit the number of children per class in primary and secondary education in the Netherlands. Eventually, they want no more than 21 children per teacher, despite the ongoing teacher shortage. According to the parties, this will safeguard the quality of education while also lowering teachers’ workload.

“The initial reaction is often: it’s not possible because of the teacher shortage,” SP parliamentarian Sandra Beckerman told AD on Monday, the first day of the new academic year for schools in the south of the Netherlands. “We’re now turning the discussion around: there’s no teacher shortage in the Netherlands, but a shortage of teachers willing to teach.”

“200,000 people in our country have a teaching qualification,” said D66 MP Ilana Rooderkerk. “That is enough for ten children per class. The problem is that teachers are dropping out due to the high workload.” A quarter of new teachers quit education within five years, the MP told the newspaper.

The parliamentarians believe that smaller classes will automatically make teaching a more attractive profession, thereby decreasing the shortage. In their bill, the D66 and SP want to cap classes immediately at 29 students, decreasing that number to 21 in the long term. “Research shows that this number is optimal for students’ academic performance,” Rooderkerk said.

According to the MPs, reducing class sizes in all schools would require approximately 1.5 billion euros. “But that investment also yields significant returns: research shows that class size reduction would lead to an increase in gross domestic product of 3.5 billion euros over ten years,” Rooderkerk said.

It is not clear how many school classrooms in the Netherlands have over 30 kids per teacher. Schools have not been required to record class size since the turn of the century. According to AD, a sample survey by the Ministry of Education showed that around 2 percent of classes had over 30 children in 2019, rising to 5.4 percent in the 2020/21 school year.

This isn’t the first time that these two parties have tried to ban big classes in the Netherlands. In 2016, then-SP parliamentarian Tjitske Siderius introduced a bill limiting primary school classes to 23 students. The D66 later joined the bill, but it has been shelved for years due to a lack of support. The Council of State was also very critical of the proposal, saying the limit lacked substantiation, compromised schools’ freedom to organize their own education, and would be difficult to implement given the teacher shortage.

Nevertheless, the MPs think their new bill will be successful. “Various studies show that the Netherlands is at the bottom of all European rankings: reading, writing, and mathematics are poor. One in three children leaves school without being proficient in these areas. Something really needs to be done to break this downward trend,” Rooderkerk said.