For the first two years of primary education, Victor van Boxtel (30) attended a regular school. Until his teacher noticed that his motor skills were lagging behind. Due to a rare genetic disorder – the ADCY5 syndrome, which was only diagnosed two years ago – Victor’s body makes uncontrolled movements. “We cannot provide him with the right support,” his parents were told, and so Victor ended up at a Mytyl school, a special school for children with a physical disability. There too, he turned out to be an outsider because, unlike the other pupils, he had no clear diagnosis. “‘Are you just seeking attention?’ fellow pupils would ask me.” The Mytyl school prepared pupils for the Stedelijk College Eindhoven, squashing overly high ambitions in the process. As a result, Victor ended up in VMBO-K (lower secondary professional education), one of the lowest learning pathways. The school’s motto was: ‘Above all, we want our pupils to be happy.’ “But it didn’t make me happy to be constantly told what I couldn't do. I really didn’t enjoy school in those days.”
See the potential
One of the insights of educational scientists concerning equal opportunities is that it is essential to have high expectations. Eddie Denessen, Professor of Education and Social Inequality at Radboud University, also stresses the importance of expectations. “The trick as a teacher is to see your pupils’ potential, and to see beyond disabilities or social background.”
His research focuses on the latter. Because pupils of similar intelligence but different social backgrounds still have very different school careers. Denessen and his colleagues have repeatedly demonstrated the bankruptcy of the meritocratic ideal that if you simply do your best, you’ll get there. It turns out to be blatantly untrue that doing your best is enough. You need support, from your parents and your teachers. “Throughout education, from primary school to university, you are given opportunities to develop but you also run into obstacles. And some people run into more obstacles than others.” Pupils’ achievements are the fruit not only of their own efforts but also of parental characteristics, such as income, cultural capital, and education level.
The latter in particular is an important predictor of an individual’s school career. Some children enter school or university with everything smoothed out for them, while others have to fight their way through. Or as Denessen puts it: not everyone is given the same opportunities to learn. “Children of highly educated parents get many learning opportunities outside school. For example, because their parents talk to them more, read to them, or take them to museums or holidays abroad. Children already enter kindergarten with inequalities, and schools can only partly compensate for that.”
Together with the University of Amsterdam, Denessen has launched the ‘Koersen op kansengelijkheid’ (‘Aiming for equal opportunities’) project. The goal of the project is to use two pilots, in Venlo and in Leiden, to explore how to eliminate obstacles, in collaboration with all stakeholders – policy officials, school boards and directors, and teachers. “We hope to arrive at solutions from a place of joint responsibility rather than everyone pointing fingers.”
In addition to his research, Denessen often gives lectures in schools to help teachers become aware of what they can do to promote equal opportunities. One of his messages is: keep setting high expectations and don’t lock students into fixed level boxes. “I think my job as a scientist is to constantly repeat this story, because I hear a lot of rhetoric and arguments without any base in knowledge. Sometimes I feel like a stuck record, but I simply cannot repeat it often enough. Eventually, the message gets through, and schools start thinking about it.
Then you see small shifts. For example, schools start thinking about widening the lower years, or they become more optimistic about the learning opportunities of children with lowly educated parents.”
Give children the best education
What schools can in any case do to promote equal opportunities is to teach well, says Erik Meester, and that requires well-trained teachers. That is why he helped Anna Bosman, Professor of Learning and Development, to establish Pedagogical Sciences for Primary Education (PWPO), the first and only full university Bachelor’s degree programme in the Netherlands for primary school teachers. Meester, meanwhile, works at the corresponding Master’s in Curriculum Development. “Our alumni are going to improve education,” he promises.
The PWPO alumni are trained in an evidence-based approach to teaching, with clear instructions, gradual skills practice, lots of interaction with and feedback from teachers, and a strong focus on knowledge building. “Good education starts with doing what works, so that every child can learn to read and do arithmetic well, and gain enough knowledge to understand the world,” Meester argues.
Important insights from the psychology of learning have been available for years, but they have not yet really landed in schools – and often also not in primary school and other teacher training study programmes. That is what PWPO hopes to change. Because children of highly educated parents usually manage to find their way despite school, but other pupils are in desperate need of good education. Meester: “If you give children poor education, you put the children of lowly educated parents at a disadvantage. And we can blame it all on the pupils and give them labels like dyslexia and ADHD, but let us look at our own actions first. This sense of responsibility is something I sometimes miss in schools.” Meester guides schools in improving their teaching. He contributed to a recent success in Aldenhof, one of the poorest neighbourhoods in Nijmegen. “Last year, the pupils in this area scored an average of 5/10 and they performed among the bottom 20% in the Netherlands. A year later, they are in the top 10%. This is not the first time that we have had such results with our evidence-based approach.”
Like Denessen, Meester insists on the importance of high expectations. “Children can really become smarter, as long as you provide good instructions, guidance, and feedback. And yes, that is equally true at university.”
So Victor was not happy at the VMBO-K. He wanted more. With the support of his parents, after the Mytyl school, he took a second chance and enrolled in secondary general adult education (VAVO, formerly known as ‘mother MAVO’). “My supervisor from the Mytyl school said I was aiming too high. But I wanted to show that I could do it.” At the VAVO, he received good guidance and, more importantly, gained some confidence. When he obtained his VMBO-T diploma after two years, his mentor said: I think you can handle HAVO too. He completed this degree in two years, and within a year had also obtained the required VWO certificates. The road to the university lay open.
End the levels thinking
Two years ago, Denessen collaborated on the Education Council’s ‘Select later, differentiate better’ recommendation, which advocates for later selection. Because, as research has shown time and again, later selection promotes equal opportunities. In the Netherlands, after year 8 of primary school, pupils are divided into separate educational levels. In many other countries, this does not happen until around age 15. “The Netherlands is world champion of stratification,” as Denessen says.
The Council’s analysis of the problem – we select too early – is widely shared, but the solution is a bridge too far in the Netherlands for now, and that has everything to do with history and feelings. From people who immediately see the ghost of middle school rise again. From grammar schools fighting for their survival. And from parents who fear that their VWO (pre-university) child will suffer – even though research has long shown that all children, including the bright ones, thrive in a heterogeneous class. Denessen: “We are not in any way advocating for a uniform mash-up in which everyone has to learn the same thing. It is mainly about smart differentiation, and not pigeonholing children in advance.”
The recommendation did lead to the broad bridge class bonus, i.e. funds that secondary schools can use to work towards creating a broad, mixed lower secondary school. Denessen: “I'm currently working with a number of schools to monitor this trajectory: What do they need to successfully set up a broad bridge class?”
Denessen digs deeper and points to what the stratified system does to our thinking. “A number of municipal councils have already decided to refrain from using the terms ‘highly’ and ‘lowly’ educated, since doing so might be stigmatising. But actually, by doing so, you are simply glossing over what is standing practice. As long as you classify students based on their performance in a stratified education system, you are promoting inequality. If you have to perform better to go to university than to a university of applied sciences, then university will have a higher status, you will be worth more if you go there, and those around will be more proud of you. Minister Dijkgraaf may claim that MBO is equivalent to HBO, which is equivalent to university, but that is not true.”
Clearly, not everyone learns at the same level, but that does not mean that you are a level, Denessen argues. “We are too fixated on levels in our thinking. A pupil might be able to handle VWO level in English, but only HAVO level in maths, and within maths, they may be good at algebra and bad at geometry. Or be at one level in spring and at another level by autumn. Levels are flexible, and we must design our education system so that we can always find the best match between pupil and subject matter. So flexibilization is the magic word for schools to work towards more equal opportunities.”
Victor's first choice was history, but in the end, he chose for Religious Studies, at Radboud University. Because of the small scale. “I never felt like a number here, but always like a person.” The only thing that was more difficult was the contact with fellow students, who seemed to see mainly his handicap. For instance, his mentor ‘mum’ had rather not see him go to the introduction weekend. “She asked whether I could bring my mother or sister to look after me. I didn't want that. I was 22 years old, come on! Plus, I don't need any care.” He felt increasingly excluded. On the advice of his student advisor, he held a presentation at a tutor meeting. But that backfired.
Inclusive university
Rona Jualla-van Oudenhoven has been chief diversity officer at Radboud University since 2020, making her one of the driving forces behind an inclusive university. She can already report that a group of the kind that Victor needed is now in place. “But maybe we can make it more visible still.” Other goals for the near future include signing charters and covenants for more diversity and inclusion, working with students to create the Anti-Racism Awareness Network, and developing a module for employees and students to combat discrimination and sexual harassment.
Inclusion means that everyone should be able to feel at home at the university, regardless of their gender, ethnic and other background, or abilities. “We are all members of the university community, and the university should be a safe place for everyone.” One way to achieve this is by having more voices represented at the table. But sometimes you also need to create separate spaces (virtual or in person) for the people who need them. “That is something I often have to defend,” says Jualla-van Oudenhoven. “Isn’t the entire university a safe space? Apparently not. That may be the ideal, but it is not yet a reality everywhere and for everyone.” The same goes for equity, equality, or representativeness. “Sometimes a situation has become so skewed that you need actions like positive discrimination to make sure everyone has equal opportunities.”
Jualla-van Oudenhoven works primarily bottom-up. Anyone can knock on her door and she will try to arrange things or bring people together. People come to her with very diverse questions, from how the university can do more for refugees, to a student in a wheelchair saying that there is room for improvement in making buildings more accessible. The latter led to the creation of the Disabilities and Accessibilities Committee (DAC).
People often say to her: Aren’t we ultimately all the same? “It’s great to say: I don’t see skin colour or disability; I just see people. But the reality is that not everyone gets the same opportunities, which is why we need to break down as many barriers as possible, literally and figuratively.” She completely recognises what Denessen says about the impact of the socio-economic background on equal opportunities. “If you want to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, you have to be mindful of institutionalised inequality. It is never an individual story.”
Inclusion also has to do with the curriculum and what kind of people you train. Marleen Koster, fifth-year student in medicine, is the president of CODING, a national collective for diversity and inclusion in medicine, co-founded two years ago by Professor Maria van den Muijsenbergh. The collective focuses on networking and raising awareness. For example, Koster is following a project group that aims to make Nijmegen’s medicine curriculum more inclusive. “In dermatology, for example, we need to also devote attention to specific characteristics of black skin, and in gynaecology, we need to take into account people’s sexual orientation,” says Koster. “By weaving these aspects throughout the entire programme, we make sure that they are not seen as different or divergent, but as normal. Especially if you don’t only include a black or female patient when it is relevant to the medical case, but also when talking about liver problems or foot complaints, for example.” That way, you not only ensure that all students feel seen within the study programme, but also that you train doctors who know how to care for an increasingly diverse patient population. “It is important to see people as individuals, and to approach them with openness and curiosity. That is what makes it possible to provide good care.”
Opportunities for refugees
One of the things that the medical faculty is also pushing for is better support and guidance for refugee doctors. That this is badly needed is apparent from the story of Pavel Stotcko (33). Stotcko was a general surgeon and public health policy advisor in Moscow. Until he married his boyfriend abroad and their Russian same-sex marriage received a lot of media attention. “Putin and his friends did not like it and they sent the police on us after our return to Moscow.” After their passports had been confiscated, Stotcko and his partner fled the country in haste on the advice of their lawyer and ended up in an asylum seekers’ centre in Nijmegen.
Stotcko wanted to go back to working as a doctor as soon as possible. The first hurdle, learning Dutch at Radboud in'to Languages, went smoothly. After that, things became more difficult. “According to the international credential evaluation, I had the level of a first-year Master’s student. This evaluation only looks at degrees, not at work experience.” The prescribed route involved completing an assessment with numerous knowledge tests, a three- to five-year track that refugees must complete entirely independently and without guidance. But Stotcko was lucky. In a conversation with the student advisor, it turned out that someone had dropped out of the Master’s programme, and Stotcko was allowed to take their place.
He is now completing his final internship, and looks back on a very rough time. “I was treated as if I was a Dutch student and given no extra help or explanation. This was really difficult as I didn’t always understand the system. ‘Just ask your fellow students’, the doctors at the hospital told me.”
At the same time, as a doctor from abroad, there were also things he was better at than others. Like communicating with Ukrainian refugees, not only because he speaks Russian, but also because he can empathise with them better than the average Dutch doctor. “Dutch doctors assume that their patients are outspoken and emancipated, but many refugees are not used to that. They expect doctors to know better and accept everything they say.”
Partly for this reason, Stotcko is collaborating with the faculty to help better prepare Bachelor’s students for working with non-Dutch patients. “In Russia, for example, you have to pay extra if you want good care. That’s why people are suspicious of free care; they assume it can never be good. They are also used to doctors always prescribing drugs. You have to explain to them how things work here; otherwise, they won’t come back.”
Stotcko hopes to soon specialise in psychiatry, and he has already had an offer from one hospital. He was lucky, he says. As far as he is concerned, allowing refugee doctors to gain practical experience straight away as an intern or trainee is the best way to quickly give them a place in Dutch society. “I would like to help improve the system for other people and make it more accessible to them.” His message concerning opportunities for refugees: “I don’t expect everyone to adjust to me. But I do expect respect and some understanding of how incredibly hard it was for me.”
In June 2022, Victor graduated in Religious Studies. He now holds a temporary position at this study programme’s education office. “I have become more outspoken. Starting from the Master's programme, I finally felt seen and recognised for my contribution. You need people who can see through your disability, like my parents, the VAVO teachers, and my university lecturers. What I want to say to other people who are different from what is considered ‘normal’: Don’t give up!"
This article was written by Bea Ros and also appears in the special anniversary edition of Radboud Magazine. The photographs were selected from the Radboud University collection. The persons appearing in the photographs have no relation to this article.