There is justifiably a lot of attention to unequal opportunities in the Netherlands. The fact that lives are determined by where a person is born is not very surprising, but the phenomenon itself remains disappointing. You could at least expect that the large differences among children from diverse social backgrounds would to some extent be corrected by schooling. However, the differences do not decrease but rather they slightly increase during the school years.
According to Minister Dennis Wiersma (Primary and Secondary Education, VVD), private companies that offer homework assistance, tutoring and/or test training are co-responsible for the growing opportunity gap in education. Together with many other members of Parliament, he is angry about the additional education that rich parents are gladly willing to pay for. It is true that the market for additional education is on the rise: the total annual expenditure in this market rose from 26 million euros in 1995 to 284 million in 2018. But we know nothing about the pupils receiving this help. Are they exclusively rich kids?
Primary school parents
Together with Ron Diris I am studying additional education at the primary school level. There were no concrete figures about how additional education is used in primary school education in the Netherlands. But precisely because pupils in the Netherlands are categorised into learning levels at the end of primary school, it is important to know how many parents of primary school pupils use additional education – such as tutoring, homework assistance and test training – and who these parents are.
We held a survey among a representative group of Dutch parents with at least one child of primary school age to ask about the use of additional education. We also asked which specific form, who offered it, with what intensity and whether or not it was a paid variant. On the basis of the answers provided by 3,429 parents of a total of 4,695 children, we formed a good picture of the use of tutoring in primary school. We also had an extensive set of background characteristics, including the parents’ levels of education and income, which enabled us to examine the relation between the parents’ socio-economic background and the use of tutoring.
Paid online learning package
Our study showed that about 25 percent of all primary school pupils receive additional education. This number has been surprisingly stable throughout the school years; that is, there is hardly any difference between participating in additional education in group 3 versus group 8. Children of both less educated parents and highly educated parents receive additional education equally often.
The main difference is the form that parents choose. Less educated parents have their child or children participate in free additional education at school, whereas highly educated parents tend to buy a paid online learning package. When parents use a paid variant, the average costs are 50 euros a month. This is beyond the reach of a parent on welfare but possible for a large share of our society.
I can guess what you’re thinking. Perhaps a paid variant is much better than a non-paid variant, and less educated parents are missing the boat. However, our first preliminary findings do not indicate this at all. And in any case, we know from international literature that a child will not suddenly do better at school after one or two weekly tutorial sessions.
Moreover, we found no difference in effectivity after an hour of paid online tutoring versus a free tutoring session at school. Our preliminary conclusion is that additional education is not a factor to explain the inequality of opportunity in primary school education.
A story has arisen in which we can point a telling finger at the tutoring industry and the so-called rich kid who receives endless and expensive additional hours of education, thus buying a good Cito score. If this were true then we could make restrictions or make tutoring available to vulnerable children. But it is not true and it greatly distracts from the real problems in the Dutch educational system.
Gigantic disadvantages
Demonstrable factors that do contribute to unequal opportunities are the gigantic disadvantages with which children begin at primary school and that could partially be improved by better pre-school facilities. Or that neighbourhood segregation leads to school segregations whereby schools with a relatively large number of children with a low socio-economic background do very poorly because the quality of the teachers at these schools lags behind and the teacher shortage is more acute. This is a very persistent problem, one without a clear solution. And yet these are the problems that we must address in combatting unequal opportunities. Let’s at least stop dragging in the so-called rich kid who receives additional education.
This article is a translation of a piece that was written in Dutch and has been published earlier in the Dutch newspaper NRC.