Initial School Closures and Suspensions of Exams in the Netherlands: An Interview with Melanie Ehren on the Educational Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic in the Netherlands (Part 1)

In this two-part interview, Melanie Ehren talks with Thomas Hatch about how the Dutch education system responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and what has happened since. Ehren is Professor and Director of Research of LEARN! at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. This interview is one in a series exploring what can change in schools after the pandemic? Previous interviews and posts have looked at developments in Italy, Poland, Finland, New Zealand, South Africa, and Vietnam. Other IEN blog posts from Melanie Ehren include A view from the Netherlands: Melanie Ehren on school closures and the pandemic; Lead the Change Interview with Melanie Ehren; A call to action in the Netherlands: Addressing rising inequality in a decentralized system.

Thomas Hatch (TH): Can you give us an overview what happened in schools in the Netherlands after the COVID-19 outbreak? When did schools close and how long were they closed?

Melanie Ehren (ME): The national government closed schools three times. The first national closure lasted from March 16 to 10 May 2020 (for primary schools) and until the 2^nd of June (for secondary schools). Teaching and learning was fully online during that time. The second national closure went from the 16^th of December 2020 until the 8^th of February 2021 and then the third national closure went from 14 December 2021 until 10 January 2022, although this was more of an extended Christmas break. All the closures were in response to a rise in cases, but around the time of the second closure there was also a discussion about whether closing schools was the best measure to prevent virus spread. The argument for closing schools included that it would help enforce the working from home policy. Too many people were still going into work and by closing schools, parents had to stay home with their children.

Melanie Ehren

When schools reopened after the first and second closures, schools had to ensure social distancing of 1.5 metres between people inside and ensure good hygiene. Schools were allowed to decide on how to meet these guidelines, with support and proposed models by the national councils for primary and secondary education. In response, schools did things like splitting classes in half with some students attending during the first part of the week and the rest attending at the end of the week. Even though the periods of national school closure were relatively short in comparison to some other countries, the disruption lasted much longer. For example, even when schools were technically open, many teachers and classes had to quarantine for periods of time. Since the beginning of the school closures, the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture, & Science has monitored the reduction in lesson hours due to COVID over the pandemic in a series of monthly reports. The Dutch Inspectorate of Education also documented the timeline of COVID-related decisions in 2020 (including the start of the second closure in December of 2021) and then again in 2021 in their annual reports on the state of education.

TH: What was the initial response from policymakers and others in terms of support?

ME: In the Netherlands, there was a coordinated approach by the national councils for primary and secondary education, the ministries for education and economic affairs and a national association of school boards. That approach focused on ensuring that all students had access to online learning when schools were closed. These organisations collectively investigated how many students and teachers did not have internet connections or laptops at home. Based on this information, telecom providers searched for the best solutions together with the parties involved. Those solutions included issuing hotspots and creating public Wi-Fi networks and arranging laptops for children who needed them. In addition, NPO Z@ppelin, a national broadcaster, initially offered instruction on television for children without a laptop/tablet.  But I also saw schools where teachers would just hop on their bicycle and tour around the city to check in with families and have conversations on the doorstep.

A lot was left up to the initiative of the boards of each school and the networks responsible for ensuring inclusive education in each region. Honestly, because the Dutch school system is so decentralized, we just don’t know what happened at the school level in a lot of communities. All this raises a really interesting question: are highly centralized systems or more decentralized systems are best equipped to deal with a crisis like the pandemic?  To me, the examples of teachers going door to door to check in with kids really speaks to teacher agency and how teachers understand their role and responsibility.  That agency is a really important thing to have during a pandemic, but also when thinking about school quality in general. My colleagues and I wrote about some of these issues of teacher agency from the perspective of several different education systems (Teaching in the COVID-19 Era: Understanding the Opportunities and Barriers for Teacher Agency).

[A]re highly centralized systems or more decentralized systems best equipped to deal with a crisis like the pandemic?

Overall, though, there was not much focus on internet access because the entire country has good coverage and good broadband access. At the same time, the Dutch government created some exceptions to online learning so that children from parents in key professions like health, education, police, public transport and the fire department could go to school. Local schools could also make exceptions so that children from what the government called “vulnerable populations” could come to school. That included children who were living in confined spaces, did not have access to devices, or who were experiencing other problems at home that might be preventing them from accessing online education.

TH: What happened with exams and testing at the end of the 2019-2020 school years?

ME: The school closures in 2019-2020 meant that standardized tests at the end of primary education (8^th grade; age 11/12) and in secondary education were cancelled. The cancellations of the exams at the end of primary education had a particularly significant impact because, in the Netherlands, students are tracked into different types of secondary schools according to tested ability level. Only those students in the highest track in secondary school will get access to a university. Getting into a higher secondary school type is therefore a defining point in a child’s life. In a normal school year, students are placed into secondary school types on the basis of their primary school teacher’s advice. This can be adjusted upwards (never downwards) on the basis of the national standardised test at the end of primary education. However, estimates from the national planning bureau (CPB) suggest that in the year 2019-2020 when the test at the end of primary school was cancelled, 14,000 pupils were placed in a lower track for secondary school than they would have been if they’d been able to sit the national test. This group represents 8% of all pupils – 2 to 3 students per class in a secondary school – and includes an over-representation of students with parents with low levels of education.

[W]hen the test at the end of primary school was cancelled, 14,000 pupils were placed in a lower track for secondary school than they would have been if they’d been able to sit the national test. This group represents 8% of all pupils – 2 to 3 students per class in a secondary school – and includes an over-representation of students with parents with low levels of education.

Due to these results, the Minister of Education sent out a letter to secondary schools, asking them to implement a range of formative assessments in year 1 to target the students who might have been mis-placed and to put in place transition arrangements to enable them to move upwards if warranted. The next year, in 2020-2021, primary schools were advised to give children the benefit of the doubt in their recommendations for secondary education and err towards a higher track. However, for the most part, this does not seem to have happened.

In contrast, the cancellation of standardized secondary school exams had a more positive effect for students in the Netherlands who wanted to enter university because their final grades were based only on their school-based assessments with no information from the cancelled national exams. Normally, at the end of secondary school, students receive a mark for each subject where 50% is based on school-based exams and 50% on a standardized national exams. The Government decides on which content should be included in the school-based exams and which will be assessed in the national exams. The school decides when and how it assesses the school-based component and can spread this over multiple months and even school years. The only requirement is that the assessments are finalized before the national exams and that the organisation of the school-based assessments (including how it is marked and how the assessment is quality assured) is included in a formal programme of assessment which is approved by the school’s exam board. The exam board decided on the adaptations so this would vary by school (for the official description see School Examens 2023).

For the 2019-20 school year, when the national exams were cancelled, estimates by from the national planning bureau (CPB) suggest that 8% of secondary students would have received a different outcome if they had sat the national exam. To mitigate negative consequences and to give everyone a fair chance to pass, the Dutch Ministry of Education offered all students additional re-tests of their school-based assessments in up to three subjects. This resulted in an overall pass rate above 98%, with almost 7% higher than in preceding years.

Then in 2020-21, standardized tests in primary education returned as normal. However, exams in secondary education were adapted in two ways.  First, following a formal in-school consultation process and including adaptations in the formal ‘programme of assessment’ which is scrutinized by the Dutch Inspectorate of Education during regular inspections, schools were allowed to make their own adaptations to the school-based assessments.

Second, national exams were adapted by having an additional opportunity to sit for the exam, so if you failed twice, you were given a third try.  Schools were also allowed an extended timeframe in which students could sit exams in their various subjects, and students could choose one subject that wouldn’t count towards their final pass/fail decision.

(To be continued in October…)