Educational Opportunities in the Netherlands: Policy, Students' Performance and Issues

Since 1985 the Educational Priority Policy (EPP) has been in effect in the Netherlands. This policy is aimed at reducing the educational disadvantage of children due to their social, economic and cultural circumstances. The first section of this article describes the outlines of the EPP. The second section presents the results of an EPP evaluation study conducted in secondary education among 20,000 students from nearly 400 schools. The emphasis is on test performance in relation to three student characteristics: gender, social class and ethnic background. The analyses show that the test results are largely determined by social class. Gender hardly plays a role, while the influence of ethnic origin is also limited. It should however be added that the performance of two migrant groups, the Turks and Moroccans, is the worst of all. As most Turks and Moroccans belong to the lowest socioeconomic category, the factor of ethnic origin is so closely interwoven with the factor of social class, that it is not really possible to distinguish the two. In the final section of the article these findings are related to three theoretical perspectives regarding the explanation of differences in educational performance. This is followed by a discussion on possible consequences for the EPP.