'Education needs major maintenance'
Jeroen Dijsselbloem, former chairman of a parliamentary inquiry into educational innovations, delved into the history of his own educational family. As finance minister, he was partly responsible for the zero line, one of the drastic cutbacks in education.
Image: Angeliek de Jonge
Barking breaks the silence in the yard. Twirre rushes ahead of his master like a whirlwind. Jeroen Dijsselbloem, pruning shears in hand, arrives in his slippers. “I only had fifteen minutes to spare, so what do you do: then you go and prune the roses”, he smiles.
Hidden in the greenery of the Wageningen floodplains, with the Lower Rhine in the background, turbulent The Hague seems far away. “When our previous dog died, we initially didn't want a new one,” says Dijsselbloem, chairman of the Dutch Safety Board since May 2019. “But I noticed that I spent much less time in the countryside. And how pleasant it is to sometimes leave your phone at home.”
The name Dijsselbloem is forever associated with the parliamentary inquiry committee on educational innovations that he chaired thirteen years ago. But that's not the only band. He comes from a real educational family, which includes both his parents and his grandfather. Dijsselbloem recently published a book about it in which he reviews more than thirty educational careers from four generations. A journey through time that begins more than a hundred years ago in Brabant with his mother's father, Wim Visser.
The Mammoth Act made it possible to stack in education. That was a huge emancipation of our people. Now the system is starting to fall apart, because study programs are putting up barriers again
“My grandfather studied very well,” says Dijsselbloem at the room table, leaning back in his chair. “But his father said: You have to learn a trade. So he went to craft school. There he made a career and even became director of the craft school. In the next generation, most ranks and ranks had already been broken to a large extent. If you could become a teacher, you made a big step forward. Back then, the profession still had real prestige and it paid well. Later, the Mammoetwet made it possible to stack in education. That was an enormous emancipation of our population. Now the system is starting to fall apart, because training courses raise barriers again.”
You did the interviews with your mother, why?
He springs to his feet: “Oh, that was just fun to do. My mother is 88 and still very sharp. She has a memory like an elephant. Sometimes when we spoke to an uncle or aunt, she still remembers things from the lives of those people that they themselves had forgotten.”
“Her class is on the cover of the book. You see a wooden log cabin, that was the school building. Schools were very poorly facilitated at the time. A niece of hers taught caravan children near Oss. There they taught in an uninsulated wooden shed where it simply froze during the winter. The toilet was a boarded-up nook in the corner of the classroom.”
Why didn't you go into education yourself?
“My father burned out and retired at 54. That had a huge impact on the family. My mother has kept a love for education, but her career was also very difficult. She was still of the generation of women who were fired as soon as they got married. Later she was able to return as a stand-in. The employment conditions for stand-in workers were terribly bad, you were not entitled to anything, no pension, nothing.”
“I saw a very positive example through my godfather, uncle François, physics teacher in Helmond and later deputy headmaster. He taught me for many years. Until well after his retirement, he taught at schools in Brabant that could not find a physics teacher.”
“I had other interests, that's what it comes down to in the end. You don't have to redo your parents' life." Laughing: “I actually wanted to become a veterinarian, but that didn't quite work out either.
Image: Angeliek de Jonge
Short resume Jeroen Dijsselbloem
Born March 29, 1966, Eindhoven
2000-2012 Member of the House of Representatives PvdA
2012-2017 Minister of Finance
2013-2018 President Eurogroup
2019-present Chair of the Dutch Safety Board
2019-present Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Wageningen University & Research
2021-present Chairman of the National Growth Fund advisory committee
Support base
His interest in education was greatly stimulated with the parliamentary inquiry committee in 2008. Many in education embraced the report as an indictment of educational innovations that are imposed on teachers by the government without scientific substantiation and without sufficient support from above.
In 2014, however, a radical change came from political The Hague with the introduction of appropriate education. When the House of Representatives debated the law two years earlier, Dijsselbloem spoke on behalf of the PvdA faction. "The lack of money, time, expertise and support among professionals, who have to do it all again, makes it impossible for us to agree to this bill," he said at the time.
Last year, education minister Arie Slob announced no fewer than 25 points for improvement, prompted by all the criticism since the introduction of appropriate education. One of the conclusions of the evaluation is that the government has set too little in advance about the goals and the intended results, so that everyone could give their own interpretation.
We have never said: the government should not interfere in education. That is how it has been explained, because there are quite a few people in education who wish that the government would never interfere again
In addition to 'Dijsselbloem-proof', the term 'Dijsselbloem ghost' also emerged in political circles: the shadow of the report that ensured that the government hardly dared to lift a finger. Wrongly, according to the PvdA-prominent: “We have never said: Government should not interfere with education. It has been explained that way by many, because there are quite a lot of people in education who wish that the government never interferes with it again. One of the main conclusions we drew was: the government has neglected its core task. And the recommendation was correct: pick it up again.”
Today it is not so much the government, but school boards are experimenting with educational innovations such as personalized education, iPad schools.
“The reflex should not be that the government will again prescribe which forms of education schools may or may not introduce. But the underlying question, which you do not ask, is where the autonomy and decision-making in education should lie. We've been talking about it for a long time, those large, distant school boards that sometimes have very little affinity and bond with the daily practice in the schools, but who do have very large budgets at their disposal. Does the government, the inspectorate, really still have a grip on it?”
Zero line
In his book and in previous interviews, Dijsselbloem points to the impact of the so-called hos agreement in the XNUMXs, a major intervention in teacher salaries under the then minister Wim Deetman in order to curb government spending. That measure did not do the status of the profession any good. But that was not the only intervention. In twenty years, various cabinets stepped on the brakes about thirty times with regard to salaries in education and government. figured the Ministry of the Interior agree. An example of government intervention that was strongly felt in education was the zero line between 2010 and 2014. A saving that was estimated at the time at 1,5 billion euros, for which Dijsselbloem himself was partly responsible.
You took office as Minister of Finance in November 2012. Why did you not immediately abolish the zero line?
“Because we had to get out of the crisis and make significant cutbacks. If you look at the government budget, the largest expenditure items are health care, social security and education. We really went over everything with the cheese slicer.”
You point emphatically to the hos memorandum, but the government's tendency to intervene in the wage margin in the event of economic hardship is a constant, isn't it?
“I think it is, in all honesty. I mention Deetman's intervention in the XNUMXs because it was the most radical. My father and all the uncles earned really well, they lived in very nice houses and built up a generous pension. After the hos, that changed drastically. We have never done it this rough in education, or any social sector for that matter. The zero line is then marginal to what happened there. Nevertheless…"
But?
“Yes, my first answer was: that's true. That is a structural fact.”
Image: Angeliek de Jonge
Cynical
In the Rutte II cabinet, the PvdA took government responsibility together with the VVD in a difficult time, but was punished in the elections in March 2017. The party plummeted from 38 to 9 seats. After a long formation, the Rutte III cabinet took office in October that year and Dijsselbloem handed over the baton to his successor Wopke Hoekstra. Dijsselbloem was third on the PvdA candidate list for the House of Representatives and with more than 51 thousand preference votes was the most popular social democrat behind party leader Lodewijk Asscher, but he decided to leave national politics.
Since then, he began to delve into his family's educational history as a hobby biographer. In the course of all those years a lot has changed and a lot for the better, Dijsselbloem puts into perspective in his book. But to deal with long-term issues such as inequality of opportunity, the declining quality of education and the teacher shortage, major maintenance is required.
If you want to raise the prestige of the profession, you have to make higher demands on the quality of teachers, on training and continuous training. And in parallel, you have to raise salaries
Dijsselbloem: “If you want to raise the profile of the profession, you have to make higher demands on the quality of teachers, on training and continuous training. And parallel to that, you have to raise salaries. The teacher shortage sometimes also seems to be a reason not to do all kinds of important things. You tend to place less demands on the influx of, for example, lateral entrants. But that in turn is crippling for the reputation of the profession.”
The caretaker cabinet made at the last minute 500 miljoen euros structurally free for narrowing the pay gap between primary and secondary education. An important step?
“The difference in salaries could never be explained. So every half billion that comes in is nice. I try not to look cynical about it, but spending money is not difficult at all these days. The real conversation and analysis of what is going on, what are the major problems and how can we tackle them is not being conducted. Look at the 8,5 billion from the National Education Programme. If we're not careful, that money could actually backfire. Everyone is now focusing on the question: how can we spend all that incidental money usefully in two and a half years? And before you know it, you push structural improvements even further back… That makes me really cynical.”
This interview appeared in the November issue of the Education magazine, which is published eleven times a year AObmembers falls on the bus. Look here for all the benefits of it AOb-membership.
