Grant applications frustrate school leaders: 'It's a lottery'
Applying for grants is a complex time consuming job for many school leaders. It is frustrating because, in addition to the high workload that already exists, many school leaders spend hours in vain on an application. And then the chance that you will be awarded the subsidy money is small.
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AOb-chief administrator of primary education Simone Fomenko hears from various boards that school leaders are under enormous pressure at this time and calls the subsidy policy discouraging: "If you have already submitted several subsidy applications and get no response, how much sense do you have - if you are already under high pressure - to submit that next application. That is so detrimental to subsidy pots; you have to make a lot of effort to rake in, but the chance that you will be rejected is many times greater than that you will be drawn, when you desperately need the money."
A subsidy that causes a lot of controversy among school leaders is Schoolkracht. Some 170 to 190 schools were recently awarded funding for school and educational development, while the rest of the approximately 4700 applicants were left empty-handed.
Hours for nothing
Petra 't Hoen, school leader at the OPOGO Foundation, is one of them. "It irritates me immensely. In our profession we rarely have a few hours to spare and applying for a subsidy is not a daily occurrence for me. So there is quite a bit of time that I have spent partly during my Christmas holidays. You make a well-considered plan that is completely fits in with your school development and consults with the board and team members. If I add up my hours, there are thousands of euros. And that for a subsidy of 30 euros with which I can use someone just a few extra hours. It is quite a lot of money, but it is the world upside down. My plan was not even looked at in terms of content, it was a lottery."
It's the world upside down, my plan hasn't even been looked at in terms of content
It is not the first request in which 't Hoen has invested a lot of time in vain. Earlier she applied, among other things, to relieve work pressure. Even then she fell by the wayside and her plan was not looked at. "While we desperately need the money for development space. Our small school team is already extremely overburdened."
Subsidy desk
Teacher and project leader Meintje Spijker finds it worrying that you need subsidies for high-quality education. Spijker recently started working one day a week as an MT supporter at De Boomgaard in Utrecht to relieve the director's workload. She spends that day largely accounting for and applying for subsidies. "It is of course very nice that I can be used for this temporarily, because De Boomgaard is a very large school. Smaller schools do not have that option. Our foundation has recently even set up a subsidy desk. a lot of 'subsidy work' for our school leaders is left behind, because it has to be done in detail."
Time consuming puzzle
Spijker is already busy for 3 or 4 hours with just an application. "It is demotivating that you do not know whether that work will be rewarded. And then there is still a lot of arranging and accountability after the application." She is currently busy with the Extra Help for the Class grant, for which the cabinet has made 210 million euros available because of corona. "One of the many things I run into is that it is almost impossible for me to convert the subsidy into my hands. There are so many snags, especially because you are tied to the collective labor agreement for primary education. The subsidy only runs for three months, and before that I can't just hire someone, because then I still have obligations to that person after those three months, but no more money. It's a time-consuming puzzle." Chief driver Fomenko agrees: "It is very complex."
It is demotivating that you do not know whether that work will be rewarded
If these subsidies are already so complex, the question arises: how will the 8,5 billion euros of the National Education Program (NPO) be distributed in the near future? "At the moment it is still unknown exactly how the money gets to the schools and whether there is a subsidy condition. Undoubtedly, there will be a lot of work for school teams and they will sometimes run into the same restrictions as with subsidies," says AObChief Driver Fomenko.
School leader 't Hoen: "Of course I'm happy with the NPO money, but I'm afraid of a huge amount of administration, accountability and so on. I feel like I'm already 2-0 behind."
Trust
According to Fomenko, trust is the key word. "Grants actually ask schools to prove in advance that they have good intentions with the money. But I really don't know of a school that does wrong things with it. Trust the abilities of educators. It is imperative that all this incidental money - the grants and the billions from the NPO - are converted into structural money. Then we can structurally go for quality education."
