The price of the small class
Small groups, the money to the class. With resounding words, the Schools for Personal Education (Svpo) are constantly recruiting new colleagues. Former teachers sketch a different side: wasted efficiency, lack of support and lesson blocks that are partly paid out as homework assistance. At the same time, many tons of education money ends up in the bank account or in stones, according to research by the Onderwijsblad.
Image: Editors Education Magazine
Ping. On February 5, 2019, at five to five, the teachers of the Isaac Beeckman Academy, the first School for Personal Education (Svpo) that was opened in 2010 next to the small train station in Kapelle-Biezelinge, will receive an email. Sender: Chairman of the Board and Svpo founder Misha van Denderen.
One of the recipients is Niels Minnaard. He has been one of the new faces at the school since the summer of 2018. It is actually quite good. As a subject teacher he teaches history to all five classes of the second year, eighty students in total. It clicks with his students and with colleagues. He is nominated in the provincial elections for the best teacher in Zeeland. "Well, that doesn't say everything", Minnaard puts it into perspective, but still: "It was a nice boost."
The teacher had to get used to it in the beginning, to the emails from the headquarters in Amsterdam North. This time it is about the strike that students have announced for a better climate and the national education strike of 15 March. Pupils who want to strike should only take a day off, writes the chairman of the board. And the education strike is not supported by the Svpo leadership either. According to the board, it is better to look at better use of the money. "So we just stay open."
Minnaard's message is uncomfortable. Isn't it up to every employee to decide whether to strike? He decides to send Van Denderen an email back the next morning, with a cc to his team. "I thought it was important to let them know that there were colleagues who wanted to take part in the strike."
I thought it was important to let people know that there were colleagues who wanted to take part in the strike
That evening at ten past eleven, the mailbox of the Zeeland teachers pings again. In a lengthy response, Van Denderen writes that Minnaard as a secondary education teacher cannot strike to stand up for primary education, another sector. 'It is nice that you want to stand up for them, but not if you do it on behalf of our school ... You also write that you want to strike for smaller classes. That's pretty much the travesty of the year. Have you ever looked around your classroom and counted the number of students in it? (…) That is by far the lowest number in the Netherlands. Your strike would therefore simply be unlawful. '
“Your director who speaks about unlawfulness, I found it intimidating”, Minnaard looks back on his former employer. “I had barely seen that man. Colleagues who have been there longer said: Don't worry too much about it, that is Misha, in reality he is not too bad. Most of all, I was angry. That's not how you treat your employees, do you? "
1. 'As if you were in a private school'
"Teach as if you were in an expensive private school." For example, economist and philosopher Misha van Denderen has now launched eight Schools for Personal Education on the market. With small classes of an average of sixteen students, a lot of contact time and as little overhead as possible. A four-day week of classes, little homework and a lot of attention from teachers. Svpo only promises benefits for both students and teachers. Regional newspapers that have visited one of the schools in recent years give the floor to delighted teachers.
The Education magazine did research last summer
to the remarkable financing constructions within
the network of personal education. Click on the image.
“Students who might drown in a regular school can be given more attention in a small class,” agrees Minaard. The small classes were an important reason for him to apply for a job at Svpo.
“Nowhere have I had such a good time with the students as there. It's so small-scale, you do it all together, ”remembers Kim Scherpenhuyzen, who taught Dutch at the school in Kapelle from 2011 to 2015. "The idea is really okay, but after a while you start to notice things that are not right."
There is also another side. It Education magazine spoke with eight former teachers from three different schools, saw dozens of emails and reports, and requested documents from the Education Inspectorate via the Government Information (Public Access) Act. Themes that keep recurring in the conversations: teacher turnover, lack of support, outdated teaching materials, and the way in which the board deals with criticism - and pulls the strings behind the scenes.
Chairman of the board Van Denderen did not want to give an interview. He did, however, respond by email to a number of questions submitted by the Education Magazine. His reaction is woven into this story.
(The text continues under the frame)
Eight schools for personal education
2010 Kapelle (fully grown)
2013 Hardegarijp (fully grown)
2016 Geldermalsen (now 4 annual layers)
2017 Amsterdam, Utrecht (now 3 years)
2019 Hoorn, Deventer and Hengelo (now first annual layer)
The Utrecht Svpo school
2. A meeting in Utrecht (2019)
On Friday, December 6, 2019, something special will happen at the school in Utrecht: there will be a team-wide meeting. Meetings are rare at Svpo, which is also overhead. Only the mentors sit together with colleagues from their own annual layer on a weekly basis. 'Consultation across the school is unnecessary. We don't do that at any of the other schools, 'the school leader emailed the team at the end of 2018.
But there is much dissatisfaction among parents and teachers about the course of events. There are incidents, the turnover within the team is high. The school has been expanded examined by the Education Inspectorate. In mid-October, the latter issued a damning report with the judgment 'very weak', which the school board is trying to keep out of the public with a lawsuit.
The inspection report also remained secret for a long time for the teachers themselves
The report also remains secret for a long time for the teachers themselves. It is eagerly awaited at school. Lecturers cooperated in the investigation and told the inspectors which bottlenecks they identified. From time to time they receive an email in which the chairman of the board explains why the findings do not do justice to the school in his view.
On a Thursday mid-November it reveals Education magazine that the school has received the lowest rating of 'very weak'. The next morning the team receives an email from their school leader. The report is a 'direct attack' on the school's right to exist, the teachers read. According to the management, the inspectorate cannot deal with the innovative approach. No further announcements can be made about the content, the email continues. The report is being challenged by the board. Moreover, Svpo would like to 'protect' the teachers.
Meanwhile, the inspection report will remain in the drawer until the judge judges that the inspectorate may still publish it. At the beginning of January, teachers finally found the report in their mailbox, more than a month after the team-wide meeting that Friday in early December. Van Denderen is also taking part in this. Moreover, a number of teachers and the school leader from Geldermalsen appear to have been summoned.
3.Efficiency
One of the bottlenecks raised by Utrecht teachers is that their own school leader is only present part-time. He also runs the branch in Amsterdam. And if teachers drop out, colleagues have to take care of the hours among themselves. Svpo sells itself as a school without empty intermediate hours. If teachers are not in front of the class, they are assigned part of the time for a backstop. On paper they can plan parent meetings, check work or prepare lessons during those hours. But in practice they often do not get around to that, because they have to take care of students. Too little time is left for their mentorship, they say. They have to find time for this themselves during the long lesson blocks, but this is not always possible, partly due to the fast pace of the lesson program.
Some of the teachers lack guidance and support, the inspectorate notes in the report. 'Reports from parents that may indicate shortcomings in the quality of education are ignored, denied or downplayed by the school management and the board. The same applies to suggestions for improvement from teachers. Many of them do not experience the openness of the school management to discuss matters. Some of them even experience a culture of fear. This hinders the school from implementing the necessary improvements in the quality of education. '
Lecturers continue to run into problems that are a result of excessive efficiency
"Teachers always run into problems that are a result of the excessive efficiency," says Niels van den Dungen, who started working as a philosophy teacher in Utrecht in March 2019. "If a student can no longer be maintained in the classroom, you send him to the deputy principal. But you don't have that escalation step at this school if the school principal is elsewhere half the time. If you have to fill in while you have scheduled a parent meeting, you have to look for a replacement yourself. And because you often have to cover hours, your own work piles up.”
In order to make small classes possible, the 'overhead' at Svpo schools is kept to a minimum. Besides the teachers, there is only a concierge and a part-time school leader. From March, Utrecht will have a second part-time school leader, parents were told last month. The school leaders are supervised by a school director, Suzan Polet, the wife of founder and chairman of the board Misha van Denderen. One of the four board members acts as internal supervisor, a model that many schools exchanged years ago for a separate supervisory board. This week Svpo known that the organizational structure will be overhauled: there will be more supervisors, in addition to a one-man board.
Someone has to be a counselor and there is no reason why one employee should be better than another
Partly due to cost savings, the school leader simultaneously acts as a care coordinator and a confidant. One of the health and safety principles is that a confidential counselor does not have a managerial position, in order to avoid conflicts of interest.
Van Denderen sees it differently, he emailed the Education magazine last summer. “Someone has to be a counselor and there is no reason why one employee should be better than another. Whoever it is, there is always the possibility that there is a conflict of interest or that the person in question doesn't like you or otherwise. In those cases, a board member or possibly the supervisor can always be called upon.'
That these positions are at odds with each other, was the experience of former teacher Minnaard last school year. He found himself in a difficult situation after he indicated that he wanted to participate in the national education strike on March 15. “After the email from Misha, I still sent a message to my colleagues that I was going on strike and that my hours should not be taken over. Then the school leader emailed that I would be uncollegial and unprofessional, with a cc to the entire team. I felt embarrassed, I wanted to take it somewhere. But where can you go? "
The Svpo school in Geldermalsen
4 David Beckham
Another source of frustration is the digital learning environment Workbook, developed by Svpo itself, in which students complete the lion's share of the assignments. It shows signs of malfunction, lecturers from different locations note. For example, correct answers are sometimes counted incorrect. Teachers can do something about it themselves by manually adjusting the answers, they are told. There are 'bonus hours' available for this. Students find tricks to bypass the assignments, to 'hack' away modules. Teachers can revert those assignments, but it results in extra actions. "The education system is outdated and not future-proof," said members of the participation council in Kapelle during an informal meeting last January.
For many courses in the lower years, method books are used that were published ten years or more ago. The methods seem dated. The biology book still states that alcohol can be served from the age of sixteen, while the limit was raised to eighteen in 2014. In the economy method, the VAT rate of 21 percent, introduced in 2012, does not yet exist. In the French method, Émilie Le Pennec, who won her country the first gold gymnastics medal at the 2004 Olympics, is featured as a promising gymnast. Plagued by injuries, she would turn her back on top sport in 2007, but that is nowhere mentioned. This happened two years after the release of the method.
The biology book still states that alcohol may be served from the age of sixteen, with the economy method the VAT rate of 21 percent does not yet exist
An inventory provides a remarkable list of publications from 2008 and 2009, the period in which the first school in Kapelle was prepared behind the scenes. Some of the publications have been out of circulation for a long time, such as the French textbook. “We have been phasing it out since 2010,” says portfolio manager Sander Groeneveld of ThiemeMeulenhoff. The geography method is also no longer available, says Kees Karremans, general manager of secondary education at Noordhoff publishers. In a subject like geography, the insights, for example about the climate, have changed considerably over the past ten years, he says. Schools receive money from the government for teaching materials. "You wonder: why does a school choose this?"
From a scientific point of view, Van Denderen responded earlier to it Education magazine. The director has also explained this to teachers several times by e-mail in recent months. With the scores of students over the years, the management can make a historical data analysis to improve the teaching material 'evidence based'. New lesson bundles are in preparation. According to him, hard work is being done to update the outdated passages. Lecturers can help with this – with bonus hours; the increased scale with now eight schools makes that easier. 'It is not the intention to rewrite entire chapters and that is not necessary. Instead, you should consider replacing a text that mentions CDs, msn or David Beckham', Utrecht teachers read in an email last Christmas holiday.
So please keep original copies (even if they fall apart)!
In the core subjects, where lower secondary teachers receive all five classes of their year in a fixed room, one set of books is in the shelf. They stay behind in the classroom. These are by no means always the original books, but sometimes copied copies or bundles of clustered material provided by the school. The copies are also there to prevent wear and tear on the original, older books. 'We guarantee the copyrights by keeping original copies of all original books in the attic in Amsterdam. So please keep original copies (even if they fall apart)! ', Van Denderen emails employees at the end of January.
The Svpo school in Hoorn
5. Operating surpluses
Thanks to the minimal overhead, practically all the money goes to the primary process, according to the Svpo board time and again. With sixteen students in the lower years - upper classes are sometimes larger due to profile choices - the average group size is well below the national average. According to research from 2016, this is around 24 students for VMBO-TL, 26 for HAVO and 25 students for VWO.
Small classes are only affordable by making sharp choices and not doing all kinds of other things. This argument has been pushed forward at various times over the years to hold up the hand. Until recently, the intranet page on employee participation has calculated how much time and money meetings cost, money that would not go to education. 'If we have to choose between a council or an extra teacher, the choice is easy. We opt for good education, not for overheads. '
You will understand that with less than 16 students on average in the classroom and more teaching time, there is not enough money left
And if parents at the Utrecht Svpo school submit a proposal to appoint a separate care coordinator, the board states that they must indicate where they want to get the money from. 'You will understand that with less than 16 pupils on average in the classroom and more teaching time, there is no money left over', responded Van Denderen. He calculated that the request would cost about 38 euros annually. 'Options are to cancel a language course or to increase the parental contribution.' Ultimately, the proposal was not adopted.
At the same time, the schools each have a lot of money left over every year, according to the annual figures. The oldest two schools also record large surpluses year after year. In Kapelle, the operating surplus is between 7 and 14 percent of the income, which is 1,6 million euros in five years. In Hardegarijp, the annual profitability was between 11 and 22 percent. The reserves there rose from 194 thousand euros in 2014 to 1,2 million three years later. In the first year and a half, 41 percent of the income remained at the school in Utrecht, declared 'very weak', about 670 thousand euros. That is almost twice as many as in Amsterdam, the school that opened its doors simultaneously in 2017.
Reserves that have been built up are partly used for real estate investments, with money sometimes being transferred between the independent schools. In 2018, Svpo drew 9 tons from the reserves of Hardegarijp for accommodation for the new school in Hoorn (purchase price: 1,7 million euros). The reason was that 'negative interest had to be paid on the saved capital', Van Denderen stated about this last summer. 'Spending in Hoorn solved that.'
Accrued reserves are partly used for real estate investments, sometimes with money being shifted between the independent schools
The Svpo board is also investing money in housing via a different route. Within the Svpo network, money flows to and between 'service-providing' private foundations it turned out last summer from research by the Education magazine. For example, money from Svpo schools and parental contributions in the form of 'donations' ends up in the coffers of the Foundation for Personal Education, a public benefit institution (ANBI). According to its own statement, this foundation, also chaired by Van Denderen, collected 2016 million euros from the schools in 2017, 2018 and 1,5. A large part of the foundation fund has been used for housing projects in recent years.
If you look at the numbers, you will see something else that is striking. Of every euro that schools receive from the Ministry of Education, no more than two-thirds went to staff expenditure in 2018. In Kapelle this was 64 percent, Hardegarijp 63 percent and Geldermalsen 55 percent. The percentages are a lot lower than the national average of just over 80 percent, but that difference can be partly explained by the fact that other schools spend more on support staff, directors, board members and other overheads. On the other hand: Svpo says that with its own employment conditions, teachers are rated higher and pay better than other schools. And with small classes you need more teachers.
'An important part of a school budget is the development of the average salary grade for teachers. This is on average lower at a starting school than at existing schools. And that is the explanation for the still low percentage of the national budget that is spent on personnel at our schools. However, that percentage is steadily growing. In the meantime, the school saves money. This is spent on buildings in municipalities where decentralization is used. As a result, accommodation costs will be lower, creating room for further salary increases. Our average step is now 7,4. Over a series of years, the average goes to 12,3. The fact that it is above 12 is because we also have steps 13, 14 and 15. Those extra steps are there because we like to keep people for the long term. Incidentally, the percentage in Geldermalsen is also low (55 percent) because there was only a lower secondary education there and therefore virtually no LD teachers,' says Van Denderen.
6. Homework assistance = teaching time
In the school concept Svpo uses its own task policy and its own explanation of class time. It states that 35 percent of the teaching time is considered homework guidance. In this way, the small classes are partly recouped, say former teachers.
Although students only go to school four days a week, sufficient teaching time is nevertheless realized. Each school day lasts from 8.50:16.55 am to 85:105 pm and consists of five blocks. The first four blocks take 55 minutes, the last block even XNUMX minutes. Svpo considers XNUMX minutes of each block as real lesson time, the remaining time counts as homework assistance. Pupils then complete assignments in class, so that they do not have to bring a lot of homework. Svpo counts this as teaching time, but not teaching time. This guidance is less burdensome, Svpo argues, and therefore weighs less in the working time factor. As a result, teachers provide significantly more teaching time compared to other schools for the same size of appointment.
Former teachers who fully participated in the packed, four-day teaching week ended up with a working time factor between 0,75 and 0,79 - and nowhere near a full-time job.
At every school you have an instruction part, after which students make assignments themselves and you walk around to guide them
Teachers at various schools have raised the issue in recent years. For a teacher in Geldermalsen, who does not want to be mentioned by name, it was a reason to stop. “I had one and a half times as much contact time at Svpo as at my previous school for the same size of appointment. At each school you have some instruction, after which students will make assignments themselves and you walk around to guide them. In my opinion, that is just part of class time. "
The calculation of the working time factor has already been used by a legal dispute. A few years ago, the AOb Svpo teachers who worked in Kapelle who brought a case for loss of wages, but without success: the court ruled in favor of the school board.
'Students do their homework in class at school as much as possible. A teacher is present to help and guide. That part of the time is not budgeted as lesson time because there is no lesson preparation and afterwork linked to it. As a result, there is more teaching time according to the definition of the ministry. It is not the case that this works as a saving for salary costs. The alternative would be to take the homework home, reducing the FTE. However, neither of us want that', says Van Denderen.
The Svpo school in Kapelle
7. Solid program
The unrest at the Utrecht school is partly reminiscent of a turbulent period at the oldest establishment, the Svpo school for havo and vwo in Kapelle. In the spring of 2014, there was dissatisfaction among teachers and parents about the state of affairs. Part of the criticism concerned the so-called e-classes, students who come in with a recommendation for VMBO-T or VMBO / HAVO. With a 'solid' curriculum, Svpo wants to raise these students to a higher level, so that they can take exams at HAVO level. Upstream, that's called in policy language. Many students perform above their primary school advice, according to the board.
In Kapelle, parents indicated that the level and pace in the e-class were far too high. “A parent told me how painful she was to watch her child go upstairs every night after dinner to finish work. And this while he had already had a long working day at school, 'wrote the then school leader in an alarming email to the board. 'Parents think that the level is too high, that we are asking too much of the students.' And: 'Parents of especially students from the e-class believe that we have the title personal education not fulfill. One parent even literally said that we "offer uniform sausage and that his child does not like sausage". This was emotional, but the purport was that we did not respond sufficiently to the individual differences between pupils.'
One parent even literally said that we 'offer uniform sausage and that his child does not like sausage'
Then Dutch teacher Kim Scherpenhuyzen herself guided students in an e-class. “There were quite a few students with VMBO advice who could keep up, who made progress. But there were also students who we could not get along. As teachers we kept running into that. ”
Just like in Utrecht, a number of parents picked up their children from school in Kapelle. Switching to another school is not that easy, because Svpo uses a different course structure in the lower years. As a result, they are ahead of other schools in some subjects, but behind others. For example, students only get history in the second grade and geography in the third.
“Students who dropped out after the second year had never had geography. They had to catch up with a stack of books themselves. You kept hearing stories about that great up-flow, but who thought of the students who graduated? ”
'Kapelle has developed into a fun school where students are very successful. That is also the recipe for Utrecht. The difficult thing with every new school is to make it clear to everyone what our school stands for. This applies to students, parents and teachers alike. Saying 'small classes' and 'personal education' evokes images in some people that we do not (or cannot) comply with at all. Our school offers personal education, which means that teachers have enough time for each student. However, the curriculum that students go through is broadly fixed and is intended to provide a solid foundation. We are a small-scale school that offers classroom education and is ambitious for what it can achieve with students. At that meeting in Kapelle, special attention was paid to the high level of the teaching material for the MAVO students. It is true that the HAVO material that we offer them poses a considerable challenge for both teachers and students. Still, that class is also a bit of the educational honor. What you achieve with that class is really special and the results have now proven that the students are doing very well,' says Van Denderen.
The Svpo school in Amsterdam
8.Circus
Thanks to the small class sizes and the ample teaching time, there is enough space for students with an extra support need, parents read in the school guide. The message: many 'special needs students' can also keep up without outside help.
In the eyes of the board, protocols and action plans only entail more bureaucracy and overhead. 'We have good conditions at school as standard, also for special needs students. Small scale, clear, predictable, fixed schedules. This works wonders for an Asperger or other autism spectrum disorder student. For many special needs students we do not need to take special measures other than what we already do by default. We don't need the entire circus of itinerant supervisors and action plans, 'Van Denderen emailed the Zeeland teacher team in early 2014.
Svpo sticks to that starting point when the schools in Amsterdam and Utrecht open their doors three and a half years later. At the end of 2017, the enthusiastic, fairly young Utrecht team reads in an email from the board: 'At Svpo, every student receives extra attention. A pupil who would be regarded as a 'problem pupil' elsewhere because of dyslexia, for example, is simply a pupil who needs more reading time and for whose handwriting the teacher needs a little longer to decipher. The scale of the school is such that not everything has to be laid down in protocols.'
'The scale of the school is such that not everything has to be recorded in protocols'
Despite the small classes, teachers are reaching the limits of their abilities. The groups consist of a relatively large number of students who require extra support, say Utrecht school staff. In the spring of 2019 they will share their experiences with the Education Inspectorate. Although they go through fire for their students, they lack time, expertise and support.
The teacher team is not able to handle students with behavioral problems well, the inspectors write later the report. 'This is partly because there is a lack of an adequate care structure. When pupils need extra support, the school hardly offers it and uses the help of parties outside the school too little and too late, for example through the partnership. ' In the meantime, the Svpo board says it will refer pupils more often to special education.
'At times we (in Utrecht, ed.) had classes with seven ADHDers. The special thing is that the educational results remained satisfactory, but of course it puts a lot of strain on teachers. Because we hardly have overheads, that was extra hard for them. Since last year, we have made it much clearer to parents which care we provide as standard and which we do not. The result is that the new batch is much more balanced and the proportion of special needs pupils is more average,' says Van Denderen.
9. A meeting in Kapelle (2014)
More than twenty employees and the school leader will meet after work on Tuesday 6 May 2014 to discuss the unrest in Kapelle. The tone is uplifting and positive. Teachers get to work to develop ideas and improvements, without violating the school concept. The board was invited to the meeting, but is absent.
The following Sunday evening, just after half past ten, the team in Kapelle receives an e-mail from chairman of the board Van Denderen. He puts the ball to the principal. Any problems can easily be solved among themselves at the school, he thinks. He sees nothing in school-wide meetings. Tuesday's meeting called for more general staff meetings, but during school hours. However, overhead at the expense of education goes against the principles of this school. In a small-scale school lines are short and communication is fast and informal. '
The school principal writes back a 'frank response'. She hopes that Van Denderen will still talk to the staff. 'As long as you, as a director, are involved in everything decisively and decide on almost everything on your own, you can only expect the employees to want to talk to you.' The school principal, who would leave the school that same summer, did not want to face it Education magazine respond. When the Education Inspectorate comes by two years later for a quality assessment, the school retains the basic arrangement: the education is in order.
If you have ten people with the same criticism in front of you, it is different than if you email everyone one on one
“Misha doesn't want people to unite,” says former teacher Kim Scherpenhuyzen. “He would like everyone separately. You email me and I'll email you back. If you have ten people in front of you with the same criticism, it is different than if you email everyone one-on-one. Then you can more easily give people the feeling that they are the only one. ”
“Before I came to Svpo, I had worked at a different school for five years,” says Minnaard, who gave up after a year in Kapelle and became a party employee of the SP in The Hague. “The rector there was quite authoritarian and I did not always agree with him. But I could just walk in and look each other in the eye. At Svpo I was dealing with a kind of remote employer, someone who communicated almost exclusively by e-mail and who always pulled the strings behind the scenes. ”
“It has something Kafkaesque about it,” said Van den Dungen, who left the company on 1 February. “Teachers are more than just an email address. Behind those email addresses are people with lives, with a story. If you manage so much remotely day and night, I think you lose sight of that. ”
