Before starting to write my blogs, I’d prefer to explain how the schoolsystem in the Netherlands works.
We have a pretty complex system, if I may say so. Twenty years ago it was much simpler. However, time changes and so does every system.
When our pupils leave primery school most of them are about 12 years. Some of them 11, others 13. In the Netherlands we basically have 3 kinds of secondary school:
- VMBO + very special education (these children have behavioural or educational problems or both)
- Havo, which has a bit higher educational level
- VWO, which is a combination of grammarschool and grammarschool without classical languages as Greec and Latin. This school is the most straight road to university.
Where as the numbers 2 and 3 are a kind of scientific preperation, VMBO is a type of school meant for children who prefer to work and earn a living instead of studying.
We have 3 different levels for those pupils who want to learn how to earn a living. At VMBO pupils are taught the basics of what they would like to become in their lives later on. Parents are not that keen on putting their child to a VMBO school for these schools have the reputation of being dustbins: when your child doesn’t have the mental capabilities to study (read – as most people see it – : is too stupid for studying), just put it to a VMBO. At least they have a diploma in the end at the age of 16. Most of them think HAVO and VWO have much more distinction and appearance. They are disappointed when their child has to leave Havo/VWO in order to enter a lower level of school, so VMBO.
However, they seem to forget that their child will be much happier when joining a school where there is less theory and much more specialisation to what the would like to do.
A level higher than VMBO is MBO, where they will be taught a profession like a butcher, a carpenter, a hairdresser, or a nurse, or something else. Another level higher is HBO, which is more or less close to university although HBO is more or less directed to practical experience than on scientific knowledge. At this level we find teachers, dancers, actors, musicians, engineers, and so on.
At this moment of speaking I work as both a teacher of the arts and of English at a VMBO. So everything you will read is about this level, a lower level where they will be taught to speak English on a average.