Dutch text books ‘extremely expensive’

Monday 03 March 2008

Dutch school text books are extremely expensive compared with France, Germany and the UK, the Volkskrant reports on Monday.

While the Dutch government assumes average expenditure per secondary school pupil to be €308, none of the other three countries budget more than €80 per pupil.

The Dutch government has pledged to transfer the cost of buying books from parents to schools themselves, but the plan has run into trouble from European tendering rules. Because the cost of books per school will be over €206,000, contracts must be put out to Europe-wide tender, the government says.

The Volkskrant says this does not happen anywhere else in Europe.

Dutch schools say they are worried that tendering means they will have to buy the cheapest text books rather than the ones they actually want to use.

© DutchNews.nl

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