A special education programme brought in to help children from disadvantaged backgrounds with language and numerical skills before they start formal schooling has largely flopped, the Volkskrant reports on Wednesday.

The paper says the experiment has failed to boost pupils’ chances because teachers and classroom assistants are not good enough. It bases its finding on research by Utrecht University which has looked at the progress of 160 children who took part in one of three different pre-school programmes.
The results show that small groups of disadvantaged toddlers do not make much progress when taught together because of the quality of the lessons and teachers.
However, the results show that children from a disadvantaged background improve most when part of a group including children with highly-skilled parents, because they learn from each other.
Nevertheless, it is difficult to persuade highly-skilled parents to send their children to pre-school classes with disadvantaged children, the paper says.