Dutch schools must make space for languages spoken at home

Dutch primary schools are now expected to make room for the languages pupils speak at home, like Turkish, Polish and Arabic. New national curriculum standards will encourage teachers to allow students to use their mother tongue to prepare for class or better understand material if it helps them.

The change comes from updated core objectives (kerndoelen) for the Dutch language, which became law in August and set out what children are meant to learn. Current affairs programme Nieuwsuur reported on the new rules on Friday.

About a quarter of people aged 15 and over mainly speak something other than standard Dutch at home – a dialect, a regional language such as Frisian or Limburgish, or another language such as English, Turkish or Polish, according to the national statistics office CBS.

What the schools actually do with the new standards is largely up to them. Attention to multilingualism and pupils’ linguistic identity is obligatory, but the more concrete idea – letting children talk through difficult material in their home language, or prepare for a lesson in it – is advice rather than a strict requirement.

Not everyone agrees
Language expert Joanneke Prenger, who advises on primary education, said parents should “speak the language you know best” with their children, reversing years of guidance to use Dutch at home. Doing so, she told Nieuwsuur, gives pupils a richer base for learning Dutch and other languages.

Thomas Hendriks, who teaches Dutch in an Amsterdam bridging class for pupils with a language gap, said the steady stream of new advice “comes across as a whim, a trend”, even as more young people leave school unable to read and write properly. In his classroom, he added, letting pupils switch languages also means losing track of what is being said.

The debate comes amid years of concern about basic Dutch skills. The Netherlands was once seen as a strong performer in reading, but scores have fallen sharply, and a national programme worth hundreds of millions of euros has yet to turn things around.

A tougher line elsewhere
The classroom shift runs alongside a harder line on Dutch in other areas. Ministers want to raise the language level required for naturalisation to B1, and are drawing up stricter rules for welfare claimants who do not speak adequate Dutch.

For international families, the change means a child’s English, Turkish or Polish is now something schools are meant to work with rather than discourage. Regional languages count too – Friesland already requires schools to actively teach Frisian.

Schools have until 2031 to fold all the new objectives into their teaching, and for now decide for themselves how to handle home languages.