Research revealed that sharing every result puts additional pressure on students, as proven by experiments for a term.
In an attempt to reduce the pressure on students, a Dutch second-cycle school is banning parental access to their children’s results for a term.
Like most schools across the globe, schools in the Netherlands have a system where students must attain certain grades before they progress to the next level. However, Jordan–Messori Lyceum Utrecht discovered that common apps sharing every student’s grades with parents put more stress on the students.
A study of 500 students conducted by Stijn Uittenbogaard, the school’s economics teacher, disclosed that where parents access the app regularly, students rated their stress levels as 2.5 out of 5. Those whose parents do not check their grades regularly rated their stress levels at 2.
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Uittenbogaard stated: “This pressure for students to achieve is really a modern thing in my opinion.” “When I was at school, there was a report four times a year, but otherwise, you could tell your parents when and what you wanted. Now parents can get a push notification on their telephones: ‘Hey, your child has had a new result,’ and the child comes home with their parents sitting ready for a conversation. This is appalling.”
When the study result was discussed with Geert Looyschelder, the school’s rector, the school leadership decided to pause sharing results with parents for a month. Student groups were positive; 90% of parents agreed to the proposal, and the parents’ council called for a 10-week suspension.
Looyschelder, who taught for over four decades, believes that the angst over results in the mainstream Dutch school system taking over the development of life skills like flexibility and empathy. According to him, the Montessori method gave students “responsibility and ownership of the choices they make in their learning process”.
He stated: “The fact that parents are looking over the students’ shoulders only causes stress,” he said. “In our education system, we always say: ‘You have the right to make mistakes. That’s how you learn.’”
The director of Ouders en Onderwijs, Lobke Vlaming, stated that reactions to the pilot had been positive. She said: “For some time, we have been hearing parental concerns about pressure to perform and also about children’s privacy.”
“Perhaps they have the right not to have everything shared about them with everyone. And it shouldn’t replace a conversation [between school and parents] if things aren’t going so well, because sometimes parents hear this very late.”
The school is not the institution advocating for less pressure and grade obsession at a time of declining results in maths and language, growing dropouts and urgent teacher shortage. Multiple studies, such as the 2021 Education Council of the Netherlands’s report, have advocated for later testing and selection to reduce stress and improve equal opportunities.
A former director of the Testing Service Bureau ICE, Karen Veij, wrote a thesis on where the Dutch testing system is going wrong and praised the environment. She stated: “Our whole testing system means that children can’t fail, and every figure counts.” “But if you don’t get a ‘satisfactory’, you should have the chance to do it again … It’s important that you understand.”
