Education is one of the Innovation Platform’s three social topics, alongside water and healthcare. Innovation in education is urgently needed. The Netherlands is still benefiting too little in economic and social terms from existing knowledge. That is why the IP wants to develop and utilise people’s talents in order to maintain and strengthen the Netherlands’ prosperity now and in the future. The productivity of the Dutch education sector needs to improve because the sector will suffer a shortage of staff in the future. The Innovation Platform will produce concrete proposals and actions to make the Dutch education system more productive.

Current position

The Innovation Platform is developing three experimental projects with the Dutch educational sector. These are:

Network School

The Network School exists in the form of a business plan for a new school to be created for pupils age 12 and up. It is expressly not a model school, but a model for a school. The Network School was developed in 2006 by a group of enthusiastic teachers in Intermediate Vocational Education under the guidance of Frank Kalshoven. The aim of the Network School is to double the return in education. This is done by greatly improving the school’s network function in the local area, by working better with businesses and social organisations and also by delivering services to the local community. Hence the financial return can be increased by reducing costs and increasing labour productivity. This latter increase is also achieved through the better use of ICT facilities. At the Network School there is extensive use of e-learning (and e-testing) at a rate of progress appropriate to the student.
The staff at the Network School work on the basis of various types of employment and contracts, ranging from a full-time permanent contract to one-off project contributions. The school is open throughout the year; students and staff can take holidays in the same way as the rest of society, and are therefore no longer bound by fixed school holidays. The annual teaching time will be considerably higher than is currently customary.
The intention is for the network school to open in 2009.

Digitising teaching material

The ‘Digitising teaching material’ project seeks to create a permanent network of schools in secondary education which jointly develop and maintain teaching and learning materials for all science subjects. The aim is thereby to create a basic file of high quality digital teaching material quickly, so that all schools recognise and acknowledge digital teaching material as an important part of the portfolio of teaching materials. The aim is to start this at the launch of the Network School.

Summer school

Lack of time and a heavy workload mean that teachers often miss out on additional training. We would like to solve this problem with a summer school for teachers. The idea is to set up a summer school for a group of teachers (to be defined) in collaboration with the private sector so that it helps to bring together education and business in a region.
The first summer school started last summer. IBM and Kennisnet organised the ‘Onderwijs 2.0’ (Education 2.0) summer school which took place in Amsterdam between 5 and 7 August 2008. Sixty secondary school teachers took part in this free of charge.

The summer school not only discusses technologies and trends like WEB 2.0, Virtual Worlds and Serious Gaming, but also looks at the ‘Pupil 2.0’ from the HR side of business and the characteristics and aspects which businesses are looking for in terms of ICT knowledge, skills and use and the ability to work in networks. These issues are also projected onto the participants’ own school environment during the summer school.

Working group

Mr Alexander Rinnooy Can (chairman of the Social and Economic Council), Mr Robbert Dijkgraaf (professor at Amsterdam University) and Mr Kees Tetteroo (ROC Eindhoven).