The Illusion of Inclusion

The intervention carousel: thirty years of reform fatigue

For thirty years, a new term has rolled across the Dutch education landscape every decade. Weer Samen Naar School (“Back to School Together”) in the nineties, a programme meant to reduce referrals to special education. The Rugzakje (“little backpack”) around the turn of the century, a personal budget attached to the child. Passend Onderwijs (“Appropriate Education”) from 2014, which gave school boards a duty of care. And now the Roadmap to Inclusive Education 2035. Every reform promises less bureaucracy and more tailored support. Every reform ends in a new administrative layer.

The pattern is recognisable to anyone who works in public administration. Pedagogical expertise is replaced by system architecture: consortia, regional coordination tables, procurement models, “covering networks”. New positions appear, new consultation structures, new lines of accountability. The question of whether the child is better off is buried under the question of whether the system is ready.

This is not cynicism. It is an empirical observation. After three decades of reform, the results are measurable: falling PISA scores, growing inequality of opportunity, overburdened teachers, and a special education sector being stripped down without regular education being able to carry the responsibility that is released.

The stalled engine: education as a broken social ladder

The Inspectorate of Education sounded the alarm in 2016: the engine of social mobility was faltering. A year later the Education Council, the government’s statutory advisory body on education, offered a deeper analysis in its report ‘Kansen bieden, kansen grijpen’ (‘Offering opportunities, seizing opportunities’). The conclusion was stark: the educational level of parents has once again become more decisive for a child’s school success than the child’s own talent. The school as equaliser is losing ground.

This is not abstract. It means that a bright child in a family without a bookcase has less chance of reaching pre-university secondary education (VWO, the highest track in the Netherlands’ selective school system) than an average child with highly educated parents. Vertical mobility — climbing the social ladder through education — has stalled. In 2019 the Education Council identified the mechanism in ‘Doorgeschoten differentiatie’ (‘Differentiation overshot’): early selection and limited transfer routes between school types block the way up.¹

The PISA crisis as symptom

The falling PISA scores confirm the picture. Dutch fifteen-year-olds score significantly worse on reading, mathematics and science than previous generations. One in three pupils risks leaving school functionally illiterate.² These are not the scores of a country that can afford the luxury of overhauling its school system yet again. These are the scores of a country that first needs to get the basics in order.

Without a firm command of language and arithmetic, vertical mobility is impossible. We sawed through the ladder at the bottom while debating inclusive ideals at the top.

Year	Body	Core message
2016	Inspectorate	The engine of social mobility is faltering
2017	Education Council	Parents’ background again more decisive than the child’s talent
2019	Education Council	Overshot differentiation blocks mobility
2024	PISA/Inspectorate	Basic skills at a historic low

The dogma of mainstreaming

Among policymakers reigns a moral conviction that is rarely spoken aloud but permeates everything: physical integration equals social inclusion. If a child with additional support needs sits in a regular classroom in its own neighbourhood, it belongs. This assumption is the load-bearing structure under the Roadmap to Inclusive Education 2035.

The assumption is wrong. Physical presence is not social participation. Without the right pedagogical environment, the child in the regular classroom does not become a pupil among pupils, but an outsider functioning on a little island. The teacher — already overburdened by large classes, behavioural problems and administrative pressure — is asked to be a specialist in conditions and disabilities for which she was never trained. The child receives attention, but not the targeted expertise it needs.

The power of the safe haven

Against the urge to mainstream stands the value of the specialised setting. During research at the De la Bat school for the deaf in Worcester, South Africa, I saw what happens when a disability is not the exception but the norm. In that community — an entire neighbourhood around the school, built on deaf culture — people flourish. Children were not tolerated but recognised. Teachers commanded the language, the methods and the culture that fitted the child. Identity and self-confidence arose not despite the disability but independently of it, because the environment did not constantly draw attention to it.

For vulnerable pupils, special education was the place where — despite their disadvantage — they could earn the highest attainable diplomas thanks to specialist methods. By closing these safe havens in the name of equality, we deprive vulnerable children of the only place where they are not constantly confronted with their disability. Instead of vertical mobility we get horizontal stagnation: the child sits in the classroom, but no longer climbs.

The risk of 2035 is concrete: we are closing the places where emancipation through specialisation is possible, and replacing them with a regular setting that is itself already under pressure from declining basic skills.

The dilution of expertise

The policy solution for closing specialised provisions is itinerant expertise: the specialist as a roving consultant, sent past dozens of regular schools to advise teachers. On paper this sounds efficient. In practice, deep knowledge evaporates.

The specialist is no longer part of the daily school culture. She gives tips from the sidelines to an already overburdened teacher, in a visit of an hour and a half per month. The teacher receives the advice, adds it to her already overflowing list of tasks, and does her best. The child is in view, but does not receive the specialised attention it needs. The result is what one might call neglected inclusion: the child is present, but the oxygen is missing.

Under the banner of Appropriate Education and Inclusion, the focus of schools has shifted from the transfer of knowledge to care management. The teacher spends a growing share of her time on support plans, multidisciplinary consultations, registration and accountability. That comes directly out of instruction time. The effect on basic skills is measurable: the PISA decline cannot be separated from the growing care burden placed on regular education.

The administrative reflex: why the system feeds itself

Why is this trend not being reversed, when doubts are widely shared on the work floor? The answer lies in a mechanism recognisable from the broader analysis of Dutch public administration. An apparatus has been erected — policy officers, process directors, regional managers — for whom the Roadmap to 2035 is their reason for existing. The system feeds itself.

Administrators follow the national guidelines and the regulations around the youth care regions, with the focus on administrative “de-compartmentalisation” — linking budgets, forming consortia, writing regional visions — rather than on the question of what a child needs pedagogically in order to flourish. People talk about covering networks and inclusive regions, but rarely about the pedagogical depth needed to restart the engine of vertical mobility.

The pattern is identical to what is visible in other domains of public administration: government responds to complex problems with system architecture. New layers, new coordination mechanisms, new accountability structures. The underlying assumption is political makeability: if we only design the system well enough, the results will follow by themselves. Practice consistently proves the opposite.³

The repeating pattern. Weer Samen Naar School (1990s): promised fewer referrals to special education. Result: new school partnerships, growing bureaucracy, no drop in referrals. The Rugzakje (2003): promised tailored support by attaching budget to the child. Result: perverse incentives, diagnostic inflation, a proliferation of indications. Appropriate Education (2014): promised a duty of care and less bureaucracy. Result: regional school partnerships with their own overhead, teachers turned care coordinators, growing workload. Inclusive Education 2035: promises that every child can attend school in its own neighbourhood. Expected result under unchanged policy: further dilution of expertise, a new administrative layer, no improvement in educational quality.

Nobody is normal: an alternative starting point

There is an alternative to the inclusion dogma, and it begins with a simple acknowledgement: variation in society is a given. Not everyone fits the same system, and nobody needs to. The question is not how to get everyone into the same classroom, but where a child has the greatest chance of being a person among people.

In the municipality of Ede, this starting point was translated into guiding principles for the social domain. The first principle read: nobody is normal. Variation in society is a given, and everyone will have to deal in their own way with the challenges life presents. This does not automatically call for help or support. Incidents and difficulties are part of life and can in most cases be absorbed by people’s own resilience and that of their network.

This is the opposite of the makeability thinking that drives current inclusion policy. It does not assume that professional systems have the answers, but that society itself is the starting point. Professional support is not self-evident but supplementary. It always runs parallel to informal support, aims to strengthen it, and is as temporary as possible.

Applied to education this means: acknowledge that some children thrive best in a specialised environment where their disability is not the exception but the norm. Acknowledge that the regular classroom is not the best place for every child, and that this acknowledgement is not exclusion but a pedagogical choice. Invest in the quality of all forms of education rather than in the illusion that one model works for everyone.

Basic conditions first — that was the second principle in Ede. Support addresses basic needs first: work or meaningful daytime activity, a roof, finances in order, a social network. In education, that translates to: make sure the basic skills are in order before expanding the system with new ambitions.

What is needed

The movement towards Inclusive Education 2035 does not need to be stopped. It needs to be recalibrated. Not from the boardroom but from pedagogical reality. That requires four shifts.

Quality before structure. Stop building new system architecture while basic skills are falling. No new consortia, regional tables or procurement models before the PISA scores stabilise. The energy and money now flowing into administrative de-compartmentalisation must go to the classroom: smaller groups, more instruction time, better pay for teachers.

Protect the safe havens. Special education is not an obsolete residual category but an indispensable provision for children who have their best chance of development and mobility in a specialised environment. Closing these provisions under the flag of inclusion deprives vulnerable children of their most effective route to emancipation. Preserve and strengthen this expertise instead of diluting it itinerantly.

Expertise on the work floor, not in the policy memo. Itinerant support can work, but only if the specialist is genuinely part of the school culture. An hour and a half a month from the sidelines is not support but an alibi. If we choose inclusion in regular education, then structural embedding of specialist knowledge belongs with it: not as a roving consultant but as a permanent member of the team.

Pedagogy above public administration. The debate on inclusive education is dominated by administrators who talk about covering networks, referral percentages and funding models. The teacher, the educational psychologist, the speech therapist — the people who know what a child needs — are under-represented at the tables where the decisions fall. Turn this around. Let content lead and structure follow.

The core question. Real inclusion is not about which building a child attends. It is about where a child has the greatest chance to be a person among people, to learn, to climb. If we close the safe havens for an ideological ideal, we do not create an inclusive society but a generation of approved outsiders. Children who are physically present but socially do not belong. That is not inclusion. That is neglect with a pretty label.

Where a child has the greatest chance

This piece is written from the conviction that good intentions do not suffice as a defence of bad policy. The education reform towards 2035 deserves an honest debate about the pedagogical consequences, not only about the administrative architecture. The children concerned — children with a disability, a language development disorder, a behavioural problem — deserve better than a system that includes them in name and isolates them in practice.

The analysis connects to a broader pattern in Dutch public administration: the tendency to answer complex problems with system architecture instead of with substantive expertise and political courage. Whoever recognises that pattern sees in inclusion policy not a self-contained education file but a symptom of a government that structurally repairs instead of prevents.³

Real inclusion is not about the building. It is about the chance to climb.

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Jacob Huibers is an interim manager with more than twenty years of experience in the Dutch public sector. He has worked as cluster manager, cluster director and quartermaster at municipalities ranging from fifty thousand to over two hundred thousand inhabitants, and at inter-municipal collaborative bodies across the social and physical domains. Statecraft is his platform for strategic reflection on public-sector execution, pillar IV of House of Viridian.

Responses and counter-arguments via Statecraft.nl.

Footnotes

1. Education Council (Onderwijsraad), Doorgeschoten differentiatie in het onderwijsstelsel. Stand van educatief Nederland 2019 (Differentiation overshot: the state of educational Netherlands 2019), The Hague, February 2019. ↩

2. OECD, PISA 2022 results for the Netherlands, published December 2023: significant decline in reading, mathematics and science; roughly one third of fifteen-year-olds at risk of functional illiteracy. ↩

3. For the elaboration of this pattern, see Recovery State Netherlands. Why the Dutch government acts only when the courts compel it, Statecraft, July 2026. ↩ ↩²