“We have noticed that a great many foreign children are being enrolled in public schools, but these children do not understand Dutch,” Minister Dirk Currie recently said on ABC Actueel about Cuban, Venezuelan and Brazilian children who are enrolled in public schools but do not have command of Dutch.
Currie said that the ministry will soon launch a pilot project on multilingualism in education. This mainly concerns pupils from the interior, who do not yet have command of the Dutch language and speak only their mother tongue. “We want these pupils to first become fluent in Dutch, and for that we will run a pilot.”
Foreign children, including Cubans, Venezuelans and Brazilians, will also be included in this pilot project. It has emerged that a great many foreign children are being enrolled in public schools, but these children do not have command of Dutch. “We want the children to learn Dutch first before they are enrolled in a school.”
The minister stressed that children who are already attending a school will remain at that school. The ministry will begin a new programme from the next school year. Under this programme, these children will have to have command of Dutch before they are enrolled in a public school.
