Flemish education is getting worse, but half of the schools barely get an inspection | Interior

The Education Inspectorate looks with a magnifying glass at the doings of a school. It is their job to sound the alarm if the quality of education is under pressure somewhere. Every school has to be inspected every five to six years, but half of the schools barely get an inspection. The editors of ‘VTM NEWS’ have discovered this.

On the website of Education Flanders you will find one dated inspection report after another: some are even ten or twelve years old. However, every school must be screened every five to six years. Of the 3,765 Flemish schools, 1,810 have not been screened for six years.

The figures are a bad thing for the quality of education, because a lot has changed in all those years: from the school building to teachers, but also the children themselves. Flemish Minister of Education Ben Weyts (N-VA) points to the corona period for the overdue inspections. “I then explicitly asked the education inspectorate not to inspect, because schools had other things on their minds”.

According to the education minister, the thread is being picked up again. “This is a matter of the past. For the future, we want to have an instrument with these Flemish tests to intervene on an annual basis in schools where the quality of education is under pressure.”

Ben Weyts announced announced the introduction of Flemish tests last year, “who focus on Dutch and mathematics” when it turned out that students score insufficiently for mathematics. The instrument should ensure that we “get an insight into the performance of all pupils, in all schools – and that every year”.

LOOK. According to Ben Weyts, the lack of inspections is “a thing of the past”.