The Times Magazine 45me, ‘I want to build a skateboard,’ we say, ‘OK,
do you already know what you want to do
in that project?’ If we believe it has multiple
layers and insights, then we let them do it,
but if we don’t, then we put them together
with 4 or 5 other kids who ask 20 different
questions from 20 different perspectives.”
He points out that making a skateboard
could involve the chemistry of the wood glue
and geometry for calculating the angles of
the wheels. Houben is a maths teacher by
training. “If I have 25 students who all want
to know Pythagoras to make something, then
I can teach them in ten minutes,” he says.
“Traditionally, education divides everything
into courses, but we don’t do that because we
want to give them the full picture.”
Lobke Pollen and Calista Long, two
16-year-old students, tell me in perfect English
that they have just completed a challenge
on baking. They researched patisseries in the
Belgian town of Liège (although their planned
visit there was cancelled because of Covid-19).
They studied French, talked to chefs, made
a video and for their final presentation
baked 150 apple turnovers. Their aim was
to create the perfect café. “We were just kind
of freestyling but we had to do quite a lot
of maths to work out how much money we
should charge for the cakes,” Lobke says. “We
had a business plan so you could say there
was some economics. It’s so much easier to
learn here than in a normal school.”
Calista agrees. “We go to school with a smile
every day.” Her third-year challenge involved
preparing for a national Dutch swimming
championship. “That’s where I learnt that
I really love biology, physics and science. It
was all about how your body processes food
for competitions, what kind of technique you
need to go faster, the best angle to get off the
starting block. I entered the competition and
came second, although I wanted to come first.”
There must be some students who are just
not interested in learning. “If that is the case
then I am doing something wrong,” Houben
says, but he concedes that it does sometimes
happen. One boy called Noah, the son
of a Moroccan immigrant who spoke little
Dutch, was totally disengaged. “My colleagues
would say he was ‘one with the carpet’. He
sat here and he wouldn’t move. People had
always told him that he couldn’t do anything,
so he thought he was the stupidest one in
the school. We got him working on some
challenges but he always quit because he
thought the end result would be that he would
show something and other people would tell
him it’s not good enough.”
Houben became his personal coach and
after a couple of months discovered that Noah
loves football. He arranged for him to enrol
for a week at a local college that offered sports
coaching courses. Noah was five years younger
than the other students, but he had an amazing
time. At the end of the week he was in tears
because he thought he would never get the
grades needed to get on to the course. Houben
persuaded him he could, if he just started to do
some work. “He hadn’t done any mathematics
or biology in the first two years, but in the
end he passed the national exams on a higher
level than he had entered the building. He was
motivated to get the knowledge. He’s now in
his third year at the college.”
It is a huge amount of work to personalise
the education for every child, but Houben says
the culture is also liberating for teachers who
feel disempowered by bureaucracy. Despite
teacher shortages in the Netherlands, there
were 45 applications for one Agora post thatwas recently advertised. “At the moment I have
two former principals in teaching positions
here,” Houben says. He ushers me into the
staff room, where there is a cappuccino maker
and eight types of cake. “Within this district,
my people are the happiest – they don’t call in
sick as much as all the other teachers.”
Pupils’ progress is tracked using a piece of
software designed by three students, who have
now set up a company to market it to other
schools. Agora has passed its inspections with
flying colours. It is too early properly to judge
the academic outcomes of the school. The
Dutch education journal Didactief concluded
that the results so far have been broadly
“positive”, but only two small cohorts sat the
national exams before the pandemic hit.
In the Netherlands, children are
categorised into more academic or vocational
bands at the end of primary school and
generally continue on this path throughout
secondary school to get a diploma. Last year,
89 per cent of pupils at Agora passed the
diploma at or above their expected level.
The school also has a higher than average
proportion of students who move up a band.
The model would be hard to scale up to a
much larger school and it would be almost
impossible to replicate the Agora culture in
the UK, where the education system is much
more tightly controlled. Dorien Zevenbergen,
from the Dutch inspectorate of education, says
Agora is the result of the autonomy given to
head teachers in the Netherlands. “That leads
to a lot of innovation, which has its risks butalso, of course, its merits. There is a lot of
choice for pupils and parents to select schools
that suit their beliefs and values.” She thinks
there is value in a wider view of education.
“I was looking at the website of an English
school recently and on the welcome page
there were all these achievements of the girls,
all the medals, all the grades, the percentage
that got A* and also the percentage that had
got into Oxbridge. That would never happen
in the Netherlands. We’re just not that focused
on academic achievement.”
There have in fact been similar experiments
in this country. In 2009, Knowsley council
rebuilt all its secondary schools as “centres for
learning” with no classrooms or corridors. Local
education officers had decided that children
there were “kinaesthetic learners” who needed
to run around rather than sit behind desks.
The noise was unbearable, the schools were
quickly nicknamed “wacky warehouses” and
teachers resorted to using walkie-talkies to
keep track of their students. The expensive
innovation was swiftly abandoned, with no
improvement in the children’s education.
Daisy Christodoulou, the education expert
and founder of the No More Marking
website, says, “There’s been a number of
experiments with school buildings like the
one at Agora that haven’t shown themselves
to be able to repeat it at scale.”
But Peter Hyman, a former aide to Tony
Blair who set up the groundbreaking School 21
in London, says the problem in Knowsley was
that the reform was too superficial. “They
created a series of interesting buildings but
had done none of the necessary retraining of
teachers or rethinking of the curriculum.”
There are in his view many lessons that Britain
could learn from Agora. “We need more
examples of people pushing the boundaries,”
he says. “However clever you are academically,
the world is about doing and making as well
as thinking. And the future has to be about
giving students more agency over their lives.”
Back in Roermond, Rob Houben says the
world has changed beyond all recognition in
recent decades as a result of new technology
and globalisation but the education system has
hardly altered in over a century. “These kids
get more information than any of us ever had
and it’s exploding, so how do you cope with
it? From the Netherlands, you can consult a
professor who is studying the Great Barrier
Reef in Australia. You can go online and walk
through New York. This is the zeitgeist but
schools can’t deliver on it.” He blames the
fact that most schools “never let go of the
classroom”. Outside, the Chrysler Voyager
rocks as his own students go about their less
conventional education. nRachel Sylvester chairs the Times
Education CommissionSIMILAR SCHOOLS
IN THE UK HAVE
FAILED. THEY WERE
CALLED ‘WACKY
WAREHOUSES’