“We need schools that are not islands of nostalgia but bridges to the future. We need teachers who are not intimidated by the diversity in their classrooms, but who are trained and supported to work with it,” writes Bruno De Lille Battaille, school principal in Brussels. “We need methods tailored to Brussels and its pupils.”
As general director of a Brussels school network, I see every day how big the difference is between our schools in Brussels and those in, say, Wevelgem, where I was born. I grew up in West Flanders, in a school where almost all the children spoke the same language. In Brussels, by contrast, the playground is filled with a mix of French, English, the occasional “wollah” or “kifesh” — and yes, Dutch.
In the 2023–2024 school year, only 24% of pupils in primary education and 28.4% in secondary education came from families where at least one parent speaks Dutch.
That hasn’t been the case for very long. When I came to study in Brussels in the early 1990s, three-quarters of primary school pupils still came from families where Dutch was spoken, and in secondary education the figure was 94%. By 2000, that share had already dropped to just over half in primary education (52%), but in secondary it was still close to 80%.
A nostalgic ideal
Because the number of Dutch-speaking children declined so quickly, some teachers, parents, politicians… didn’t adjust. They didn’t make the switch and continue to hold on to a nostalgic ideal of Brussels schools full of Dutch-speaking, native middle-class children. They see the current reality as an undesirable situation and long for something that will never return. That is not only unhelpful for them, it also blocks urgently needed innovation.
Often these are the same people who interpret “Dutch-language education in Brussels” very narrowly, as “education for Dutch-speakers in Brussels.” In their eyes, children who grow up speaking French, Arabic or Spanish don’t belong. Some even believe it isn’t the responsibility of the Flemish Community to provide education for non-Dutch-speaking Brussels children at all.
Yet this ignores the fact that, according to the latest language barometers, Brussels is becoming ever more linguistically diverse (15% speak neither Dutch nor French), while at the same time the number of Brussels residents who speak Dutch (22.3%) is rising again after years of decline. I believe — and I’m certainly not alone — that this increase is largely thanks to Dutch-language education.
Searching for a “white” school
That attitude, however, leads to harmful situations. Parents who think this way desperately seek out the last bastions where there is still a “sufficiently white or Flemish” population. By carefully selecting preferences in the online enrollment system, they try to get their child into those few “coveted” schools.
Dozens of Brussels primary schools now have hardly any Dutch-speaking pupils, while others easily fill all their places without effort. It becomes a self-reinforcing system. And it often has much more to do with perception than with the actual quality of the school. In our school group, we have two comparable schools within a 10-minute walk of each other. One has almost 70% non-Dutch-speaking pupils, the other about half Dutch-speaking pupils. In one, 43% of pupils receive a school allowance, in the other 22%. But honestly, as general director, I see no difference in quality between the two schools.
Welcoming
I also don’t believe it’s healthy for society if groups of people grow up side by side without meeting. We need to get rid of the mentality that Dutch-language schools are only for the “real Dutch-speakers.” If a French-speaking or other-language parent chooses to send their child to Dutch-language education, we should welcome them with open arms as allies, not eye them with suspicion as intruders or profiteers. Ultimately, these parents want the same as Dutch-speaking parents: good education and bilingualism (or multilingualism) for their children. Isn’t it a compliment that they choose our schools for that? Every child who learns Dutch well gains better prospects for the future, enriches Brussels, and becomes a potential partner for the Flemish Community. A win-win-win. Our goal should be to provide excellent education for every one of these children, not to put up barriers based on origin or home language.
That nostalgic longing for the “ideal” pupil (who never really existed) or the search for a school “where we are among ourselves” blinds us to a number of obvious realities.
One-size-fits-all?
Such as: why do we teach in Brussels essentially the same way as in Flanders? If we know that about 75% of our pupils don’t speak Dutch at home, why do we continue to teach Dutch as a “mother tongue” rather than as a foreign language? Why aren’t there adapted textbooks or teaching methods for our pupils, but instead we use the same materials made for students at Sint-Pauluscollege in Wevelgem?
Our minister wants to improve our pupils’ knowledge of Dutch. Excellent — we can only support that. If we can turn our Brussels youngsters into strong multilingual citizens, we are giving them a fantastic gift when they graduate. But it has to be done in Brussels the same way as in Bommerskonten, Zoutenaaie, and Wevelgem. And that makes no sense. Let us work out our own path. Stimulate us, support us, instead of forcing us into a one-size-fits-all model that is far removed from Brussels reality.
The impact of poverty
We know that poverty and migration background negatively affect children’s learning opportunities. We also know that Flemish Community education performs poorly in this regard. In the PISA tests for mathematical literacy, native pupils across all OECD countries score on average 20 points higher than second-generation migrant pupils. In Flemish Community education, the gap is 53 points! This puts Flanders among the countries and regions with the largest gap between these groups. And when comparing the performance of the most socio-economically advantaged pupils with the least advantaged, the gap is again significantly wider than the OECD average.
Given how different the background and socio-economic status of my classmates in Wevelgem were compared to today’s Brussels pupils, this is all the more relevant in Brussels than in Flanders. Where I sat in a classroom full of middle-class Belgo-Belgian children (except for one adopted girl), today 30% of Brussels residents live below the poverty line and 75% have a migration background.
If our school system turns out to work worse for those pupils, shouldn’t the Ministry of Education be on full alert? We’ve known this for years and yet for years nothing has been done.
A structural problem
Before looking at individual schools or pupils themselves — “they just need to work harder” — let’s be clear: this is a structural societal problem. It’s about access to resources, parents often unable to support their children, lower expectations from teachers, a greater chance of ending up in “concentration schools” with less experienced teachers, lack of access to networks, the impact of all this on pupils’ self-image and motivation… A single school cannot fix this; it lacks the means and expertise. That some children make it despite all these obstacles (think of MPs Meyrem Almaci and Celia Groothedde, or Minister Demir herself) is admirable, but no excuse for shirking our responsibility.
So far the minister has mainly focused on raising expectations for our pupils. Fine, but if that happens without removing the barriers, it won’t achieve much. If a pupil fails and my only response is to raise the bar even higher, then that pupil will fail again. I’m not saying the bar should be lowered — that would only cheat the pupils themselves — but that we need to help them better to clear it.
And if poverty is an obstacle, then we must look for solutions together with the pupil. PISA results show that other countries sometimes succeed in narrowing the gap between the haves and have-nots. Why couldn’t we? And please, start here in Brussels, where these problems are most concentrated.
Teacher training tailored to Brussels
Finally, I want to plead for teacher training programs that take the Brussels situation as the norm. Because what we experience here today will, in the coming years (perhaps in milder form), also reach Flanders. It would be a disaster if, once again, teachers are left to reinvent the wheel.
One of the biggest obstacles to better education in Brussels is that our teachers are not prepared for Brussels reality. No less than 85% of teachers in our Dutch-language Brussels schools come from Flanders. They have had a training with teaching practices and internships often aimed at fairly homogeneous classrooms. You cannot blame a newly graduated teacher from, say, Ypres for being shocked by the poverty or cultural and linguistic diversity of pupils in Anderlecht, but you can expect the teacher training program to prepare her for it. Today it does not. Diversity, multilingualism, dealing with poverty — these themes do not feature strongly enough in many curricula. The result? Young teachers thrown in at the deep end in Brussels, gasping for breath because their trusted teaching methods don’t work in a class where only 4 out of 20 children fully master Dutch.
I hear too many stories of graduates who start in Brussels full of enthusiasm but quit within a few years — not because of the city or the children (their idealism is often strong), but because they feel unprepared and insecure. Because their training gave them no tools on how to teach Dutch as a foreign language to a group of preschoolers, or how to communicate with parents who don’t understand Dutch.
Why can’t it be different? These are skills that are just as useful in a quiet school in South-West Flanders, so what’s stopping us?
More Brussels teachers
We must also get more Brussels residents working in our schools. Given the number of Dutch-speaking Brussels residents, we will never be able to staff everything on our own (nor should we), but the share of Brussels-born teachers should be higher than the current 15%. Our schools are full of talented young people with a migration background or multilingual profile; surely it must be possible to train them into the role models they themselves missed? And if they live in Brussels, they are less likely to leave after a few years to teach in a rural Flemish school. That could also help address the teacher shortage.
Conclusion
We must stop pretending that the current reality in our Dutch-language Brussels schools is a temporary “inconvenience” that will fix itself. The composition of our classrooms has fundamentally changed. That is the reality. It is certainly not a disaster — unless we stubbornly refuse to adapt.
Today’s Brussels is multilingual, culturally diverse, and socially unequal — and full of talent, ambition and potential. If we want to unlock that talent, we must act.
That starts with a radical shift in thinking: our pupils are not the problem — our system needs to change. We keep educating children with methods that were not designed for them, and then blame them when results disappoint. As if a child from poverty, with a migration background or another home language, has less right to education that truly works. It is not enough to “demand more” without also offering better support.
We need schools that are not islands of nostalgia but bridges to the future. We need teachers who are not intimidated by the diversity in their classrooms, but who are trained and supported to work with it. We need methods tailored to Brussels and its pupils.
And we need a government that no longer sees Brussels as a difficult child that keeps demanding attention, but as the place where real difference can be made. Because if we can succeed here, we can succeed anywhere.
Bruno De Lille Battaille is a former Brussels Secretary of State for Equal Opportunities. He is the General Director of a Brussels school group.
>> Please note that this is a machine generated translation.