Starting this school year, thousands of pupils will receive extra Dutch language lessons to help them catch up on their language skills, smartphones are banned in classrooms in Flanders and parents of truant children risk losing their school allowance more quickly.
Extra Dutch language lessons for pupils with language difficulties
From 1 September, pupils in primary and secondary education with language difficulties will receive extra hours of Dutch language lessons. The Flemish government wants to tackle the decline in language skills among the general school population and provide extra support for pupils whose home language is not Dutch. The government also believes parents have a role to play and Dutch should be used at home.
In primary education, teachers can decide to provide three hours of additional language lessons per week for pupils who need this. A similar arrangement will also be introduced in secondary education: pupils may be required to take three hours of extra Dutch lessons per week.
In addition, changes will be made to the existing OKAN classes (reception classes for non-Dutch-speaking newcomers). They will be turned into fully-fledged language classes with a knowledge-rich curriculum, so that pupils who are not native Dutch-speakers can move on to mainstream education more quickly. The first grade of the B stream will also be adapted to provide better support to the high proportion of foreign-language pupils.
Smartphone ban comes into force
Starting this school year, there will be a total ban on smartphones in primary schools and in the first and second grades of secondary education in Flanders. In the third grade of secondary education, the ban only applies during school hours, and schools can choose whether to allow smartphones outside of school hours.
The ban applies not only to smartphones, but also to other smart devices such as smartwatches.
An exception may apply to pupils with specific educational needs, as well as to pupils who use a smart device for medical reasons. Think, for example, of children with diabetes who need to monitor their blood sugar levels.
Regulations on truancy tightened
From this school year onwards, the rules on truancy will be tightened. For example, parents of pupils who are absent for 30 half-days or more without a valid reason will lose their school allowance after one school year. Until now, this only happened after two consecutive school years.
The school allowance is an annual subsidy in Flanders for families on low income with school-age children. The allowance is calculated and granted automatically.
In the 2023-2024 school year, families of 502,911 pupils in Flanders received a school allowance. In the 2022-2023 school year, the school allowance was reclaimed from a total of 8,109 pupils, and in the 2023-2024 school year, that figure rose to 8,223 pupils.