The Agora school in Roermond, Netherlands. Photo / Facebook
The Agora school in Roermond, Netherlands. Photo / Facebook
An institution that has no timetable, no year groups, no head and no classrooms is part of a radical approach to education in the Netherlands.
In a deprived suburb on the outskirts of Roermond in the Netherlands, half a dozen teenagers are clambering over a car. They jump on thebumper, pop the bonnet, toot the horn and open the boot. Music is blaring from the radio as they tear out the seats of the Chrysler Voyager and throw them on the ground. It looks like a case of antisocial behaviour spiralling out of control in the Dutch city, which has recently been the scene of riots. But in fact the young people are outside a school and this is part of their education.
A science teacher, Frank Neiss, has set his pupils the challenge of transforming the people carrier into a camper van. They will spend the next six months learning about voltages, velocity and aerodynamics as well carpentry, plumbing and design. This will be their way into studying maths, chemistry, physics and art. Already the students are buzzing with ideas: one plans to customise the exterior of the vehicle; another is thinking about the sound system. "First we will let them play with the car," Neiss tells me. "It will be a great project. Then, next summer, I will go on holiday in the van with my wife." The students may even learn some geography by helping him to plan the route.
This is Agora, perhaps the most extraordinary school in the world. There are no classrooms, no timetables, no year groups and no curriculum. Pupils decide what they want to study and all the learning is done through individual projects that involve making things, meeting specialists or going on expeditions. Instead of a teacher, students have a personal coach. They work in large common rooms, with sofas, armchairs and communal tables. If a child wants a desk, they are encouraged to make one.
This non-selective state school in the southeast of the country has a well-stocked library, but also a 3D printer, a metal workshop, a carpentry centre and a textiles studio, with screen-printing facilities and sewing machines. The "inventions" room, which is piled high with Lego, has a specially made carpet with a pattern designed by the children. Rob Houben, the manager, who is the closest thing Agora has to a head, says the school is a combination of a university, where all knowledge is within reach, a Buddhist monastery, where pupils can discover what matters in life, a theme park, where students can have fun, and a marketplace, where the young people can exchange ideas. In Ancient Greece, the "agora" was the commercial, social and political centre of the town. "We start with you," the school tells its pupils, who range from 12 to 18 years old. "What do you want to learn? What are your talents, interests and ambition?"
It could not be more different from the traditional English education system, but the innovative approach has become increasingly popular with parents in the Netherlands, where happiness is valued as much as academic outcomes. The Roermond campus opened in 2014 with 30 pupils as an experiment within another more conventional school.
It has since expanded to 295 students and has a long waiting list of others wanting to join. There are now 12 Agoras around Holland and the school has provoked interest from all over the world. Before the pandemic Houben was receiving around 70 requests to visit a week from people looking for fresh ideas.
Agora turns all the normal expectations of education on their head. For a start, it looks nothing like a school. The outside is painted in primary colours and as you walk into the building, the first thing you notice is a kayak hanging from the ceiling in the foyer. The school is built around a giant atrium, which has a climbing wall in the middle of it and a surreal collection of sculptures and creations scattered all around. There is a line of mannequins wearing dresses made from pages torn out of books, and a tent next to a barbecue and fake tree, which are part of a camping scene. The front of a turquoise car protrudes from a wall, with brightly coloured wings painted above it. I spot a paper aeroplane stuck in a corner and a huge globe. "We want to have a joyful environment, but also an environment that raises questions, because that's what everything is about," Houben explains.
There are meeting rooms in glass, wooden and metal boxes that appear to be suspended in the air and a large cube, wrapped in golden fabric, which has a stuffed gorilla on the top of it. This is where pupils can display their work. "At the moment there is nothing in there," Houben says. "I always get students at my office asking, 'Why did you get the great stuff out of the golden box?' and I say, 'Because otherwise you wouldn't be asking. The next interior should be made by you and not what we already have.' "
The whole point of school should be to provoke curiosity, Houben argues, as we walk through the atrium, where some students are playing charades. He leads me up the sweeping metal staircase, past a replica of the statue of the winged goddess of victory, Nike, from the Louvre. "It's about having the freedom to fly," he explains. Agora, he suggests, is framed around discovering pupils' passions as a way to unlock learning, rather than simply cramming them with facts. "We need to put a lot of knowledge in these kids, but if we attach it to a trigger, then it sticks."
On the first floor, busts of Hippocrates, Homer and Socrates are lined up in a row. "There is nothing wrong with traditional learning, but we try to put kids in a traditional learning situation when they are fully open for it," Houben says. "We called the school Agora because in Athens, at the agora, these guys were talking in the market square and everybody who wanted to join could join in – everybody who had an opinion could give their opinion."
The central atrium. 'We want to have a joyful environment, but also an environment that raises questions, because that's what everything is about'. Photo / Facebook
Instead of being divided into classes on the basis of age, pupils are put into "coach groups" that span the whole school. "A 13-year-old girl acts like she's 16, and a 13-year-old boy acts like he's 11," Houben says. "If you are interested in something, you should be able to work with people who are interested as well. If I put you in an age group, that makes it more difficult… We prefer a mix of people, so we have kids from 12 up until 18 in the same room, and kids from the so-called lowest educational levels to the highest educational levels. We all know that there isn't a highest and lowest level – it's just who's happy and who is not, who wants to explore and progress."
In contrast to the disciplinarian regimes that are favoured by some English schools, pupils at Agora can choose flexible start and finish times, signing in and out to suit their schedule and what they are doing. They all have a laptop and arrange meetings with experts or coaches on their Google diaries. There are no detentions. "We have a simple rule – act like you would love to be treated by others," Houben says. When students misbehave, "We talk about it and ask, 'OK, how are you going to fix the problem?' To start with they said, 'Just give me a detention,' and I said, 'No, detention is for stupid people. Start thinking.' "
The idea of silent corridors is anathema to him. "I spend hours sitting in the middle of the atrium just to see how my kids are doing. If they were not allowed to shout, run or whatever, how would I know who is happy and who is not happy? If a child is happy at school, that means that they will open up for learning."
It sounds like a recipe for noisy chaos and Houben admits that things have not always gone to plan. Three weeks after the school opened, the floor was littered with paper from all the paper aeroplanes that had been thrown. "We panicked. We spent an hour and a half making rules like, 'You are not allowed to move without asking.' Then someone said, 'If everybody was working on something they loved, would they spend time building a paper aeroplane?' Our conclusion was they wouldn't. So we took our 60 students and made a list – the annoying ones on the top, because the annoying ones were only annoying because we didn't know what they loved. As soon as we know what they love, we can encourage them with that. Then I don't have to police them any more. And that's what you see here."
As we walk around the school, the atmosphere is calm and quiet. Students are getting on with their projects, occasionally asking for advice from one of the adults sitting dotted around on sofas. In the inventions room, children are building vast contraptions out of Lego. In the common room, there is a washing line hung with screen-printed baby clothes. Photographs and plants are dotted around. Don't the kids get distracted? "Of course," Houben replies. "You would get distracted. The question is, how do you analyse that and what do you do? If we don't get this right now, how will they cope afterwards?" He says that is why pupils are also allowed to use their mobile phones in school. "In my opinion, secondary education should be about preparing you to stand up in the world."
It's not a total free-for-all. Agora covers all the elements of the compulsory Dutch curriculum and in their last two years students are taught by subject experts to prepare them for national exams.
The projects are carefully managed by the coaches who ensure that there are educational elements woven through even the most apparently fun-filled plan. "If a kid tells me, '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 that was 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 but also, 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.
