Islamic primary schools in the Netherlands: The pupils' achievement levels, behaviour and attitudes and their parents' cultural backgrounds

Steps have been taken in various Western European countries to found Islamic schools, but with only a very limited amount of success. This article focuses on the Islamic schools in the Netherlands. Since the 1988/89 school year, 29 state-funded Islamic primary schools have been founded, which are attended by about 4000 pupils, largely of Moroccan and Turkish descent. This article compares the achievement levels, behaviour, attitudes and family backgrounds of pupils at half the Islamic schools with pupils at schools with a similar socio-ethnic population and schools from a nationally representative sample (in total 450 schools). As far as the behavioural and attitudinal characteristics are concerned, there are only very small if any differences between the three categories of schools. In the lower forms, pupils at Islamic schools tend to do worse at language and arithmetic than pupils at similar schools; in the higher forms they do equally well or better. However, compared with the pupils at the representative schools, they lag far behind. With regard to the family background characteristics, the pupils at Islamic schools hardly differ from pupils at similar schools. The parents attach more importance to their children attending Koran classes and to the role of religion in the upbringing of their children. For the time being, it is possible to conclude that pupils at Islamic schools do not do any worse than pupils at schools with a similar socio-ethnic disadvantage. Time will tell whether they will succeed at raising their educational performance up to the level of non-immigrant pupils.