Amsterdam Islamic school guilty of mismanagement, inspectors say

The board of Cornelius Haga Lyceum, an Islamic secondary school in Amsterdam, is guilty of mismanagement, the education inspectorate has found, and has asked the government to intervene.

Inspectors said the board – the Islamic Education Foundation (SIO) – had failed for years to tackle persistently poor teaching, leaving pupils “needlessly and continuously” inadequately educated.

The case has been escalated to the education ministry and could ultimately mean cutting the school’s funding.

Years of poor results
The inspectorate pointed to results that have lagged far behind the national average, especially on the school’s mavo track, a lower secondary stream, where around 35% of pupils have passed their exams over the past three years against more than 90% nationally.

It also found the board had no working system to monitor teaching quality, unclear lines of responsibility, and a staff and parents’ council that did not meet legal requirements. The board was unaware of its own internal report in which some staff said they did not always feel safe, inspectors said.

The board has been given a year to put things right through a series of recovery orders, though inspectors said they had little confidence these would be followed after earlier improvement plans went almost nowhere.

The SIO said it took the orders seriously and accepted that teaching needed to improve in places, but rejected the finding of mismanagement as poorly substantiated and based too heavily on interpretation and missing paperwork.

Long conflict
The school has been at odds with the state since before it opened in 2017. In 2019 the government published warnings from the national terrorism coordinator and the AIVD intelligence agency about Salafist influence, and Amsterdam froze its funding, though education inspectors found no evidence that pupils were being indoctrinated.

The school has since won in court. In 2022 the Council of State ruled there had been no mismanagement or self-enrichment, overturning an earlier order to replace the board, and in 2024 a court found the state had wrongly portrayed the school as a radical-Islamic stronghold and ordered it to pay compensation.