Introduction

Abstract

Size of school organizations is a recurrent theme in Dutch education policy and has shown fluctuations in the past 20 years. From the mid-1980s until the mid-1990s the government policy has been strongly focused on stimulated scaling-up in all sectors of education, see e.g., the report “Scale and quality in primary education” (Ministerie van Onderwijs and Wetenschappen 1990). The expectation was that scaling-up would be both cost-effective and beneficial to the quality of education and the educational career opportunities for pupils (due to e.g., more choice within larger institutions, easier transfer opportunities to other programs, and more opportunities for professionalization and specialization of staff). From the perspective of school boards, school leaders, and government finally, scaling-up was seen as an important precondition for more decentralization and increased autonomy of schools and institutions. One of the assumptions was that by increasing the autonomy of schools and school boards a more differentiated curriculum would emerge (Onderwijsraad 2005; Ministerie van Onderwijs et al. 2008; NWO 2011; Van de Venne 2006).