Special feature

The government does not mention young people as a specific group with regard to its efforts around creativity and culture, but they do issue programmes that are specifically developed for children and youth in primary, secondary and tertiary education (Paragraph 8.2). According to the Law on specific culture policy (Wet op het specifiek cultuurbeleid) (1993) the Minister or the Secretary of State of Culture issues a culture policy notice every four years. The Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW) distributes the budget for cultural organizations in the so-called cultural basic infrastructure (culturele basisinfrastructuur - BIS) (Paragraph 8.3).

Highlights

It is not compulsory for schools to offer education in culture and creativity. However, the Council for Culture (Raad voor Cultuur) and the Education Council of the Netherlands (Onderwijsraad) think schools should make it part of their curriculums (Paragraph 8.5). The National Centre of Expertise for Cultural Education and Amateur Arts  (Landelijk Kennisinstituut Cultuureducatie en Amateurkunst LKCA) works on improving the quality of cultural education, both in and out of school. They see three main trends: Young people find new ways of expression, with hip-hop becoming increasingly mainstream; Digitalization has a major impact on young people’s cultural participation with social media taking up a lot of their time; Young people prefer to learn about art through tutorials and share culture via Internet.