Chronic absenteeism is a wicked problem, it is extremely complex and multifaceted and there is rarely a simple, unambiguous solution. Also, it is almost never due to the commitment of education professionals, as far as we are concerned, there is not a single professional who gets up in the morning with the intention of bullying students out of Education. And as far as we are concerned, everyone is making a lot of effort and all kinds of well-intentioned interventions are being committed and despite everything, we do not know how to turn the tide.
We are not there to point a finger and complain about professionals and directors, we always play it hard on the content and soft on the person. We do not have a magic formula to solve the problem of sitting at home and we will not just pretend to know everything better, but because of the combination of our personal experiences, our broad dossier knowledge and our international network around school attendance, we do have a toolbox full of concrete solution directions.
We have already spoken at about 100 conferences about education, (youth)care and youth participation.
Not only do we like to provide keynotes and workshops, but we also like to think along the front. For example, at the first set-up of conferences and symposia. We also always give the voice of young people a full-fledged place. In addition, we make these meetings as attractive as possible for young people, because after all, it is about them.
Each of us has experienced what it is like to get stuck in education. We know the dark side of education and therefore we try to make it clear from our own experience how important it is to listen to young people sincerely. Because this can save lives!
All our volunteers like to share their stories, also our board members and employees have a combination of lived experience and knowledge about policy and/or practice to share. Do not hesitate to invite us, check out our team via the button below.
There are a lot of young people in the Netherlands who are stuck in education. Many people know someone who has been stuck in the past or is currently without education at home. Nevertheless, many students with chronic absenteeism feel that they are alone in front of it.
We help educational organizations to set up low-threshold (fellow sufferers)contact and give young people a voice at the local level. For example, at school, within municipalities or at the association for appropriate education.
We work intensively with other youth organisations, also because our ultimate goal is to be able to dissolve our organisation, while the more general student and youth organisations will in principle continue to exist as long as there are students.
We work nationally with, among others, the youth organizations: LAKS, LBVSO, Voice of the VSO student and JongPIT.
We also work regionally with a number of youth organisations.
As a foundation, we basically run entirely on public funding from the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. Nevertheless, we sometimes charge a fee for (large) projects, we do this because we believe in principle that lived experience expertise is just as valuable as other forms of expertise. With this compensation, we can pay our experienced experts decently for their hard work.
If employees, board members or volunteers from Adviesraad ÉigenWijsheid are invited on location, we will in principle at least ask for a travel allowance based on the actual travel costs incurred.
We do not have standard rates for our commitment, everything is negotiated and if we are invited by an organization that runs entirely on volunteers without or with hardly any subsidy, we basically do not ask for compensation anyway.
In principle, Stichting Adviesraad ÉigenWijsheid does not carry out paid assignments for commercial parties and the foundation obviously has no profit motive. This is established by statute.
