Bringing High-Impact
Tutoring to Scale
in the Netherlands
The Bridge Learning Interventions & Saga Education
Amsterdam, Netherlands
2014-Present
Executive Summary
This case study explores broad-scale, high-impact tutoring (HIT) programs operated by Saga’s school system partners. Through interviews with program managers, we examine success factors and challenges. Saga supports districts with planning, launching, and implementing high-quality tutoring.
Key Takeaways
- The Bridge Learning Interventions effectively modified Saga Education’s high-impact tutoring model initially for schools in the cities of Rotterdam and Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) proved its success and demonstrated high-impact tutoring works across cultures.
- The success of The Bridge’s tutoring approach in RCTs attracted major funding, allowing the program to expand and reach a larger number of at-risk students nationwide.
- The effective training of tutors and site directors, along with a varied part-time workforce, played a crucial role in the lasting success of The Bridge’s tutoring program, ensuring stability and high-quality performance.
The Challenge
Over the past two decades, dozens of communities in the Netherlands faced an emerging education crisis. Low-income neighborhoods needed more educational resources to support the emerging needs of communities and schools with, in many cases, growing immigrant populations. To Dr. Bowen Paulle, a sociologist at the University of Amsterdam and, since 2021, co-director of a nonprofit called The Bridge Learning Interventions, the challenges in the Netherlands resembled those he saw as a high school teacher in New York City’s Bronx neighborhood, where he worked in underserved, high-poverty schools.
Like other countries, the COVID-19 pandemic-related school closures significantly influenced recent declines in student learning in the Netherlands. According to the latest 2022 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), the country saw a drop of 25 points or more in math scores.
“The really scary thing is the lowest performing, least advantaged 10-20 percent—that’s where you just absolutely see the floor falling out,” said Paulle. “With regard to the bar the national government sets for the absolute minimum basic math skills that kids are supposed to achieve by the time they end primary school, which is age 12, we’re seeing strong increases in the percentage of kids who do not achieve that even by the second or third year of high school.”
In 2014, years before The Bridge came into existence, Paulle—in his role as an associate professor of sociology at the University of Amsterdam—began researching and advising on the implementation of primary school programs in a large Dutch city for a philanthropic foundation that has requested to remain anonymous. Paulle, who had been familiar with Saga Education’s high-impact tutoring (HIT) model, proposed implementing a pilot replicating Saga’s year-long tutoring model during regular school hours at several primary schools in this large Dutch city.
“Thanks to a three-year RCT [randomized control trial], we can now say that the results of this first-ever attempt to bring Saga-consulted tutoring outside the U.S. were highly successful,” Paulle said. In June 2023, Paulle and his research colleagues published the results of their RCT in the journal Economics of Education Review. High-impact tutoring showed an effect size of 0.28 standard deviations—enough to bring students in the 90th percentile up to the 50th percentile in terms of the socioeconomic gap for math achievement.
While this first effort supported by the anonymous philanthropic organization was still being researched, Paulle helped The Bridge get off the ground in 2016. While still a tutor at the first (that is, non-Bridge) intervention, Anne Kielman, who would later become the director of The Bridge, visited Saga sites in the U.S., Paulle said. Kielman returned both inspired and equipped with actionable insights that helped her serve as the first site director (2017-2018) and as the sole director of The Bridge from 2017 to 2021. As Paulle put it, Kielman’s managerial skills and commitment to excellent execution on the ground have always contributed massively to making The Bridge’s version of Saga-consulted tutoring a success.
The Implementation
In 2017, while still advocating for, advising on, and evaluating The Bridge’s tutoring efforts from his role at the University of Amsterdam—that is, before he became the co-director of The Bridge in 2021—Paulle and his research partners launched an RCT to study The Bridge’s iteration of Saga’s high-impact tutoring model in a secondary school (Mundus) in a low-income neighborhood of Amsterdam. The model resembled the one Saga originally used in U.S. high schools—tutoring occurred in a 2:1 student-tutor ratio during regular school hours, and students worked with the same tutor for five hours each week.
A team consisting of six tutors and a site director delivered the tutoring. The site director provided ongoing training and coaching to tutors, none of whom had prior experience with this tutoring approach. Tutors were paid and, typically, were recent graduates of B.A. or M.A. programs. Although there was only funding for half a year (from September 2017 to January 2018), the results of this effort showed that students could make strong academic gains even in a short time.
Saga staff provided technical assistance on the project, conducted bi-annual site visits for implementation reviews; Saga’s CEO spoke at a City of Amsterdam “Up Close and Livable” conference of government and private sector leaders in 2019, and conducted regular phone consultations to provide guidance and training. Leaders of the Netherlands tutoring program also participated in Saga training in the U.S and visited Saga sites.
Paulle noted that while The Bridge intentionally replicated Saga’s high-impact tutoring approach, they have also made significant additions to their program’s social-emotional learning curriculum components, including “concentration” exercises used at the start of sessions.
Identifying Eligible Students
To determine which students need tutoring, The Bridge works with schools to look at students’ performance on standardized achievement tests and tries to go farther back than a year and a half if possible, Paulle said. They also try to speak with teachers about students’ ability levels and look at students’ personalities and relationships; “you don’t want best friends, and you don’t want enemies,” nor do you want “two extroverted or two introverted kids” together for a tutoring session, he said. “You need to have classroom teachers or an ‘anchor’ person who has detailed insights into these kids’ personalities.”
Pulling Students Out of Class for Tutoring
Paulle noted that scheduling time for tutoring is easier in primary schools, as students who need tutoring are typically with a single teacher all day. Students in secondary schools are typically pulled out of a class for tutoring offered by teachers who only see their students for a few hours each week and, therefore, who sometimes need to alter their planning to accommodate the tutoring sessions. For this reason, it can be harder to generate and maintain teacher buy-in at the secondary level.
“We have not pushed in” to classes, he stated. “We’re trying to stick to a 1:2 tutor-to-student ratio.” At the secondary level, where the scheduling issues are most challenging, that would mean working with small class sizes of at most 14 students and, in such cases, teams with seven tutors.
Space Challenges
Paulle said that finding space for tutoring is often a challenge as a nonprofit tutoring provider. “We cannot get [tutoring] done if we’re in the gym, and people are coming in and out, and kids are distracted,” he said. Paulle said that The Bridge site directors and program managers try to meet quarterly with a steering committee in schools where they work, which includes an “anchor” person or key staff person from the school, to discuss potential challenges such as those related to space constraints.
Keys to Success
Key elements of success involve site directors’ ongoing training of tutors and keeping the number of tutors a site director manages low. “I think ongoing training doesn’t get enough [credit],” Paulle said. “We are committed to small groups of tutors because we want our site director in there giving at least one hour a week of observations for each tutor and having a feedback moment.”
Pay attention to small details, Paulle added. “So, it’s about managers training [tutors and site directors] to be detail oriented—handshakes at the door, whiteboards cleaned—but it’s also about the macro: what’s the big picture, who are the key players, and how can you be super-sensitive to the potential challenges and try to nip them in the bud before they become daunting. Troubleshooting—you’ve got to embrace that.”
Another key element of The Bridge’s success is its part-time labor force. Allowing tutors and site directors to work part-time widens the talent pipeline. Among Bridge tutors, you will often find people experimenting with mid-career switches (into education) and professionals winding down—or even retired from—longstanding careers (in other fields) who would not be willing or able to work full time. Having a team of tutors, including professionals in their 40s, 50s, and even 60s, changes the dynamic for the better, Paulle suggested. Many Bridge tutors are also in their fourth or fifth year of service, and this longevity with the program means more experienced tutors bring a sense of calm and stability to tutorial rooms.
Paulle believes that sticking to the evidence and critical components of the original HIT model has also been another reason for continued effectiveness. “If, for example, you’re rural and can’t get [tutors] into your schools, you must go online,” he said. “I don’t judge people who adapt or pioneer online. However, the market has not forced us to move to online platforms; for now, we’re committed to face-to-face. There are studies documenting that online tutoring can be successful. Whatever you do, I say stay committed to genuine scientific education reform.”
“The success we’ve been able to achieve in the Netherlands is exciting because this is the first time Saga-inspired tutoring was brought outside the United States,” he said. “And a lot of intelligent people would have said, ‘you’re slapping randomized controlled trials on this right away. I bet it won’t work because of cultural differences.’ Yet with two different NGOs starting from scratch, we’ve had remarkable success with these RCTs.”
Lisette Buiting, team leader of Mundus Secondary School in Amsterdam, said that better math skills and more self-confidence lead to better chances in school and later in life. “For me, the main thing pupils get from Bridge HDT is self-confidence,” Buiting said. “This leads them to perform better, and a positive spiral develops. This allows kids to achieve levels that, in the past, had been too difficult for them.”
A teacher at a high-poverty primary school in Haarlem said that The Bridge’s tutoring in earlier grades not only helps improve students’ skills but also enhances teachers’ experiences. “Grade six teachers have a less stressful job because they have more homogenous classes, and significantly fewer (if any) kids who are behind grade level, thanks to Bridge [high-dosage tutoring] in Grade 5,” the teacher said.
The Impact and the Future
“The first Bridge intervention we looked at involved a subpopulation of kids who were told they did not have what it takes to go to the lowest regular vocational trajectory in the Netherlands,” Paulle said. Students in this track received high-impact tutoring for five and a half months. Paulle noted that students who received high-impact tutoring scored higher than the students in the track above them who did not receive tutoring. “In the education field, especially with early tracking systems like we have in the Netherlands, people should be much less confident in predicting kids’ abilities,” he said.
Paulle successfully worked with the municipal government of Amsterdam to set up a three-year randomized controlled trial of high-impact tutoring where students would work with tutors on a 2-to-1 student-to-tutor ratio five days a week. The RCT focused on seven primary schools in a high-poverty neighborhood of Amsterdam. That study, based on the five-day model, resulted in a 0.6 Standard Deviation (SD). However, the city couldn’t afford the five-day-a-week model on a larger scale and asked The Bridge and the research team to explore a three-day-a-week tutoring model. That yielded a 0.25 – 0.3 SD result. These results were the breakthrough that moved Amsterdam’s municipal government to invest 3 million euros to scale tutoring over the next three years, Paulle said.
Thanks to this investment, Paulle added, “We’re confident that by 2026, we should start getting significant data at a neighborhood level because we’re going to have such a meaningful percentage of the population of at-risk students in the city’s most segregated neighborhood.”
The Netherlands’ national government is currently funding another RCT to study The Bridge’s tutoring at the secondary level. The study will involve students at four high schools who will receive one year of high-impact tutoring. These studies, Paulle said, will provide a menu of rigorously tested, proven methodologies for helping students who are years behind in math and other subjects in the Netherlands and be a model for other European countries.