One in five classes can be taught in foreign language

The government of Flanders has approved a decree that allows secondary schools to teach up to 20% of courses in a language other than Dutch. The Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) project has been launched to better prepare pupils for the “multilingual future”.

Every school also has the choice to participate in the project or not, and pupils are not obliged to take part, so all courses also remain available in Dutch. According to Mieke Van Hecke, director-general of the Catholic schools network, about 50 of the 600 Catholic schools have already shown an interest.

The Flemish initiative is similar to the Walloon system of “language immersion education”. In that system, up to 75% percent of the non-language courses are taught in Dutch or English and it is mostly used in primary schools.