In order to support professional development of their teachers 14 Dutch secondary schools developed and implemented a series of interventions. The concept of School as Professional Learning Community was used to frame these school interventions. Data were collected through project documents, interviews with school principals and project leaders, group interviews with teachers and focus groups with project leaders. Interventions can be grouped into five clusters: 1) Shared school vision on learning; 2) Professional learning opportunities for all staff; 3) Collaborative work and learning; 4) Change of school organisation, and 5) Learning leadership. Interventions aimed at teacher-leaders, team leaders and school principals were relatively rare. Interventions belonging to the clusters Professional learning opportunities and Collaborative work and learning were the ones most frequently mentioned including formal and informal teacher groups working and learning together. In general, we conclude that the more embedded an intervention was in the organisation and culture of a school, the more sustainable it appeared to be.

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The importance of teaching twenty‐first–century competencies has increasingly been emphasised. Little is known, however, about how schools actually approach teaching such competencies. We investigated (1) how innovative and innovating secondary schools in the Netherlands implement a focus on self‐regulation, collaboration and creativity in their curriculum and (2) how and to what extent schools’ curricular focus was reflected in students’ self‐reported mastery of these competencies. To answer the first sub‐question we used the data of 16 school portraits. The second question was addressed with a quasi‐experimental study. About 551 students from 51 tenth grade classes (age 15–16) of 12 schools completed questionnaires measuring their self‐reported competencies regarding self‐regulation, collaboration and creativity, and the extent to which they experienced a curricular focus on self‐regulation, collaboration and creativity in their schools. The article describes how innovative and innovating schools aim at developing their students’ self‐regulation, collaboration and creativity through curriculum content, pedagogy and school organisation. It appears that the stronger a schools’ curricular focus on self‐regulation, collaboration and creativity, the more students indicate they master these competencies, and the more they improve in self‐regulation and collaboration skills between the ninth and tenth grade.

In general the use of minority language in schools is supposed to contribute to the maintenance of that language. The present study investigates whether this assumption is true for bilingual education in Friesland (i.e. the use of both Frisian and Dutch as media of instruction and communication). To this end 39 bilingually and 31 monolingually Dutch educated 6th graders were questioned on their language attitudes and usage (in various domains) and skills with respect to both Frisian and Dutch by means of a questionaire with multiple choice items. Analyses indicated that bilingual education in Friesland does not have a positive influence on attitudes and skills with respect to Frisian (as reported by the children). Usage of Frisian was more frequently reported by the bilingually educated group, although mainly in the expected school domain. Bilingual education in Friesland does not seem to contribute to the maintenance of the Friesian language. This study did reveal a stron. indication of the importance of Frisian as a subject for language maintenance based on the relation found between language skills in Frican and language use and attitudes. Because of its explorator nature, the conclusion of this study must be tentative.