Dr A.B. Dijkstra (1963) has been named Professor by Special Appointment of Supervision and Socialisation in Education at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences of the University of Amsterdam (UvA). The chair was designated on behalf of the Netherlands’ Inspectorate of Education.

As professor by special appointment, Anne Bert Dijkstra will be investigating public accountability for and supervision of education in relation to the Dutch education system and, in particular, education’s socialising function. Dijkstra will be collaborating with researchers at the UvA and the Education Inspectorate to study the social return of education and the socialising role of schools, also in relation to the other central functions of education. Key questions to be answered include: What are the social returns of education? How do schools contribute to realising these returns? And how can evaluation and accountability be organised to make the most of these returns?

The special chair has been set up within the UvA’s Child Development and Education Department and is affiliated with the Amsterdam Centre for Inequality Studies (AMCIS), where sociologists, political and educational scientists from the UvA and VU University Amsterdam work together in projects focusing on institutional impacts on inequality.

As the Education Inspectorate’s programme manager for social returns since 2003, Dijkstra has been in charge of coordinating and developing the quality of the Inspectorate’s supervisory task in the social domain. He is also on the editorial team of the Inspectorate’s annual report on The State of Education in the Netherlands. Prior to this, he worked as a researcher at the University of Groningen, where he earned his doctorate on a comparative study of school careers in secondary education. He has published on a wide range of subjects including social capital and school success, education and social cohesion, citizenship, the publication of school performance data, the effects of the school sector on educational outcomes, school choice, the ‘compartmentalisation’ of education, and the determinants and effects of public and private education.