"Two weeks ago we reported on the situation: Because of demographic changes, Brussels will need 3,000 extra places in Dutch-speaking schools by 2030. Even without that growth, there are already more than 2,000 children who failed to get a place at one of their five choices in the last registration round.

Now the French-speaking education authorities have accused the Flemish schools of shutting out the children of immigrants and brought a complaint about the Flemish 55% quota for Dutch-speaking children to the Constitutional Court.

"From the introduction of an electronic registration system last year, it was clear that there was a capacity problem" Smet says. "So then there was a rush to create extra places. We found more than 2,000 places in Antwerp in five months; everyone said we could never do it, but we did. In Brussels, we found 350 places."

We're talking in his seventh-floor office high above the Brussels North quarter now taken over by banks, companies and government departments. Smet (sp.a) is tall and rangy, 44 years old but still boyish. He's formidably well prepared: He answers questions in paragraphs, then stops to wait for the next question. Where others hum and haw, he gives an interview that can practically be transcribed straight onto the page.

He's also boyishly energetic, forever changing position on his office sofa as if being forced to sit still for too long were a kind of detention. If he were in a classroom instead of the minister's office, he'd be either the boy fidgeting at the back or the highly charged teacher bounding back and forth to the blackboard at the front.

It's doubtless that kind of restlessness that took him into politics; he was on the city council in Beveren, East Flanders, at only 22, the start of a career that has included posts as chairmen of the Young Socialists, commissioner-general for refugees, mobility minister in the Brussels regional government and now minister for education and equal opportunities in Flanders.

"Last year, thanks to an investment of about €12 million - €8 million in Antwerp, a bit more than €3 million in Brussels and then in Halle and Vilvoorde €800,000 - every child had a school place by the time the schools started on 1 September," he continues. "In Flanders in general, there's no capacity problem; the demographic problem is in the cities."

Pupils may find places, but not necessarily at the schools the parents wanted to send them to. This has caused some parents to go as far as to move to the municipalities in the Flemish periphery around Brussels, where they have a better choices for Dutch- language schools.

"Parents here can choose where to send their children," retorts Smet. "In many other European countries, you have to go to school where you live, whereas here it's laid down in the Constitution that you have a free choice. Of course, you have popular schools, and obviously the school won't be able to take everyone. So some parents have to send their children to another school further away. While it's not always possible to give parents their first choice, the vast majority of children do get to go to their first choice of school."

His office provides the figures for last year for Antwerp, where there's also a demographic boom putting huge pressure on school places: Last year 77% of children were admitted to their first choice of school, and 95% found places in one of their top three schools.

Discrimination claims
In the capital, the priority given to children from Dutch-speaking homes was recently increased to 55% of the spots available, once siblings have been placed. ␣is has been portrayed, including by the French- speaking education system, as a form of discrimination. Smet is impatient to put the question in perspective.

"French is the dominant language in Brussels, and children who speak another language at home may only come into contact with Dutch during the official school hours - not on the street, not during their free time," he says. "The quality of French education is lower than Flemish education, and the parents of children from other language backgrounds all want to send their children to Flemish schools, with the result that the numbers of actual Dutch-speaking children are diluted. Our schools are open for other children and will stay open for them, but we have to make sure that Dutch-speaking parents have places in Flemish schools, so we've raised the quota to 55%, and we've made it clear that to make it into that quota, you have to actually speak Dutch at home."

Dutch-speaking education, he says, is supposed to be for Dutch speakers in the first instance. "The city is predominantly French speaking," he says. "If you offer Dutch-speaking education to people who speak Dutch at home, you have to give them priority, just as we give priority to children who come from socially disadvantaged backgrounds, and just as we give priority to brothers and sisters."

At present, only about one in 10 children entering schools in Brussels for the first time comes from a family where Dutch alone is spoken at home. The rules on priority, on the other hand, only require one parent to be Dutch speaking, reflecting the number of bilingual families.

"Proportionally, there are more children from other language backgrounds in Dutch-language schools than there are in French-speaking schools," Smet argues. The complaint from the French side has no foundation, he claims. "I think that they haven't understood the situation correctly."

Delays in building schools
The next move is to build more schools, and that has led to a polemic between Smet and Jean-Luc Vanraes, who's responsible for schools within Brussels' Flemish Community Commission (VGC). Vanraes (Open VLD) claims Smet is dragging his feet on a dossier of 17 building plans he submitted for financing. Smet in turn attacked Vanraes and his predecessor Guy Vanhengel, also a liberal, for tackling the problem too late.

"I try to avoid that kind of political game," he says now. "It's more important to solve the problems people have in the interest of the children." Nevertheless, he has described the plans as "vague". "I'm glad the list is finally there, don't get me wrong, but there are still a lot of points that need to be clarified."

And even when the schools do come, there remains the problem of teachers. Between a third and a fifth of new teachers in the Flemish system leave the profession within five years.

"Across the whole of Flanders," Smet says again, "there's no shortage. There's a shortage of teachers in Brussels, but that has more to do with the particularities of the city. A lot of teachers don't come from Brussels. Even if they study here, they eventually want to go back and live closer to home."

Also in Antwerp, he admits, it's not always easy to keep teachers. "Now in Antwerp they've taken some initiatives to recruit teachers, like visiting schools to encourage students to think about becoming teachers and looking towards the Netherlands to pick up some of their surplus of teachers," he says. "In Brussels, the VGC will have to do something similar to tackle the situation."

www.pascalsmet.be

Pictured: Pascal Smet visits a school in Bredene on the Belgian coast last autumn