Culture Card in secondary education

The Culture Card is a special-purpose grant with relatively limited funding (€15.5 million) but a fairly complicated system. Schools have to satisfy many procedures and rules before they can use the credit on the Culture Card. The complicated system is due to the minister wanting the Culture Card to achieve many goals at the same time. This leads to relatively high administrative burdens for the schools. Implementation costs for the Culture Card have fallen sharply, however, (they now account for about 17% of the budget) in comparison with the Card's predecessor, the CKV vouchers (at the time 25% of the budget).

Our audit also found that improper use could be made of the credit on the Culture Card. There is uncertainty about what the credit on the Card may or may not be spent on. Furthermore, checks of the use of the credit do not cover all risks. It is therefore possible that the credit on the Culture Card is not used to achieve the goals.

We also concluded from our audit that the House of Representatives receives a rather narrow and overoptimistic picture of the Culture Card's achievements. The 'total available budget' the minister uses to calculate the redemption rate is too low relative to the total amount spent. If the redemption rate is calculated in a more logical manner, it is about 10% lower than in the minister's calculations. The targets are then nearly achieved rather than comfortably achieved.

The Rutte/Verhagen government stated in the coalition agreement that the Culture Card would be abolished. The State Secretary for OCW, Halbe Zijlstra, promised the House in December last year that schools, cultural institutions and CJP, the body that administers the Culture Card, would be consulted to determine whether it could be continued in one form or another without government funding. The outcome will be announced in the Spring Memorandum (June 2011) at the latest. We made a series of recommendations to the state secretary for consideration in the talks on the future of the Culture Card.

One of our recommendations was that the State Secretary for OCW critically review the goals set for the Culture Card. This could lead to a simplification of the system, with lower administrative burdens and implementation costs.

We also recommended that the State Secretary for OCW limit the risk of misuse and improper use of the Culture Card by defining when and when not the Culture Card can be used and fully informing schools and the bodies that accept the Culture Card.

We further recommended that the State Secretary for OCW calculate the redemption rate in a more appropriate manner. This can be done by relating the total credit spent on the Culture Card to the total available budget based on the number of registered pupils rather than on the number of activated pupils.

The state secretary wrote in his response that our report contained very valuable information for the organisers of a possible reintroduction of the Culture Card.

He also accepted our recommendation that his reports on the Culture Card should relate the total credit spent on the Culture Card to the total available budget based on the number of registered pupils rather than on the number of activated pupils.