‘Children who struggle with learning benefit most from a close relationship with their teacher’ - Tim Mainhard (Professor of Educational Sciences at Leiden University)
Simone attaches great importance to practice-oriented research and wants to work with schools to investigate which approaches contribute to greater equality of opportunity in education. She is convinced that improvements in education arise from strong links between research and practice. She sees the small scale of the region as an opportunity to work with schools to achieve good and fair education.
In her doctoral research at Utrecht University, she focuses on classroom management in primary schools with a high school weighting, looking in particular at the interactions between teachers and pupils. Within the research group, she is involved in various projects that focus on equal opportunities and connection, such as the Education Workshop – Research into Giftedness and a new study into education in the MBO-HBO-WO spectrum.
After completing her Master's degree in Educational Sciences, Simone participated in a research project on the effects of school closures on vulnerable pupils during the coronavirus pandemic. She combined this research with teaching in primary education. Eventually, she started her PhD research through the PromoDoc programme, in which she continued to combine teaching in a multicultural neighbourhood with research.
Simone was born and raised in Zeeland and studied at the Academische Pabo in Utrecht because of the combination of Pabo and Educational Sciences. Among other things, she did an internship at a primary school in Kanaleneiland in Utrecht. There, she came into intensive contact with a metropolitan, culturally diverse learning environment for the first time. This experience broadened her perspective and sparked her interest in the theme of equal opportunities: what does it take for teachers to provide good education to children from very diverse backgrounds?