As a cultural institution, do you want to lay the foundation for cultural education at secondary schools? Do you want to check with a school to see if you are a good match and how you can collaborate? In phase 1, you can apply for funding to investigate this. This way, you learn together what works and what doesn't when designing cultural education activities that suit the students.

Who can apply?

A non-profit cultural institution in the Kingdom of the Netherlands that enters into a collaboration with a school or branch of a school for VMBO, VSO or PRO. The school itself can't apply, but it can take the initiative of finding a cultural institution to collaborate with.

What can you apply for?

You apply for a cultural education project in which you get to know your partner, try out cultural education projects together that meet the wishes and needs of the students. You share your expertise and knowledge.

Making a connection between curricular and extracurricular cultural education can be part of your project.

What does the Fund look out for?

To help you with your application and to facilitate the process, we have created a format for your project plan. You can use this as a framework to describe your plan. We have also made a format for the budget and the collaboration agreement, which we advise you to use. This page is a summary of the complete legal regulation. Would you like to apply? Then make sure you have also read the full version of the scheme. A text version is available here that only includes the relevant parts. You will find all the documents mentioned here in the grey box under 'Documents'. These documents are only available in Dutch.

The criteria of the scheme are briefly described below:

• Content | Is your project sufficiently focused on jointly exploring how to promote the students’ creative ability? Also describe the expectations, wishes and possibilities of yourself, the school and the students.
• Collaboration | Is the collaboration equal and based on mutual effort and commitment? Is there a common goal and a clear division of tasks and roles in terms of involvement and finances? 
• Organisation | Does your application contain a realistic plan of activities that will contribute to achieving the goal? Is your budget reasonable and consistent with the activities? 

At the end of the project, you will know each other's possibilities and needs regarding the promotion of creative ability, as well as those of the students. You will also have a better grasp of how to design cultural educational activities that suit students.

Practical conditions (selection)

• Applications are processed in order of receipt until the budget limit has been reached. So do not wait too long to apply.
• Your project may only start once the Fund announces that you have been awarded a grant. This takes 13 weeks at most.
• At the latest, you start in the school year following the year in which your application was honoured.
• Your project has a maximum duration of 1 year.
• You have not previously received a grant for the same course from the participating school/schools in one of the Fund's earlier VMBO schemes.
• A maximum of three applications is granted per applicant.
• You must apply the three culture codes as described in Article 1.4 of the grant regulation. How strictly this is taken into account depends on requested amount.
• The grant will not exceed 65% of the total project costs in the European part of the Netherlands, and 80% in other parts of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
• The educational institution also contributes towards the financial resources needed for the project. This contribution must not consist solely of capitalised hours.

The total budget for this phase is €1.5 million. This has been split into two periods of €750,000 (up to 31 December 2022 and from 1 January 2023).

Other phases

Does your project not fit into this phase? The other two phases focus on the joint development of cultural educational activities and assuring the sustainability of cultural education projects.