present and past

In 1983 Het Nederlands Lyceum, the oldest lyceum in The Netherlands, opened an international stream at its school in The Hague. The Lyceum closed in 1991 and the international stream, as well as the school building, was taken over by Rijnlands Lyceum Wassenaar.

Renamed The International School of The Hague (ISH), it became a self contained international school for students aged 11 – 18, while technically still being the international stream of a Dutch national school, Rijnlands Lyceum Wassenaar.

In 2003 we opened a primary school at a separate location in the city, sharing facilities with another Dutch national secondary school. This immediately proved extremely popular, and from opening with a one stream school of less than 100 children, four years later we have a three stream school of around 400.

After several years of planning, we moved the primary school into a brand new school in Kijkduin to the south west of the city at the start of the 2006/2007 school year.  In January 2007 the secondary school joined them, realising our dream of having both the primary and the secondary schools in one building.

As Rijnlands Lyceum have a government license to run only secondary schools, while it fully owns the primary school, and we manage ISH as an independant school for children between 4 and 18, we have a license partnership agreement with the Haagsche Schoolvereeniging (HSV), a separate and longstanding primary school organisation offering Dutch national, international and special needs education in four locations in The Hague.

The Rijnlands Lyceum group of schools is also described elsewhere; Wassenaar and Sassenheim are Dutch national schools, Oegstgeest is a national school with an international stream, and four overseas branches offer Dutch national education as departments within host country schools.

As a member of a Dutch foundation and legally the international stream of a Dutch school and, therefore, a Dutch school itself, the ISH receives government funding for our students. While this subsidy does not pay the full costs for international education, it does enable our fee structure to be extremely low, making our school more affordable for those who self-fund the tuition fees.

We are joined in this by a small group of similar schools throughout the country, nine primary and ten secondary, and together we form the organisations of the Dutch International Secondary Schools (DISS), and the Dutch International Primary Schools (DIPS), which provide benchmarking, staff development programmes, and a vehicle for inspection.