Overview

Het Onderwijsloket is the central information platform for careers in Dutch education. Our team of experts collects and publishes independent, objective, and up-to-date information, and also offers free, personalized advice. All data and content published by Het Onderwijsloket is used on onderwijsloket.com and is also available through our API for use by third parties.

The platform includes both proprietary data and aggregated data from external sources. Any information authored by Het Onderwijsloket may be reused freely—without attribution—for commercial and non-commercial purposes.

What can you do with the API?

The possibilities with our API are extensive. For example, you can:

• Display and search frequently asked questions about secondary education

• Build a thematic knowledge base with objective articles, including filtering options for personalized content

• Retrieve teacher-training programs within a 40 km radius of Utrecht

• Receive possible pathways into the teaching profession, including process steps based on personal characteristics

• Identify which regional education desks are active within a user’s area of interest

For more inspiration, explore our data model to understand the information available to you. Or jump into our tutorials, where you’ll find practical examples to help you get started with the API.

Technology

Our API is powered by Directus. This documentation walks you through everything you need to work with it. If you want to dive deeper into platform-level behavior, the Directus Docs offer additional details

We also provide access to our Algolia-powered search engine. It’s not available directly through our API endpoints, but you can call the Algolia API directly if your permissions allow it.

Setting up a search client

Create an Algolia client and connect to the Onderwijsloket instance

Our assets—such as images, videos, audio, and other documents—are hosted and distributed through Cloudinary. All of these assets are publicly available, allowing you to utilize the full power of Cloudinary’s platform: media transformations, caching, CDN, and more.

Cloudinary

Learn how to retrieve optimized assets from Cloudinary.

Prerequisites

Before you make your first request, you’ll need an API token with the right access rights. You can request an account and token by sending us an email. Response times are typically fast. In your application, please provide the following information:

• Full name of applicant

• Email of applicant

• Administrative email

• Organisation name

• Reason for requesting API access

Request an account

Data model and collections

Onderwijsloket provides more than 80 collections, each representing a distinct type of data. All can be queried through the API, and key datasets have their own search indexes.

Understanding our data model—how collections relate, and how their fields are structured—will make interacting with the API significantly easier and more effective.

Introduction

An introduction to our data schema and the structure of our collections.

Permissions

Your account determines what data you can read or modify. A good part of our data is openly accessible once you acquire a token, but certain features and datasets require elevated permissions, including access to:

• Search engine access

• programs, program_froms educational_institutions and locations, where vendor ≠ ‘onderwijsloket’.

• schools

• Data related to our stats dashboard, such as applicants, applicant_activity, scheduled_events and scehduling_links

For detailed permission rules, refer to the article on specific permissions and how to request access.

Permissions

An overview of different access policies and their permissions within the system.

Pricing

Our core API is free to use under fair-use conditions. If you want access to the search engine, we charge a small yearly fee based on expected usage. This helps us cover provider costs and keep the service available without limitations.