Daisy Mertens

Daisy Mertens is a Dutch primary school teacher. In 2016, she was the winner of the 2016 National Primary Teacher of the Year in the Netherlands and she was among the top 10 finalists for the Global Teacher Prize 2019. She works in a large community-based school in Holland, with 440 students and up to 30 different nationalities represented. Her dream is for child participation to become the new norm in every school, with children as equal partners in dialogue, in the context of a community-driven school. She shares this dream with Number 5 Foundation, an incubator of social innovation and initiator of societal movements based in The Hague, where she is developing and enhancing special needs education in Sri Lanka.