About Tom

During his Industrial Engineering and Management studies, Tom Buunk learned how to bring technical and management knowledge together. He now puts those skills into practice by helping to support educational processes in primary education with an (advanced) software solution, and he gets an enormous amount of satisfaction out of it.

In year 5 of primary school, his teacher Klaas told Tom that he had far more in him at that point than he often showed. In his first year of secondary school it turned out he was dyslexic. He therefore knows better than anyone how challenging reading can be for some pupils, but he never let it stop him there.

A little bird with smaller wings simply has to flap a bit harder. It is with that mentality that he now takes on ambitious projects like Onderwijs in Beeld. He also reads more than most people around him these days. He particularly enjoys informative books with useful or interesting content, which means he can hold his own on all sorts of subjects: economics, history, and more recently primary (reading) education too.

When Stijn asked him in May 2020 to help innovate education together, it was something of a leap into the unknown for him. During the first conversations with school leaders and teachers, he soon discovered that it is a very approachable and, above all, enjoyable environment to work in.

The idea that they could make a big impact with this initiative also helped him get over that uncertainty quickly. Reading is a perfect example of that: it touches the very heart of education, and it lets you influence future generations in an enormously positive way. That thought is what drives him every day to continue this wonderful initiative together with Stijn.