I could only find classes on Wednesday and Saturday. Then I counted 8,950 of them

7 October 2026

When my children were old enough for swimming, dance and music, I did what every parent here does. I opened one club website after another, scrolled to the timetable, and wrote the times on a list.

Every list looked the same. Wednesday afternoon. Saturday morning. A few things on a Monday or Thursday, scattered over different parts of town. And Sunday, nothing at all. After a few weeks I was convinced: in the Netherlands, children’s classes are on Wednesday afternoon and Saturday morning, and you fit your week around that.

Then I built Find a Class, and for the first time I could see all the timetables at once instead of one website at a time. So I counted. I took every class for children (up to 16) that says both its day and its start time: 8,950 classes at 1,542 schools and clubs, counted on 7 October 2026.

The two slots I kept finding hold only a third

Wednesday afternoon and Saturday morning together have 2,867 classes. That is 32% of the week. The other two thirds were there all along, I just never found them, because they are spread over many small clubs whose websites I never opened.

My feeling was not wrong, just incomplete. Wednesday really is the biggest day, with almost one class in four, because many primary schools still finish early that day. And 10:00 on Saturday is the busiest single hour of the whole week: 520 classes start then. That is exactly why those slots are the first ones you find, and why they are the first ones to be full.

Sunday is not empty

This was the biggest surprise for me. I had given up on Sunday. There are 427 children’s classes on Sunday, at 181 schools and clubs. It is only 5% of the week, so you have to know where to look, but it is not nothing.

• Most are sport: football, other sports, swimming, gymnastics, yoga, even sailing and climbing.
• Theatre and art have Sunday classes too, and so do the Chinese weekend schools.
• Three in four Sunday classes start in the morning, most of them at 10:00.
• Amsterdam has the most (96), then The Hague (80), Utrecht (59) and Rotterdam (52).

If Sunday is your family’s free day, here are the Sunday classes near you.

Friday was a surprise the other way

I also thought Friday was a children’s day. For school-age children it isn’t: Friday has 14% of the classes, the same as Monday. The exception is the youngest. Classes for children up to 4 run on Friday 222 times a week, against 128 on Monday, and almost a quarter of the music classes for babies and toddlers are on Friday. With a toddler and a free Friday morning, look here first.

Every city has its own rhythm

Here in The Hague, Wednesday is even more crowded than elsewhere. Eindhoven is the opposite: Saturday is its busiest day by far.

What I do differently now

• I no longer start with Wednesday 15:00 or Saturday 10:00. Those are where the waiting lists are. Monday and Thursday after school often have room.
• I look per activity, not per club. Swimming is spread over the whole week and has the most Sunday lessons; ballet leans on Saturday; art and toddler music lean on Wednesday.
• For myself, I look on Monday to Thursday evening. Six in ten adult classes start at 18:00 or later, and the weekend has very few.

How I counted, and what is missing

These are the classes on Find a Class on 7 October 2026, copied from the schools’ and clubs’ own websites. A class counts once per weekly session: a club with three Saturday groups counts three times. About four in ten classes on the site don’t say their day or start time, and they are not in these numbers. Clubs that only put their timetable in an app or a PDF are missing too.

If your club’s day is wrong or missing, use “Add or fix” on its page and I will check it against the club’s website.

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