Sébastien Gouttebel, vice-president of the Association of Rural Mayors of France (AMRF), keeps his eyes glued to his calculator. Between the forecast numbers last June and the start of the school year in September 2024, its department of Puy-de-Dôme, which is not immune to the demographic decline, “lost” 500 primary school students. “As usual, National Education will be content to make a rule of three without taking into account the particularities of our territory. According to my accounts, if we divide the 500 fewer students by 25 [NDLR : ce qui correspond, selon lui, au nombre d’élèves par classe]”, we risk having 20 fewer teachers and, in the process, being forced to close classes”, continues the elected official. Everywhere in France, there has been concern since the announcement on October 10. , the elimination of 4,000 teaching positions planned in the 2025 finance bill. Particularly in rural communities, where the school plays a central role “For ministers, who leave the ENA and who are. all from big cities, a class closure is nothing! For us, this risks ultimately eliminating one more public service and causing families to flee,” warns Jean-Paul Carteret, first vice-president of the AMRF and mayor of Lavoncourt, a small town of less than 400 souls in Haute-Saône.
This feeling of not being heard by Parisian leaders comes back repeatedly among local elected officials and residents of small towns. For years, the regional press has regularly reported on mobilizations intended to prevent school map adjustments which reduce the number of classes. An Odoxa survey carried out for the Excellence Ruralités network of schools in January 2024 confirms this impression of abandonment, since 73% of inhabitants of rural areas, towns and small towns mostly feel abandoned by the State, compared to 57% of citizens of large cities. If the former say they are rather satisfied with their primary schools, 28% of them find themselves disadvantaged when it comes to middle schools, and 43% when it comes to high schools. While the dissatisfaction rate in large cities is, respectively, 19% and 26%. “The lack of choice and the average travel time, which continues to increase as the child advances in their schooling, are among the points of tension in these territories. The more we extend the distances, the more we amplifies this feeling of abandonment”, explains Jean-Baptiste Nouailhac, co-founder of Excellence Ruralités.
According to an INSEE survey published in 2022, a third of rural schoolchildren aged 3 to 10 are educated outside their place of residence, i.e. three times more than urban children. They travel on average 9.5 kilometers to reach their school. Entry into high school further increases the home-study journey, since 94% of them make daily trips of 23 kilometers on average. Which inevitably leads to greater fatigue. Finally, inequalities in terms of educational guidance are no longer in doubt. High school students from rural areas, particularly subject to self-censorship, are less likely to choose long and selective courses. The housing crisis, which has worsened in recent years, tends to further dissuade these young adults from migrating to large cities when entering higher education.
“The time when we rented a maid’s room so that our son could go and study in Paris, Lyon or Toulouse is over because the big cities have become inaccessible for modest backgrounds,” explains geographer Christophe Guilluy. For him, the solution would be to decentralize the provision of higher education to, for example, “train engineers in rural areas who will later work on site in a context of reindustrialization”. And, more generally, to rethink our land use planning model, which until now has been essentially focused on metropolises. “We have too much of a tendency to think of rural areas, small and medium-sized towns, in short what I call peripheral France, as margins, when on the contrary they represent the future,” insists Christophe Guilluy, for whom the movement is in the process of being reversed with the departure of families from large cities, starting with Paris.
A “lack of fairness”, for certain elected officials
Complicated at a time of all-out budgetary restrictions. “At the start of the 2025 school year, it is estimated that there will be approximately 100,000 fewer students. What is good management of taxpayers’ money? Does it mean considering that the budget of a ministry must be systematically increasing both in resources and in staff, or is it to adapt to the reality of the need of the public service?” asked the Minister of the Budget Laurent Saint-Martin THE October 11 last year. At the Ministry of National Education, we deny ourselves that we only reason according to accounting logic. “The distribution of resources is done according to three criteria: demography, major national guidelines which aim, for example, to open local units for educational inclusion, but also the social and geographical characteristics of each territory,” explains Caroline Pascal, the general director of school education. Several school measures were announced as part of the France ruralités plan, launched by the government in June 2023. Such as the creation of the Boarding school of excellence – rurality label aimed at facilitating adolescents’ access to rare training.
New dialogue bodies called “rural dynamics observatories” have also been installed in most departments. The goal: to bring together the prefect, the academic director of national education services (Dasen) and elected officials in order to have visibility over three years of demographic developments, the school map, political measures of transport or support for families. “For the moment, we have only had one meeting last year during which the discussions were very lively,” says Patrick Carayon, chief magistrate of Rayssac, a small town in Tarn. And the elected official recounts the fears of a neighboring mayor at the idea of losing a new class next year and having to enter into an intercommunal educational grouping system (RPI), which consists of bringing together schools on a single or several sites.
Many rural elected officials also denounce a lack of fairness in the face of certain recent reforms such as the splitting of classes in the large section of nursery, CP and CE1 in a priority education network. “This system, which makes it possible to reduce the number of students to 12 students per class, mainly concerns towns and suburbs. Why not benefit rural areas which are also very fragile?”, asks Sébastien Gouttebel, for whom the demographic decline should be an opportunity to improve teaching conditions and “not serve as a pretext for eliminating positions”. “In primary school, the national average is 21.4 pupils per class. In rural areas, the figure drops to 20.9, and to 19.9 in the most remote municipalities. The supervision rate there is therefore best,” replies Caroline Pascal.
Jean-Baptiste Nouailhac, for his part, is calling for a review of the classification criteria for REP and REP+ establishments, which are more advantageous for cities according to him. An unequal treatment that the ministry refutes. Will the executive’s responses ease the uneasiness of some of the residents of small towns? For Christophe Guilluy, it is now urgent to reconcile metropolises and peripheral territories “today completely divided”. “Otherwise we know what that looks like,” he adds. “I’m not drawing you a picture…”
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