Make sure homework is done at home is sometimes tedious for parents. Yet the law that supervises them is little known.
If collective education is sufficient for the majority of children, help adapted to the needs of each student is often necessary in order to ensure control of fundamental learning. In this context, National Education may soon be tempted to integrate homework into the educational process of students, from primary school for the start of the 2025-2026 school year. “Work offered outside the class, in particular learning lessons and the resolution of application and training exercises are essential to consolidate the achievements,” said a project New cycle 3 programs (elementary school), which will be effective as of the next school year.
“Integrate in 2025?” Yes, you read that right. If homework is already a lot of many children and their parents, you should know that written duties are however strictly prohibited in elementary school. “No written duty, either compulsory or optional, will be asked of students outside the class,” said a circular dated December 29, 1956. This written black on white ban is very little known to parents. And even less teachers who have been giving homework for decades.
A report by the Inspectorate of National Education, published in 2008 and appointed Student work outside the class. Inventory and conditions of efficiencyspecifies that the official texts have always or almost prohibited homework at home. The document admits that in fact, the duties are however “very numerous, probably for lack of being generally applied”, and that they are “most often articulated with instructions relating to directed or monitored studies”.
Because the formulation of the law is subtle and it is necessary to distinguish the “duties outside the class” of “homework at home”, as recalled by the president of the Higher Program Council, who spoke in the columns of RMC recently.“We do not stipulate: Home written at home, but outside the class, which can mean to study, in a duty-to-make system,” he said to defend the current project.
This does not prevent this project from dividing unions and parents of students. Difficult not to think of single parents, or those faced with scheduled schedules in the context of their jobs and which may not have the time necessary to devote to the duties of their children, if these were to be made at home and not in study. For Thierry Pajot, spokesperson for the School Directors Syndicate, returning to this little-known law and authorizing duties outside the class is actually “a formalization of what was done in many classes .