A gap that continues to widen. The report that France Strategy devotes to educational inequalities, dated September 2023, which the Express was able to consult a few days before its publication, describes this impression of an ever greater separation. From the age of two to eighteen, the gap between the success of children from wealthy families and those from poor families continues to widen. The diagnosis is brutal: the school has failed for thirty-five years to reduce the inequalities of destiny.
“Schooling, the weight of legacies”, write in title Johanna Barasz, Peggy Furic and Bénédicte Galtier, three senior officials of the institution attached to Matignon. The authors had access to many internal statistics from the Ministry of National Education, from annual evaluations or ad hoc studies, from 1987 to 2022. They compared these results with those from several surveys carried out by the Institute Institute for Demographic Studies (INED) and by the OECD, in particular the famous Pisa report. Their conclusion? “From early childhood to leaving the education system with or without a diploma, the social origins, gender and migratory ancestry of students exert a major influence on their performance and their careers”, they write. In very different proportions. Because it is the parents’ standard of living that determines, very largely, academic success. “Of these three dimensions linked to the birth of pupils, it is social origin which, in France, weighs the most on their trajectories”, conclude the officials of France Strategy. Even internationally, this decisive dimension of inheritance is “among the highest in OECD countries”, they describe.
Fewer poor people in crèches
Their investigation consists of following the students’ trajectory step by step. This method reveals a striking reality: at each stage of a child’s life, inequalities of opportunity persist and even widen. The differences are noticeable from two years. At this age, “children living in an advantaged environment master a richer vocabulary than children from disadvantaged backgrounds”, note the authors. Children whose mother has a baccalaureate + 2 know 80 words on average, against 70 words for children whose mother does not have the secondary school diploma. Some learning delays will never be caught up. “Some early deficiencies in literacy and even more so in numeracy are conducive to the accumulation of later difficulties”, note the senior officials.
The authors note that childcare can reduce the gaps… but “disadvantaged children have little access to it”. France is below the average for OECD countries in terms of childcare for children from working-class backgrounds. From this strict point of view, the report therefore pleads in favor of a much more massive reception policy for children in crèches.
Kindergarten and especially primary school are two new stages in the widening of inequalities. The report also notes that school from the age of two benefits children from disadvantaged backgrounds more, which gives meaning to Emmanuel Macron’s project to develop this system. “The differences in performance linked to social origin increase during elementary schooling, in particular in mathematics”, also write the senior civil servants. They studied more closely the case of students weak in mathematics at the entrance to CP, in 2011. Children from a family where the library has more than “200 books” are making dazzling progress. Half are experiencing a “very positive development”. Regarding children in whom there is no book, only 7.4% of them will experience this “very positive development”. From this age, pupils from poor families repeat more.
crystallization in high school
The acknowledgment of failure continues in college. The social background sometimes has a greater influence than the grades obtained, notes France Stratégie. “Good results in 6th grade are not a guarantee of successful schooling for children from working classes, while difficulties at the start of middle school are more often overcome among children from more privileged classes”, it is written. The statistics are well known: the children of manual or inactive parents are largely over-represented in third preparatory-pro and in Segpa, this sector reserved for students in difficulty. 37% of the children of inactive people do not present themselves for the patent, against 7% of the children of executives. Hence the suggestion, which emerges, to rethink the orientation by integrating the observation that children from disadvantaged backgrounds will more often be directed towards professional streams. Emmanuel Macron precisely wishes “to close the formations where there are no outlets and to open them where there are needs”, he explained on August 23 to the Point.
And the gap finally materializes in high school, where inequalities “crystallize”, writes France Strategy. Based on a major national study carried out in 2007 within the Ministry of National Education among students entering sixth form, the institution notes that “76% of children of executives and teachers were high school graduates at the start of the 2014 school year. , compared to 27% of children of inactive people”. The gap is also noted with regard to specialties. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds are much less likely to opt for a general baccalaureate and even less to choose scientific disciplines. Thus, 63% of engineering school students in 2016 came from very privileged sections of the population, while students from disadvantaged sections represented only 9% of the workforce. The figures are even more spectacular for business schools and IEPs, ie all Sciences Po in Paris and in the provinces.
The report examines at length the case of the children of immigrants. If France Strategy notes that they succeed less well than the French without foreign origin, this difference is largely explained by their over-representation within the underprivileged social classes. So that the authors evoke, in the interrogative mode, the children of immigrants as “poor like the others”.
The report does not provide a clear path for improvement. Moreover, this is not its object. But France Strategy suggests that public policies should better take into account this decidedly heavy weight of family inheritance. The panorama “leads to question the question of the” targeting “of educational policies”, conclude the authors. Which, in administrative language, amounts to recommending a global questioning.