Gabriel Attal found a way to set up the level groups in French and mathematics promised to the college from the next school year, despite the skepticism of the unions. The Minister of Education revealed, Thursday, December 21, the mystery ingredient of his plan to “raise the level of the French”. At the heart of this sleight of hand: the cancellation by the minister of the planned elimination of hundreds of teaching positions.
“We are making the historic choice not to restore teaching jobs overall. This choice allows us to continue to further reduce class sizes,” welcomed Gabriel Attal during a briefing with the press. The job cuts were justified by a further reduction in the school population expected in 2024, with around 83,000 fewer students. Nearly 7,000 teaching positions have been cut in secondary education since Emmanuel Macron came to power.
The minister’s calculation to reach 2,330 additional positions
This announcement is a real budgetary victory for Gabriel Attal, since it will immediately support his so-called “shock of knowledge” reform. In order to raise the level of students, colleges will have to be “at the heart of the electroshock”, he said in December before the alarming results of the annual Pisa survey. At the heart of the system, the creation of three reduced level groups per class, in French and mathematics, in the 6th and 5th grade classes from the start of the 2024 school year, then in the 4th and 3rd grades from the start of the 2025 school year. A battle plan greeted by the Head of State on the eve of this new announcement, who congratulated in the program C à Vous on France 5 a minister “who does good at the head of the school” and who demonstrates “energy” and “courage”, recalling that education is “the mother of battles”.
According to the ministry’s calculations, the creation of level groups in 6th and 5th grade will require 2,330 additional French and mathematics teachers from 2024. To reach this number, the minister, accustomed to budgetary mysteries, adds several measures: while 484 positions were to be eliminated in middle and high schools at the start of the next school year, ultimately 574 jobs will be created, or 1,058 “additional” positions in total. “This will be the first time since 2017 that we will recreate teaching jobs” in secondary education, he boasted on Thursday.
Another tool used by Gabriel Attal: the elimination of the weekly time support established by his predecessor Pap Ndiaye, which should make it possible to recover, according to his calculations, the equivalent of 1,500 full-time equivalent hours. “This time no longer has to be with the establishment of level groups,” he justified.
Lack of attractiveness and mysterious financing
In detail, “a third of the job creations under the level groups will benefit the overseas academies – Guadeloupe, Martinique, Guyana, Mayotte, Reunion. Some 10% of the job creations will benefit the Créteil academy, 5% at the Amiens academy or even 5% at the Lyon academy,” the minister explained to the union organizations. And if the organizations welcome the cancellations of job cuts – a “choice of reason” according to them – they wonder about long-term financing. “We need to be explained how we finance these job creations, because for the year 2024, all the means are already identified,” Sophie Vénétitay, general secretary of Snes-FSU, explains to AFP.
At primary level, the choice is also “to continue to reduce class sizes”, indicated the minister. “We had already gone from 23.6 students per class in 2017 to 21.5 at the start of the 2023 school year. With this new employment plan, we will reach 21.4 students per class at the start of the school year, the lowest level since the Depp (the ministry’s statistical agency) has been measuring this figure since 1960. But for the teaching union SE-Unsa, “the additional jobs will not a priori be filled because the question of attractiveness has not been resolved, both financially and with regard to working conditions”.