The secondary school certificate will ultimately not be modified for the 2024-2025 school year, as the official texts were not published in time, we learned this Monday, September 16 from the Ministry of National Education.
“The decree would have had to be signed before the start of the school year” for the changes to the secondary school certificate, announced by former Education Minister Gabriel Attal in December 2023, to be applied this year, the rue de Grenelle explained to AFP.
Following announcements made in December by Gabriel Attal, the outgoing government had planned to change the terms of awarding the diploma marking the end of the 3rd year, starting in the June session. The aim was then to increase the weight of the final exams in the final grade and, above all, to make “direct access to high school” conditional on obtaining the brevet, with students who failed having to go through a “preparatory-secondary” class.
A contested project
On the compulsory brevet for moving up to the second year, the most controversial point, the decree is “frozen at this stage” and “the next government will decide what to do”, said the resigning Minister of Education Nicole Belloubet during her back-to-school press conference at the end of August. On the methods of evaluating the brevet, she assured that the texts had “had to be postponed” due to the political context, but as soon as “current affairs” are over, “we should be able to ensure their publication so that they can come into force for the 2025 brevet”. But “the next Higher Education Council (CSE) will take place on October 10, there will be no changes to the 2025 brevet (new points count and compulsory brevet for moving up to the second year)”, confirmed to AFP Sophie Vénétitay, general secretary of Snes-FSU, the leading union for middle and high schools.
Elisabeth Allain-Moreno, general secretary of SE-Unsa, welcomed this abandonment. “We told Nicole Belloubet that this project on the brevet had to be withdrawn because the school year had already started for 3rd year students,” she said. “The brevet may possibly change (in the years to come), but not at the last minute and not without consulting the staff concerned,” she added.
With this draft reform of the brevet, the share of end-of-year exams in the final verdict was to increase from 50 to 60% and all third-year disciplines were to be taken into account for the 40% of continuous assessment, in the form of an “average of averages”. A system that is slightly different from the current system where, in addition to the exams, obtaining the brevet is linked to mastery of a “common core” of knowledge and skills, acquired throughout cycle 4 (5th, 4th, 3rd). Some 718,800 middle school students were admitted to the brevet in 2024, representing a success rate of 85.6%, down 3.5 points compared to the previous year.