Education Major Trends and Developments in France

Major Trends and Developments

The last few decades have seen huge changes in the number of pupils and students in the French education system. In the 1960s the sudden opening-up of access to secondary education for all children led to a veritable explosion of the numbers of pupils in collèges. In 1985, the announcement of the goal of 80% of young people obtaining the baccalauréat (a vocational baccalauréat was introduced that year) by the end of the century, reaffirmed in the Outline Act of July 1989, led to a second influx of pupils. The lycées and then higher education were becoming accessible to the great majority of young people.

Today, around 70% of young people complete their secondary education in schools run by the National Education system, in agricultural lycées or through apprenticeships. This percentage has virtually doubled in 15 years, rising particularly in the case of those taking technological and vocational courses. In 2000, out of those leaving school with the baccalauréat, 30% had a technological baccalauréat (4), 18% a vocational baccalauréat and 52% a "general series" baccalauréat (5).

The 1989 Outline Act also included another major goal by laying down the principle that "before leaving the education system and regardless of their level of achievement, all young people must be offered vocational training". This became a reality with the Five-Year Act of December 1993 providing employment and vocational training.

Annual statistics on the number of young people completing their studies, together with a breakdown of these by level of education attained, show the scale of the progress. The proportion of youngsters leaving school without any recognized qualifications (i.e. without having at least reached the final year of a short vocational training course) fell from around a third in the 1960s to under 10% in the 1990s.

After ten years of compulsory education, the system must today ensure that everyone acquires not just academic, but also vocational skills, so that not even a small proportion of young people leave school ill-equipped to face adulthood and a working life.

Statistical Improvements in Training

Consequently, the 1990s saw two major developments on the education front in France:

1. The advent of mass education to a higher level, thereby substantially raising the level of training of the younger generations, and so of the whole population. Children entering nursery school today can hope to continue their education for 19 years, i.e. three years more than their own parents. 60% of a year's group now pass their baccalauréat, compared with only 24% a quarter of a century earlier. And in higher education, now undertaken by over half the young people in France, the number of students has risen sevenfold in three decades (from 300,000 to 2.1 million).

2. That first change, the huge rise in the number of students continuing their education beyond the school leaving age, which seems to be stabilizing at a high level, has occurred simultaneously with a significant fall in the birth rate since the mid-1970s, thus resulting in the second major development: a reduction throughout the education system of pupil and student numbers. This had already been the case in nursery and primary education, but is more recent in secondary and higher education.

This reduction in numbers, combined with the maintenance and even increase in educational resources (particularly in the numbers of teachers), has enabled the improvement of school facilities and pupil-teacher ratios. This has been notably the case in nursery and primary schools, which have been enjoying regular reductions in class sizes: currently an average of 26 in nursery schools and 23 in primary schools compared with — respectively — 40 and 30 during the 1960s.

Current Challenges and Testing

The developments on the education front have successively opened the doors of collèges and then lycées to the vast majority of children in France. They have allowed new categories of pupils, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, to reach levels of education and training from which they were formerly excluded. But this democratization is posing a new challenge: to ensure a common education and the same chances of academic success to all young people regardless of their circumstances at home.

These huge increases in the number of successful students must not mask the persistence of a "hard core" of children who fail at school, with the failure often coming to light within the first few years of schooling. Under France's education system, such children have traditionally been "punished" by making them repeat classes and labeling them "slow learners"; so far no way has been found to remedy the situation. These early difficulties were highlighted during a detailed investigation carried out in 1997 with children in the first year of collège: 15% were bad readers and 4% were nearly illiterate. Most of these children will find it difficult to overcome such a handicap. A few years later they will be among the cohorts of young people leaving school without any qualifications, and will still — around the age of 17 or 18 — reveal serious gaps in their education in the tests they take during the day of introduction to defense and the French armed forces (JAPD - Journées d'appel de préparation à la défense (5)).

National tests which assess the progress in French and mathematics of all children in CE2 (8 years) and the first year of collège (11 years) — introduced over ten years ago — are designed precisely to identify pupils struggling in school. To ensure not only genuine equality of access to collèges and lycées, but also an equal chance of achieving success at each level, requires giving more support to children experiencing learning difficulties, so as not to let them "fall by the wayside".

Adaptability To Special Needs

At nursery and primary level, where the emphasis must be on language, the organization of cycles (educational stages covering more than one year) has brought greater flexibility, and allows an accounting to be taken of the different speeds at which children learn. An extra two hours a week is reserved for supplemental tutoring to benefit individual children. Networks of specialists — providing help for pupils with learning difficulties (RASED) — cater to those at greatest risk.

All the children in a given locality attend the same collège, before going their separate ways in lycées. As a result, collèges are faced with the task of providing the same standard of education for all their pupils, while of necessity adapting it to children who may be at very different standards, if only as a result of varying levels of achievement at primary school. The practice of teachers standing up in front of mixed-ability classes giving standard lessons is no longer tenable. Collèges now have the requisite extra resources to allocate at least two hours a week in form 6 to bringing children up to the required level, or to provide children lagging behind with extra supervised tutoring in forms 6 and 5. Teaching methods capable of arousing the pupils' interest and making their studies more meaningful are being used in the new, more diversified and "cross curricula" lessons — addressing the difficulties some children have in coping with a relatively compartmentalized teaching system. Similarly, in lycées, two hours a week of individual tutoring in French and mathematics can be given to pupils who are struggling. The modular courses and personal supervised work (TPE - travaux personnels encadrés) introduced in autumn 2000 in form 1 (penultimate year of lycée) for pupils studying for a "general series" baccalauréat (6) are designed to develop independent learning.

More generally, to help the most disadvantaged children, France has opted for the development within her education system of a policy of positive discrimination, which takes the form of allocating additional funds to schools in so-called "priority education areas" (ZEPs) where a disadvantaged social and cultural environment makes educating the pupils especially difficult — 18% of all primary-school children and 21% of collège pupils attend schools in ZEPs.

Going beyond the basic knowledge necessary for any responsible adult, schools must also prepare young people for a successful working life. A prestigious qualification is still highly sought-after in France. It continues to afford a large degree of protection against unemployment, and is a crucial asset when it comes to quickly finding a stable job and then progressing in a career.

Qualifications: Link to Employment

For twenty years, youngsters leaving school without adequate qualifications have been the hardest hit by the increase in unemployment. In the mid 1990s, the best-qualified young people, relatively spared until then, began to find things significantly more difficult. Since 1998, they have, however, been the first to benefit from the general improvement in the first-job market.

A person's future position in society is in fact — to a fairly large extent — dependent on his/her academic achievements. Five years after the end of their studies, people with degrees are five times more likely to hold an executive or middle-ranking managerial position than those who started work immediately after the baccalauréat. The bulk of the people in top jobs in both the engineering field and the professions hold diplomas from a grande école (prestigious higher education institution with a competitive examination) or have successfully completed a third university cycle (7).

While this is reassuring in that it demonstrates the value accorded to academic qualifications, it is also a matter for concern, since the inequalities often picked up very early on in school — and overcome with difficulty — have a lasting effect on an individual's future working life. The aim of continuing education, vital for what is now known as "life-long learning", was originally to offer a second chance, attenuating or correcting the legacy of an inadequate basic education, but it only very imperfectly fulfills this role. At the same time, the idea is gaining ground that experience in a trade is as valid as qualifications obtained at school or in higher education. But the procedures for validating vocational achievements — brought about by the 1985 and 1993 Acts — still face serious obstacles. In 1998, only 12,000 people managed to validate the achievements of their experience, principally in university education. Today, a Bill on Social Modernization envisions an augmentation of the present system so as to offer a genuine second chance to those whose limited skillsets were not detected at school.

Footnotes:

(1) In the French system, forms are numbered from 12 (first year of primary school) to 1, followed by terminale, with the collège beginning in form 6, approximately 11 years of age.

(2) Teachers who are aggregés hold the highest level of professional teaching qualifications, achieved through success in a competitive aggrégation examination.

(3) The New School Year Allowance is means-tested and paid once a year to compensate for the expenses incurred at the start of a new school year.

(4) A technological baccalauréat involves science and tertiary or industrial or laboratory technologies, or medical and social sciences.

(5) A general series baccalauréat involves literature (arts-based), or economics and social sciences, or science.

(6) Military service has now been suspended in France and replaced by the JAPD. All young people, both male and female, have to register and attend this day when France's defense is explained to them.

(7) In France, higher education studies are organized in cycles, as at primary and secondary levels. The first theoretically lasts two years and leads to a DEUG, which is comparable to a Diploma in Higher Education in the UK (Associate's Degree in the U.S.). The second (also two years) leads first — after one year — to the equivalent of a bachelor's degree and then — after a further year — to the equivalent of a higher or master's degree. The third, open only to selected postgraduate students, leads to even higher qualifications and can pave the way to obtaining a PhD.