After a year of hesitations and drama about whether communes and schools would implement key a reform on the length of the school day, this week the moment of truth will dawn. But not everywhere. As France's nursery and primary schools return from their summer break on Tuesday September 3rd only a fifth of them – 20% - and fewer than a quarter of pupils, 22.3%, will actually be affected by the changes. Local councils who run the remaining schools have taken advantage of a government concession allowing them to delay bringing in the changes until next year.
The reform introduced by education minister Vincent Peillon broadly follows recommendations made by a committee of experts that in turn followed a public consultation on the length of the school day for younger children. The government decree reduces the length of the school day to a maximum of five hours and thirty minutes of classes, which involves moving from the current four-day week to a four-and-a-half day week. This means primary and nursery schools will now open their doors on Wednesday mornings. The changes also stipulate a lunch break of a minimum of one-and-a-half hours.
A key change is that the schools concerned will now offer some form of after-school care to fill the crucial gap between the end of the shortened school day and the normal 'home time' of 4.30pm when mums, dads or grandparents collect their children. Vincent Peillon has described the changes as a “gentle revolution”. He said last week: “For the first time France is going to be offering free extracurricular activities for all pupils.”
Enlargement : Illustration 1
However, that might not prove to be entirely true. For though the government decree has laid out the broad guidelines for the number of hours that younger children can be taught per day, exactly how the new school day is to be organised has been left to the local authorities who run schools. This has led to a variety of different solutions being adopted around the country and raised a number of problems – especially on the nature of extracurricular activities and the thorny question of who should pay for them. In some areas, for example, parents will be asked to contribute towards the cost of those activities.
According to the trade union for primary school teachers, the Syndicat national unitaire des instituteurs, professeurs des écoles et PEGC (SNUipp), 43% of those schools that are adopting the changes this year have chosen to end classes at 3.45pm on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, and at 11.30am on the new half-day on Wednesdays. This approach is not too complicated to bring in, but the drawback is that it only leaves an additional free time of 45 minutes before the usual home time of 4.30pm. This does not give much scope for high-quality extracurricular activity. This approach has been adopted by many small communes – who have low budgets and thus cannot afford to lay on many extra activities – plus a few larger towns such as Nantes in west France.
Meanwhile 13% of schools will have slightly longer mornings than the previous group – three hours and fifteen minutes – and slightly shorter afternoons of two hours, leaving a little more time after classes for after-school activity.
The SNUipp survey shows that a further 10% of schools – those in Paris plus some small towns – have chosen a rather different model: two days comprising of six hours of classes (and thus breaking the decree's stipulations!) plus two days with only one hour and thirty minutes of lessons in the afternoon, followed by an hour and thirty minutes of extracurricular activities. This approach has mostly been adopted in those areas with an existing strong network of cultural and other associations that allows the authorities to organise varied after-school events.
In another 5% of schools the authorities have opted for lengthening pupils' mornings considerably, to three hours and thirty minutes of lessons, so that afternoon classes last just an hour and forty-five minutes.
Finally, around 29% of schools are using such varied approaches that it is impossible to group them into one category. An example are schools in Génops in the Hautes-Pyrénées département – broadly equivalent to a county – in south west France where classes will not start until 9am (rather than the usual 8.30am). Others will have two-and-a-half hour lunch breaks.
Charter on secularism
In certain towns and cities, for example Paris, extracurricular activities are already very well developed and so the reforms correspond to an existing and growing trend in that direction. But other areas are having to lay on a new service offering after-school activities. Sport, theatre, circus, music, cultural tours...the range of activities on offer is large but very variable from one local authority to another. According to the SNUipp union, some local authorities are simply offering child-minding facilities.
“We can see some real inequalities in the provision of extracurricular activity in terms of content, the supervision of pupils and in the cost for families,” said the union's secretary general Sébastien Sihr. On the question of supervision there are, once again, many different solutions on offer around the country. According to local authorities and schools, those supervising pupils in the additional extracurricular activities will essentially be child care workers, teachers on overtime or pensioners working as volunteers. In nursery schools it will typically be the specialist nursery workers known as agents territoriaux spécialisés des écoles maternelles (ATSEM), so from the point of view of the children little will change.
Another key issue is the cost of the activities and the supervision – and who pays for them. While the education minister promises that the new proposed activities will be free for families, the villages and towns who have to finance them are not all abiding by this. Some authorities are proposing a modest payment of 50 cents to 1.50 euros a day according to the parents' 'family quotient' (known as the 'quotient familial' in French, it is the basis for working out how much income tax a French household should pay). For some families this could nonetheless be a financial deterrent. Other authorities have put in place monthly or annual payments. At Dompierre in the Charente-Maritime département in western France, for example, higher-earning families will be paying 30 euros a month. “The minister made the provision of extracurricular activities the showcase of this reform,” said Sébastien Sihrs. “Today it is its Achilles' heel.”
But the reform in the length of the day for nursery and primary schools is only one of the changes taking place in this new academic year. A key difference this term is that there will be 6,700 new teachers, 3,350 in primary education, which has been the initial focus of Peillon's reforms, and a similar number in secondary schools. Though there remains a long way to go to meet President François Hollande's campaign promise of 60,000 new teaching posts during his five-year term, the creation of these new positions contrasts strongly with the recent past. Peillon points out that in the last few years 15,000 posts have been lost each academic year. There will also be a total of 28,000 new teaching assistants and carers in schools, 10,000 of them working in secondary schools and 8,000 working with disabled pupils.
Another development this year is the establishment of 30 teacher training colleges known as Écoles du professorat et de l’éducation (ESPE). The new education law also puts great emphasis on the digital world, both as a subject in itself and as a medium for teaching. Some 30,000 pupils in education priority areas - essentially deprived areas - will get individual tutoring with the help of computers and the internet.
Finally, by the end of September every school will receive a copy of a new 'secular charter' to underline to pupils the secular nature of French schools and society in general. The content of the charter will be known by the middle of the month. “It is important that everyone understands what secularism means,” said Vincent Peillon, who in 2015 is also introducing an hour-long lesson in “secular morality” for pupils at primary schools (pupils aged 6 to 11) and collèges (11 to 15). Some teachers, though, are unsure exactly what the value of the charter will be without classroom time or teaching aids. “A charter's great, but how do you bring it alive?” asked Sébastien Sihr. “If it's just for sticking on a wall...”
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English version by Michael Streeter