There will always be a good reason, a very good reason to close schools. If it is not Covid or the icy weather, then one can point to the fact that there are staff shortages because teaching is no longer an attractive profession or, to take the latest example, blame the current bronchiolitis epidemic among children in the country.
Each time the arguments look sensible enough: in order to avoid further economic hardship to already cash-starved local authorities, why not reduce the heating in classrooms? And to avoid overwhelming a major public service such as the hospital, why not just close another essential service, the school?
Yet the social contract on education is quite clear. Ever since the Jules Ferry law of 1882, reaffirmed over the years by the state's education code, schooling has been obligatory from the ages of three to 16 in France, in the school of one's choice, whether state or private, or even at home (now allowed under a special exemption). “Every child has the right to schooling which, complementing the family's actions, contributes to their education,” the law states.
The obligation is not just one way. The education code states that pupils cannot just go to school when they want. Absences normally need to be justified to the school management, and after several unjustified absences parents can be called in or even subject to an investigation.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
For the last three years, however, the public authorities seem to have acted as if they could excuse themselves from their side of the educational bargain. The precedent was set with the Covid-19 epidemic when from March 2020 schools were closed for several weeks and pupils had to stay at home. After that schools were closed more randomly, depending on the region and the establishment, right up to January 2022. During that period, when “mingling” between classes was banned, the lack of staff was already clearly exposed.
Yet for two years the majority of those involved did their best, aware of the seriousness of the health situation. When possible, parents split their time between school exercise books and home computers, while teachers learnt as they went along how to give online lessons, then to deal with classes with very mixed levels. Even then, though, many children were already giving up.
Covid precedent sets a trend
And, sure enough, what had once been thought of as exceptional gradually became part of family routine. Since then, whenever one, two or three teachers have been off at the same time in a primary school, the headteachers have known that, if they are lucky, they will get just one replacement. And the priority is given to those classes where the regular teacher is off for a long time or those classes with the greatest need, such as year two (first grade in the US) or year six (fifth grade). Sometimes even these replacements will disappear on the same day, called away to deal with another shortage elsewhere.
On such occasions headteachers ask parents to keep their children at home, to avoid overcrowding other classes and harming the learning of all pupils. Then, having responded as best they can to infuriated parents, the headteachers pass the anger on to the regional state education authorities, who are in charge of recruitment.
These education authorities also find themselves harassed by letters from parents and given a hard time by teaching unions who are justifiably worried about the general worsening of conditions for teaching and learning. But despite the complaints, nothing ever changes.
In middle and secondary schools timetables are full of gaps and parents know that it is almost fanciful to hope that a replacement will be found at short notice. The informal - and never written - response of the education authorities is that where a teacher is absent for under a fortnight “we don’t replace them”. In February 2022 Mediapart reported on the impact of these lost teaching hours on a middle school in the département or county of Seine-Saint-Denis adjoining Paris, with pupils losing 15% of classroom time between January and February.
No one is spared. It is true that the schools with the biggest timetable gaps are those situated in the most densely-populated parts of the country, such as the Paris and Hauts-de-France regions in the north and the Bouches-du-Rhône département in the south. But rural départements such as the Creuse or Lozère are also affected. And even in the regions most popular with teachers looking to move, such as Brittany in the west, there is an increasing number of protests from parents fed up with having to work around their schools' staffing issues, for example in the Morbihan and Finistère départements.
Back in 2009 the parents federation FCPE launched a website called 'Ouyapacours' where parents can flag teacher shortages in their schools, and in recent times the number of such reports has taken off. In the last three months alone more than 18,000 absences have been flagged. In a symbolic action in September this year, families, FCPE representatives and their lawyers lodged 127 claims for compensation for each teacher that was not replaced, and they are continuing to collect hundreds of requests for action since the start of the academic year.
“To make a parallel with the world of work, in which working from home was introduced because of the health crisis, we get the impression that once a teacher is absent, it's down to us as parents to take over,” said Nageate Belahcen, a FCPE representative in the Val-de-Marne département south-east of Paris. “They minimise the snowball effect it has and the stress on parents. Are we sending a message to children that school isn't important?”
While the FCPE does not want to “normalise” legal action over absences or increase the number of proceedings in administrative courts, a number of parent groups who feel desperate about the current inertia are considering it. For when faced with staffing alerts the education authorities often finds themselves “robbing Peter to pay Paul”, said Nageate Belahcen. Fatalism is gripping the educational community, with even maternity leave and teacher retirements not being properly planned for.
Latest reason for closures: the energy crisis
The announcement at the start of December that some classes could close in the mornings this winter if there are managed power cuts simply provides yet another illustration of the little interest that the government appears to have in schools. This is despite the reassuring words of the Ministry of Education which says that no more than 10% of schools will be affected at any one time, that there will no more than three or four closures in the coming months, and that there will be a massive publicity campaign about the risk of power cuts aimed at the public.
“Even if it's a half-day here or a half-day there, it's not negligible,” said Guislaine David, spokesperson for the teaching union SNUipp-FSI. “All this comes on top of Covid, of colleagues not being replaced. And when you increase the number of factors leading to closures, that's when inequalities grow bigger.”
In a press release the same union declared: “The seventh most powerful country in the world is thus unable to operate services essential for the life of the country at the same time as the education service and its thousands of primary schools, middle schools and secondary schools.” The FSU also attacked the ministry's communications strategy – which is the same as under the previous education minister Jean-Michel Blanquer – noting that teachers only heard about this latest plan in the media.
The government has made it clear; in case of power cuts gendarme stations, fire stations, police stations and hospitals are considered to be a priority. Not schools. This viewpoint seems to have become adopted in the rest of society too. Since October a bronchiolitis epidemic has caused major tensions in hospital paediatric departments which are under-staffed and face a chronic shortage of beds. One paediatric department at a hospital in Rennes in Brittany, noting the influx of patients into a service that was not big enough to cope, suggested that the only way to stop more infections was to “think about closing the schools right now”.
This approach, which was also debated during the Covid epidemic, is not the consensus view among paediatricians. But it highlights a slippery slope in which it is schools that potentially have to give way when society's other weakened public services buckle or even break faced with the latest crisis.
Parents with disabled children are very familiar with this refrain. At the start of each academic year they have to fight tooth and nail to get their school to uphold its societal promise to provide education for all pupils. Looking at the current scenario these parents might well conclude, perhaps bitterly, that the familiar response from schools of “yes, but...” is being extended across the education system.
Politicians who are most worked up about the basics in learning - starting with past or current ministers - might well mourn falling standards in maths and French, and express their concern about France dropping down the list in the international survey of educational standards known as PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment).
But it is the whole of society that should panic at the fact that we are increasingly telling both parents and children that learning is something that is optional.
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- The original French version of this op-ed article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter