State Control and Policies

France has a strong, centralized, republican tradition — having built and consolidated her identity through a school system tasked with educating her future citizens. Consequently, her education system is very largely the responsibility of the State.

Central government thus retains fundamental powers when it comes to defining and implementing education policy and national education curricula. It is responsible for the recruitment, training and salaries of teachers, most of whom are civil servants trained at university-level schools of education, the Instituts universitaires de formation des maîtres (IUFM). Established in 1991, these train future primary and secondary school teachers, including those of the latter who are aggrégés (2), who, when fully trained, will all have completed five years of post-baccalauréat study.

Since 1808, the baccalauréat has been the symbolic national diploma, both crowning the successful completion of secondary education and providing a passport for entry into higher education. From the beginning of the twentieth century, France has also been developing State vocational education by "scholarizing apprenticeships", i.e. establishing vocational qualifications which can be attained at school: the CAP and the BEP (brevet d'enseignement professionnel, which sanctions the completion of adequate training within a range of technical skills required in a particular trade, industrial, commercial, administrative or social field).

The State continues to provide about two thirds of the total funding (FF 600 billion) for the education system, principally because it pays the teachers, but it also disburses various forms of financial assistance, such as scholarships, New School Year Allowances (3), etc.

Increased Regionalization

However, for over ten years now, France has been engaged in a process of decentralization. In the education sphere, this has brought greater diversity and more flexible organization to what was once a too uniform — or even monolithic — educational system.Greater power is now given to regional and other local authorities placed under the authority of the National Education Minister. No longer are issues decided only in Paris or by ministerial private offices. Each year, the recteurs d'académie (cf. Chief Education Officers in UK or Commissioners of Education in the U.S.), responsible for schools in each of the 30 education areas (académies), receive from Paris a single sum of money for each item of expenditure, which they themselves allocate to the various educational establishments. Since 1999, decentralization of the management of teachers' careers has given the recteurs the new and important responsibility of assigning new teaching posts and promoting and moving teachers between schools within their académie.

At the local level, this has also given those on the ground — and particularly school head teachers — greater freedom and room to maneuver. Collèges and lycées, but not primary schools, have become local public education establishments (EPLE - établissements publics locaux d'enseignement) which are legal entities enjoying financial autonomy. They have also gradually acquired greater educational autonomy in that each school draws up an "establishment project" setting out how it is implementing the national objectives and curricula; this enables them to match their courses more closely to the children in their school and so better address their specific needs.

The 1982 and 1983 Decentralization Acts also significantly increased the role of the elected local authorities, i.e. regional, departmental and communal assemblies which have substantial budgets of their own. Today they fund about 20% of the total cost of education.

Each tier of local authority is responsible for one level of education. Communes are responsible for primary- and nursery-school building, equipment and maintenance, and paying the non-teaching staff. Departments are responsible for building, equipping and maintaining collèges, and financing the school transport system. The regions have these same responsibilities for the lycées and contribute to education planning (regional training plan, forward investment program).

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.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 576