“We will open licenses to prepare for teaching at school starting next school year,” Emmanuel Macron announced this Friday, April 5, during a visit to a school in the 9th arrondissement of Paris. “Then we will give direct access to the master’s degree. And we will make our master’s degrees normal schools of the 21st century. The idea is that we will have people who will enroll after graduation, we will immediately train basic learning and then (we will have) very professionalized M1, M2 which will be paid,” continued the head of state.
“The competition will take place at the end of the License”, i.e. at bac+3 instead of bac+5 currently, he stated during a trip to the school in Paris. “We will strengthen it from next year and actually in two or three years we will systematize it.”
According to the President of the Republic, the project of the executive power should enable “to train much better, to prepare better (…), but also to better recognize our compatriots who want to engage in this profession”.
Teacher training, recurring subject
Emmanuel Macron reflects on the thinking initiated by former minister Pap Ndiaye. Since then, the executive power has on several occasions presented the hypothesis of the return of the bac+3 competition for future teachers.
Pope Ndiaye’s successor, Gabriel Attal, during his brief visit to rue de Grenelle, launched last September a consultation with trade unions on the attractiveness of the teaching profession, highlighting three themes: initial teacher education, working conditions and career development.
This subject of teacher training is repeated. With the reform of 2021, competitions have already been moved from the first year of the master’s degree to the second, and in previous years several changes have taken place in this study. “We can clearly see that the system we adopted in recent decades was undoubtedly not the best. Why? Because it actually forced teachers to take courses that were varied and varied five years after graduation,” commented the head of state.
National education has been facing an unprecedented recruitment crisis for several years. The start of the school year in September last year was again under pressure with more than 3,100 unfilled positions in the spring 2023 teaching competition.