During a trip to a school in Paris, Emmanuel Macron announced that the “competition” that allows one to become a teacher “will be taken at the end of the license”, i.e. at the bac+3 instead of the bac+5 currently. The change, which will come into force from “next year”, to try to solve the teacher recruitment crisis.
At the end of the license, “you will take a competitive exam for admission to a master’s degree, which will be more professional,” said the President of the Republic. “With the beginning of working with students, obviously under supervision, the trainee system”, he continued, indicating that these future teachers will benefit from “remuneration” after their master’s degree.
The Head of State echoes the thinking initiated by former Minister of National Education Pap Ndiaye. Since then, the executive power has repeatedly presented the hypothesis of the return of the bac+3 competition for future teachers. Papa Ndiaye’s successor, Gabriel Attal, during his short tenure at the ministry, launched a consultation with trade unions last September on the attractiveness of the teaching profession, highlighting three themes: initial teacher training, working conditions and career development.
Licenses for preparation for teaching at school
Preparatory licenses for school teaching will also be opened, with “French, mathematics, geography, history” and also with “the most innovative methods”, announced Emmanuel Macron. The head of state, who has made the school his “reserved domain”, imagines this License as a kind of “integrated preparation” which, at the end of the three-year study, should lead to a competition before the “professionalizing” master’s degree.
Emmanuel Macron praised the “normal schools of the 21st century”. In the 19th and until the end of the 20th century, elementary normal schools were responsible for the training of teachers before their integration into larger university structures.
He did not provide details on the cost of this reform to public finances, while Bercy promised in recent weeks to tighten the screws on spending.
More than 3,000 jobs were unfilled last year
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.
National education has been facing an unprecedented recruitment crisis for several years. The start of the school year in September 2023 was once again under pressure with more than 3,100 vacancies in the spring 2023 teaching vacancies.
“Counterproductive” reform?
Emmanuel Macron wants to better train teachers. “Today, the teachers you don’t hire are contract workers you have to hire to put in front of the class. So the long-term goal, once this system is in place, is to train much better, also plan what the nation needs and therefore hire as soon as possible after graduation and therefore, to be able to employ fewer contract workers,” developed the tenant of Elizaje.
But Guislaine David, general secretary of FSU-SNUipp, the first primary school union, called the reform “counterproductive”. “We fear that this is formatting, not training, formatting on the basics – mathematics and French – when what is important in teaching is understanding the mechanism of student learning. Learning to count on students requires skills,” analyzed the trade unionist for AFP. With this “specific permit”, “we risk being cut off from a significant number of applicants”, she fears, even if the bridges will allow students from other sectors to also participate in the competition for teachers.