Macron seeks to reform unfair school system

President wants to focus efforts on improving early-age literacy to help bust the poverty trap

Used to teaching 24 children or more at a time, Zahia Adnani now spends her days with a group around half that size in her colourful classroom north of Paris where a flagship effort to tackle inequality is under way.

Adnani’s Taos Amrouche school is in the high-immigration Paris suburb of SeineSaint-Denis, home to the national sports stadium and Charles de Gaulle airport, as well as deep problems of poverty, crime and Islamism.

Over decades, governments have launched plan after plan here focused on improving local infrastructure and housing, upgrading living conditions slowly in the area’s ghettos and their highrise tower blocks.

Emmanuel Macron, the 40-year-old centrist president elected last May, wants a change of emphasis: while public investment will continue, he wants to focus efforts on improving early-age literacy to help bust the poverty trap.

When pupils returned to class last September, the government forced schools in high-priority zones, including many areas of SeineSaint-Denis, to divide their classes into two for children aged six to seven.

Instead of a maximum 24 pupils, there should be 12 or less per teacher.

“I’m very positive about it,” Adnani says during a chat in the staffroom of her recently opened school, which stands among new low-rise residential blocks — signs of the investment going into the area.

Around 2,500 classes nationwide are like hers, meaning roughly 30,000 children are benefiting from the special treatment.

The aim is to correct one of the biggest failings of the French public education system: the gap in achievement between children from poor and wealthier backgrounds.

“I don’t feel like I lose children along the way,” Adnani said. “And you can spend more time with those pupils who advance quicker than the others.”

As well as allowing more individualised teaching, smaller classes are easier to control — an advantage in an area like Seine-Saint-Denis where discipline problems are widespread.

From September, the initiative will be expanded in the same high-priority zones to a second school year, for pupils aged seven to eight, meaning 5,600 classes will take part.

Education Minister JeanMichel Blanquer is yet to unveil any results of the change.

For Macron, who is married to his former schoolteacher Brigitte, the reform is about more than just education.

Ten months after his election, it remains his key social policy for deprived areas and a response to critics who see the ex-investment banker as a “president of the rich”, too focused on pro-business reforms. “One thing is unbearable in a society,” Macron said in February. “It’s saying ‘you are from a certain place so you don’t have the same access as the others. You don’t have the same opportunities to succeed’.”