Macron tackles unfair French school system
SAINT-DENIS: 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 Seine-Saint-Denis, home to the national sports stadium and Charles de Gaulle airport, as well as deep problems of poverty and crime.
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 high-rise tower blocks.
Emmanuel Macron, the 40-yearold 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 Seine-Saint-Denis, to divide their classes into two for children aged six to seven.
Instead of a maximum 24 pupils, there would 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.
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 highpriority zones to a second school year, for pupils aged seven to eight, meaning 5,600 classes will take part.
Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer is yet to unveil any results of the change, but he claims the feedback has been “more than excellent”.
For Macron, who is married to his former school teacher 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.
It also backs up his public commitment to taking on inequalities.
“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’.”
Sylvie Charriere, a ruling party MP elected for Macron’s party in June, said roughly a third of the 11 and 12-year-old children were struggling to read.
“It’s very hard to help them make progress,” she said. “So you need to tackle the problem at its root: and the root is learning how to read which happens in France at age six and seven.” — AFP