the great dismay at the shortage of teachers in middle and high schools

The figure is edifying: during the first six weeks of the school year, students in a second grade class in the Paris region only had eight days without any absent teachers. “Today we only had an hour of lessons”illustrates Nawel, one of them, confronted since the start of the school year with 27 teacher absences. It's 11 a.m. and his day is already over, his afternoon classes cannot be held.

For two months, a team from France Télévisions followed the daily life of several middle and high schools of the Créteil academy, the second largest in France, which includes the departments of Seine-et-Marne, Seine-Saint- Denis and Val-de-Marne.

From September, at Charles De Gaulle high school, in Seine-et-Marne, the principal counts the hours he misses. The list is already long: “Three days before the start of the school year, I discovered that in philosophy, a professor appointed in June no longer appears”he explains. “It’s not me who’s being put in trouble, it’s the students”deplores the latter.

In the rectorate premises, the crisis unit that principals can call in the event of an absent teacher must find dozens of replacements every day for establishments that lack them. Most are contract workers, who compensate for shortages in certain materials.

France lacks teachers. In recent years, the vocations crisis has become more serious: in 2023, of the 23,800 open positions, 3,100 positions (i.e. 13%) found themselves unfilled. Despite some recent increases, salaries are not considered attractive enough: 1,842 euros net for starting teachers, or 1.3 times the minimum wage, whereas in the 1980s, teachers earned more than twice the minimum wage.

Watch the full report in the video above.

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