Patrick Hetzel's roadmap closely resembles that of his predecessor at the Ministry of Higher Education and Research, Sylvie Retailleau. Except for one detail: more than putting the work back into practice, the new minister displayed, on Tuesday, November 19, his desire to start from scratch on a certain number of subjects.
Firstly, with the reform of scholarships intended for students in financial difficulty, which will be the subject of a “consultation” in spring 2025, two and a half years after the hundred hearings conducted by Professor Jean-Michel Jolion, charged in October 2022 with leading this project. Since then, the observation has been clear: we must overcome the defects of the current allocation system which excludes a proportion of low-income students due to threshold effects linked to the sometimes minimal change in their parents' income.
Constrained by a 2025 finance bill which did not plan to increase either the allocated amounts or the allocation scales in order to reach more students, Patrick Hetzel justified his choice to overhaul everything: “I work with the current finance law, so the course we must aim for is the start of the 2026 school year.” The spokesperson for the Student Union is surprised: “Nothing justifies a new consultation if the objective is not to hear the demands of student organizations, particularly around an independent income,” warns Eléonore Schmitt.
“Cleaning up” in training
Another project, the regulation of lucrative private higher education, a “label” of which was to be presented by Sylvie Retailleau just before the dissolution of the National Assembly cut short government action. Patrick Hetzel commits to proposing for the 2026 school year “a common base of training quality” while strengthening controls. “We need to clean up”he agreed, referring to the case of 400 to 500 training courses already identified as fraudulent. An “ethics charter” for orientation fairs must also guarantee the public the quality of the training present and limit aggressive commercial practices.
The reform of primary and secondary teacher training, also suspended by the dissolution, is also relaunched on new bases. “With national education, we list all possible scenarios, including on the competition site [pas nécessairement placé en fin de licence, comme le prévoyait le projet précédent]. We don't forbid ourselves anything”, said Patrick Hetzel. In October, Anne Genetet declared that it was “an excellent reform”, that the two ministers “would take care to move forward”, without specifying the terms.
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