At the beginning of September 2023, a few months before the Olympic and Paralympic Games in Paris, the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, announced his desire to generalize in 2026 to all 7,000 colleges the establishment of two weekly sports hours, in addition to physical education and sports (PE) classes. The time had come to display the ambition of “build a sporting nation” and to assert, through measures of this type, “legacy” that the summer 2024 event was supposed to have to leave behind. A little over a year later, this “ generalization » is presented as “not sustainable”.
This is what the Ministry of National Education and the Ministry of Sports, Youth and Community Life wrote in a circular published on November 7 and addressed to the rectors of academic regions, as well as to academic directors of national education services.
The initial objective, with these two additional hours of sport per week for students who wish it, was to allow “dropouts” sport to (re)discover a physical activity.
The system was implemented at the start of the 2023 school year in 700 colleges, after around a hundred establishments had tested it in 2022. It will now be “refocused on only colleges classified as REP/REP+ [réseaux d’éducation prioritaire]territories where the license rate [sportive] is the weakest ».
A system “perceived as complex to implement”
Even if the ministries of national education and sports assure that “the results of the first two years of experimentation (…) demonstrated the relevance of the measure »its deployment remained limited.
“Only 7,500 middle school students benefited from it during the 2023-2024 school year”notes the deputy (Libertés, independents, overseas and territories group) of Calvados Joël Bruneau in his report for opinion on the credits of the sports mission, written as part of the examination of the finance bill for 2025.
“The system is still perceived as complex to implement”agree the ministries of national education and sport. Hence, in part, the decision not to generalize and to refocus.
From the fall of 2023, it appeared that, in the colleges concerned, invited to form partnerships with sports clubs, it was difficult to attract students far removed from sports practice: the vast majority of volunteers registered in these two hours already had a sporting activity outside of school.
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