“At least this year, no one has committed to having a teacher in front of every class when school starts.”says Bruno Bobkiewicz ironically. The general secretary of the SNPDEN-UNSA school principals’ union refers, not without irony, to the promises made by the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, and Gabriel Attal, then Minister of National Education, for the start of the 2023 school year.
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Assigning 850,000 teachers to 12 million students is the biggest challenge for national education at the start of each school year. With the recruitment crisis taking root, it is now a gamble. While the vast majority of primary, middle and high school students will meet their teachers from Monday, September 2, there will undoubtedly be shortages.
Despite a slight improvement compared to the 2023 session, the teacher recruitment competitions left more than 3,000 vacancies for the 2024 school year. These are in addition to the unfilled positions in previous years. According to the Court of Auditors, more than 5,500 teachers were missing between 2017 and 2021. This situation, which varies between academies and disciplines, has worsened since then, particularly after the competitions were moved to the end of the bac + 5 in 2022.
Cautious optimism
Mechanically, the recruitment of contract workers has increased. In public education, there are now 49,000 of them (nearly 7% of the workforce), i.e. 10,000 more than two years ago.
Faced with this observation, the resigning Minister of Education, Nicole Belloubet, displayed cautious optimism on Tuesday, August 27, during her back-to-school press conference. According to her, the rectorates are “very close to reaching 100% coverage of teacher needs” thanks to a “important work of anticipation” for the recruitment of contract workers. Rectorates such as Créteil and Versailles, which have significant needs for non-permanent staff, hire throughout the year and can offer two-year contracts.
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On Friday, August 30, however, when they returned to school, teachers counted the empty chairs in the teachers’ lounge, like this teacher in Dordogne (he did not wish to give his name) who already lists a SVT teacher, a physics-chemistry teacher and a music education teacher who are missing from his college. The job offers for contract teachers still available on the France Travail website are also not going unnoticed. According to the annual performance report for the 2023 school education budget, it now takes on average nearly twenty-nine days for rectorates to fill the approximately 3,000 vacancies noted in middle and high schools at the start of the school year and assign a teacher to them, twice as many as fifteen years ago.
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