The executive wanted two additional hours of sport per week to be offered to willing college students. This measure did not hold and will be tightened up to priority education networks (REP and REP+).
Barely a few months after the end of the Olympic Games, which gave the French a love of sport again, the executive made an about-face. Emmanuel Macron had promised that all middle school students in France would be offered two more hours of sport per week, on a voluntary basis, with the aim of “preparing the champions of tomorrow”. But this measure was abandoned after two years of testing. All is not lost for the priority education networks (REP and REP+), which are the only ones affected by this measure. While 7,000 colleges were to benefit, it is in barely more than 1,000 that these two additional hours will be offered. This system will be “refocused only on priority education establishments”, we learn from a circular from National Education, reported by BFMTV.
Financial reasons for this change of mind
What seemed like a good idea was abandoned for mainly financial reasons. First of all, the students who volunteered for these two additional hours were mostly already dismissed from a sports club. The measure will therefore focus on colleges classified as REP and REP+, where the number of sports licensees is the lowest. A good way for the ministry to save money, even though it was recognized in the circular that “the generalization” of this system “to all 7,000 colleges does not appear sustainable”.
The government justifies itself
But this about-face is not to everyone's taste, and certainly not to athletes. Among those who raised their voices was swimmer Léon Marchand, who had made France proud during the Olympic Games with his four gold medals. The swimmer simply retweeted this information given by the newspaper L'Équipe, with a clown emoji. A message of childish simplicity but which pushed the Minister of National Education, Anne Genetet, to justify herself: “We are not abandoning this ambition, on the contrary: we are adapting it to make it more effective . Fairer”, she tries to explain, adding that “sports practice at school is now reinforced and targeted at priority education establishments, where students practice the least sport due to lack of resources” .
The Minister of Sports, Gil Avérous, also reacted to this clown emoji. Traveling to Toulouse on Friday, November 15, he assured the press that “the State is not canceling the two hours in colleges” but “there is a refocusing of the system today.” He then added that “this experiment was sometimes very unequal depending on the establishments because we did not necessarily have the necessary resources to approach the clubs, other times because the young people themselves were not interested It's not obligatory, it's extracurricular time.
