From year to year, disaffection for the profession of teacher is confirmed. However, many are hanging on. In the “world”, they explain their motivations, whether social, academic or simply at the service of children.
by Violaine Morin and Sylvie Lecherbonnier
The figures are eloquent: at the end of an extended registration period to allow latecomers to make themselves known, the teaching competitions recorded a dizzying drop in the number of candidates over two years: – 38 % in the 2023 school teacher competition compared to 2021; – 21 % in the external competition of the CAPES, compared to 2021. The precariousness of the profession, with the increased use of contract workers, also hit the headlines at the start of the school year, as well as the structural problems of purchasing power, to which government has promised to tackle by upgrading the treatments – while excluding, a priori, the most experienced teachers.
Despite an increasingly palpable “teacher discomfort”, most teachers choose to remain so, including after several decades in the profession. How to keep the course in a degraded system, with poorly brilliant wage prospects and a feeling of recognition at half mast? MO12345LEMONDE has chosen to ask teachers of all ages the question, at all levels of schooling.
From kindergarten to high school, there is a visceral belief in the school’s mission, a very deep attachment to youth, but also multiple individual strategies to “hold”. And in particular a commitment that goes far beyond the hours due: whether it is purely educational, social, associative, even union, it allows teachers that we have interviewed to keep the feeling of “having an impact”.
“Small daily victories”
When we question the teachers about their commitment and what makes it last, the most striking is to feel how much they hold to their students. “Recognition can only come from them, from the exchange with them and from our small daily victories,” says Rachid Biba, 44, who teaches road driving in a professional high school in Loire-Atlantique since 2006 and represents The Snetaa-Fo union in its academy.
In an institution where some find that nothing is going round, there will always be children and young people, their questions, their liveliness and their enthusiasm, sometimes, before the content taught. “Contact with youth gives the impression of aging slower than the others!” Had Lucie Bons, a 48-year-old French teacher responsible for a class for allophone students without prior schooling (UPE2A-NSA) at the within a vocational high school. Lucie Bonnes turned to this device, which welcomes a majority of isolated minors, because she felt like “no longer advance” her students in the professional sector. “When you have in front of you big teenagers who progress very quickly in French and are still, for their age, completely amazed by the content of the course, it is very rewarding,” she says.
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