According to the Ministry of National Education, demography, with a fall in the number of pupils, justifies this drop.
by Sylvie Lecherbonnier
Back to school 2023 is already preparing and the equation turns out to be complicated. The 2023 finance bill, declined with the distribution of resources to the academies that the Ministry of National Education has just transmitted, provides that 1,500 teaching positions will be suppressed in public education at the start of the 2023 school year; 500 in private education under contract.
The ministry prefers to count in “teaching means”, which makes it possible to reduce the deletions, taking into account the compensatory reinforcement of trainee teachers. With this more favorable reading grid, public schools, so far spared to allow the duplication of large section, CP and CE1 classes in priority education and the cap at 24 students per class throughout France, will count 667 means of teaching less.
In the second degree, 498 less teaching means are provided in colleges and high schools. In parallel, 100 CPE stations (Main Education Advisor) must, moreover, be created to “improve the school climate” as well as 4,000 equivalents full of supporters of students with disabilities.
The decline in the number of students justifies the deletions of posts for the rue de Grenelle. In view of the reduction in the number of births, national education expects to lose 500,000 students (out of 12 million today) between 2022 and 2027. For the start of the 2023 school year, the ministry provides for 64,000 less students in the Schools (- 50,000 already in 2022) and 800 in colleges and high schools. The schooling, since February 2022, of 20,000 Ukrainian children has been somewhat delayed this drop in staff.
All academies are not housed in the same brand. Those of Lille and Paris, who see their number of students particularly reduced, are more affected. They lose 150 and 155 teaching means respectively in the first degree and 160 and 182 in the second degree.
Edouard Geffray, the Director General of School Education, believes, however, that these reductions are “incommensurate with the demographic decline”: “if we had applied a simple rule of three, 5,000 positions should have been abolished. “
According to ministerial statistics, the framework rate is increasing in the first degree. It must increase to 5.98 teachers per 100 students in 2023, according to forecasts, against 5.46 in 2017. In parallel, the national average of the number of students per primary class decreases, going from 23.2 in 2017 to 21.7 in 2022.
Unions are concerned about these announcements. The SNUIPP-FSU judges that “this school card turns its back on the real issues and needs of the public education service to reduce school inequalities”. For the SE-UNSA, it would be necessary to “take advantage of the demographic decline to meet the needs of students and the public education service”, in particular concerning replacements.
Schools will know more about their endowment in the first months of 2023.