THE French government has outlined a plan that will see a choir in every collège from the rentrée of 2018.
Education minister, Jean-Michel Blanquer, and culture minister, Françoise Nyssen, launched the plan at a school in Paris, saying teaching support would be made available to schools.
Jean-Michel Blanquer said that he wanted to see two hours of choral music a week in collège and the 20 million euros it will cost in the first year will be funded by his education ministry and a smaller proportion will come from the culture department.
It won't be obligatory for students to take part but it is the first time that choral music will be present as part of the curriculum across the 7,000 collèges in France.
The plan for écoles would see support put in place on Wednesdays from the rentrée of 2019.
FOR the rentrée of schools next year the education minister has said mobile phones will be banned at both école and collège levels.
Jean-Michel Blanquer said that for the return to school for the new academic year in 2018, a ban on mobile phones will be in place.
The ages of the children covered by the proposal will take in those from six to eleven years old in école and then up to 15-years-old in collège.
No clear details are currently available on how the ban will work, but it is something that Emmanuel Macron promised during his presidential election campaign.
After decades of planning, a new generation of students and researchers will start their first full academic year in September 2015 at the University of Paris-Saclay, a huge, ambitious project to bring together a group of 19 higher education institutions alongside a business cluster on the outskirts of the French capital. It has been dubbed the French Silicon Valley, writes Jean-Claude Thoenig.
The rationale behind Paris-Saclay is to reach the same size and level of excellence as Harvard, MIT, Oxford and Cambridge. With its higher education institutions already attracting 15% of the potential research budget in France, Paris-Saclay should give birth to Europe’s top multi-disciplinary university, and bring a well-needed boost to France after years of shame caused by poor performance in global university rankings.
Formally incorporated in 2014, the University of Paris-Saclay has federated together two universities, ten grandes écoles (professional schools in engineering, agronomy, telecommunications, life sciences and management), and seven national research institutions – or at least some of their laboratories. All of them were previously autonomous and most of them are prestigious in their own right. They include the university of Paris-Orsay, the École Polytechnique, the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan, the HEC business school, laboratories of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and of the Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique.
There is a great variety in the institutions which are a mix of private, public and non-profit. Some are non-selective public universities that cover a wide set of disciplines, such as the University of Paris-Orsay. While others are highly selective and elite grandes écoles.
Covering the whole scientific spectrum from education and basic research to technology and development, the university is strongly linked to a technological cluster set up in Saclay in 2004. The campus and cluster are set on 7,700 hectares of land and have already attracts giant global firms such as EADS, Siemens, EDF, Thales or Danone, as well as more than 300 small and mid-size firms. The MIT Technology Review already lists Paris-Saclay as one of the eight world innovation clusters.
Merging 19 institutions
While some of its members, such as HEC and the University of Paris Orsay, are already located on or near the Paris-Saclay campus south of Paris, others will move out of Paris within the next three years. How to merge 19 autonomous entities – some of which are historical and have unique identities – is an unusual challenge in academia, business and management.
The first full academic year will start in September 2015, but the campus already hosts 300 research laboratories and 15,000 faculty and doctoral students. Together, its institutions will offer 17 doctoral programmes, eight schools from law and political science to biology and medicine, and 49 masters programmes. Academic publications authored by its 19 member institutions are already referring to Paris-Saclay as the common trademark. It already has 5,700 doctoral students (40% from abroad) and 10,000 masters students. Its faculty, post-docs and doctoral students will publish 8,000 scientific publications a year – expected to increase in the coming years.
The ambitions to build an internationally visible flagship industry cluster and university have been supported at the highest levels, from the president and ministries in charge of higher education and research. Without taking into account indirect costs and subsidies, the state has allocated more than €6 billion for buildings, innovation projects and transportation infrastructure. The university has already collected €2.5 billion in cash from the state to construct new buildings and fund research and education projects, according to my interviews with people closely involved with the project.
Opposition petered out
Although the Paris-Saclay project did not generate loud opposition from either the right or left wing political parties, there has been some resistance to the project since the early 2000s. Local authorities criticised the state for forging ahead with the project without the formal agreement and support of the mayors of the communes of the territory in and around the Saclay plateau. Student unions feared that taxpayer money allocated to the project would only benefit the elite and would hinder the modernisation of all other universities across France.
Some influential alumni from the grandes écoles, such as the Ecole Polytechnique, privately claimed that their alma mater should remain oriented toward selecting and educating top public servants and business leaders, and not become too research-focused or “academic”.
Plans by Japanese architects Sou Fujimoto for the new Learning Centre of the Ecole Polytechnique at Paris-Saclay.準建築人手札網站 Forgemind ArchiMedia, CC BY
Setting up an academic identity and defining an organic blueprint for the university were in no way easy. In my own research and conversations with academics, I’ve heard questions raised as to whether the Paris-Saclay project is just another white elephant, given the hybrid status of the partners and the complexity of the transitional governance merger procedure. The legal status of the University Paris-Saclay is unique in France: it is not formally a university but rather a “COMUE”, a community of universities and higher education research institutions. Under this new framework, it remains unclear how much autonomy the federated institutions will be willing to delegate.
After a slow start in 2008, the building of the new campus has accelerated since the end of 2013. Integrated programmes across the different institutions have been designed to start this autumn. Already, 80% of the masters programmes offered by the various institutions are already under the banner of the University of Paris-Saclay – which will help to make the university more visible on international rankings.
I have also heard evidence that state agencies such as the Commissariat général à l'investissement, a governmental body funding research, wanted to allocate big research grants in 2013-14 to Paris-Saclay itself, rather than to each single institution separately.
Ambiguous beginnings
The new university is headed by a team of academic administrators, some with good experience of running public agencies and laboratories. A board joins the heads of the various member institutions together and an academic council of 220 members, the majority elected by faculty, staff and students, has been granted an advisory role, functioning as an arena to generate academic consensus.
The road to the future is still paved with ambiguity. Some of the institutions favour a fully integrated model while others prefer a looser federal partnership limited to doctoral programmes and graduate education. There are still many challenges to address. There is growing pressure on the smaller grandes écoles, such as the Ecole Centrale de Paris and Supélec that have joined the project to develop their research capacity. It’s also possible “the bandwagon effect” that has given the project momentum could drop off if outside funding decreases.
Engineering, natural sciences and life sciences are at the core of the campus, and it is not strong in humanities and social sciences. As a result, it’s unclear how Paris-Saclay will handle multidisciplinary research projects such as other major clusters and campuses do. The compatibility of the two different cultural worlds – for instance between engineers of the Ecole Polytechnique and academics of the University Paris-Orsay – remains to be seen.
A major test for the new university will be its capacity to increase its attractiveness for international students and faculty in a highly competitive global higher education market.
French teachers went on strike on May 19 to voice their disapproval of two major reforms that have been proposed by Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, the French education minister (pictured above), writes Camille Terrier.
The two reforms are very different: one centres on changes to the history and language curriculum and the other on schools' autonomy to manage the organisation of teaching. Yet both have sparked criticisms from teachers, unions and French intellectuals.
More disturbing is the fact that, among OECD countries, France is one of the countries where a pupil’s social background is one of the strongest predictors of his or her subsequent achievement.
To solve these structural difficulties, in March 2015 Vallaud-Belkacem announced two reforms of lower secondary education, known in France as collège, which takes children from Grade 6 to 9, between 11 and 15-years-old (the numbers of grades descend in France as children progress through school: Grade 6 is called sixieme but Grade 7 is cinquième and Grade 8 is quatrième).
Curriculum changes under scrutiny
The first controversial reform proposed by the French ministry of education is a rewrite of the secondary school curriculum in most subjects that would come into force in September 2016. This project was presented by the Conseil supérieur des programmes, which oversees the French curriculum, on April 13.
A wave of criticism followed, particularly regarding the history curriculum. The reform plans to distinguish between some of the compulsory parts of the curriculum and the content that would be freely chosen by teachers. Some historians and right-wing intellectuals strongly condemned the fact that in Grade 7, the module “Islam: emergence, growth, society and cultures” would become compulsory, while the module on Christianity during the Middle Ages would be discretionary.
Though this fact is correct, most opponents to the reform omit to say that a compulsory module on the emergence of Christianity is taught in Grade 6, as is the module on the emergence of Judaism. Discussions on the first curriculum draft are still ongoing, and teachers have until June 12 to give their opinion.
More autonomy for headteachers
Despite the strong debate generated by the curriculum reforms, it was not the main reason for teachers taking to the streets. The reason given by the teachers' unions for the strike referred to a broader reform affecting the organisation of collèges.
A key element of this part of the reform would consist of giving more autonomy to schools to allocate teaching time. From September 2016, 20% of teaching time would be managed locally by headteachers, who could decide how to allocate time between working in small groups, cross-subject teaching or individualised tutoring sessions.
Unions have waved the flag at giving more power to headteachers to impose their decisions on teachers. At the moment, headteachers decide teachers' timetables – what time each teacher teaches, and in which room – but they have no freedom to affect how the teaching hours are allocated between different activities, which is decided by the ministry of education.
The second key element of the reform is the creation of eight interdisciplinary teaching modules, in Grades 7 to 9. For three hours a week, these modules would aim to teach abstract notions in a more concrete way – for instance a module on sustainable development would cover physics, biology and technology. Such reforms echo those that are ongoing in Finland to give students more time for interdisciplinary learning.
But for teachers, most of who are highly attached to the subject they teach, introducing such modules would be synonymous with fewer hours of fundamental teaching. With students free to choose their own modules from Grade 7 onwards, unions have raised fears of a growing competition between teachers to attract students.
Language changes under fire
The most polemic part of these interdisciplinary modules is related to language education. Latin and Greek languages, judged as too elitist, would be replaced by an interdisciplinary module on the “language and cultures of antiquity” that students could complement with an optional language course.
Most importantly, the reform plans to significantly restrict the possibility of a student learning two languages from Grade 6. Under the current system, a minority of gifted pupils take advantage of this option, although the majority wait until Grade 8 to learn a second language.
Under the new proposals, students will take a second language in Grade 7 in an effort to reduce inequalities between pupils. Most criticisms have been expressed by German teachers fearing that further suppression of bilingual classes in Grade 6 would reduce the pool of students wishing to learn Goethe’s language.
The French education system has long had a reputation for being unreformable – mainly because teachers’ unions negotiate from a strong position to protect teachers' interests. In 2014 for instance, unions managed to postpone a reform aimed at spreading teaching hours more equally over the week in primary schools for a year.
In his defence of the current reforms, French prime minister Manuel Valls emphasised the reforms were aimed at reducing inequality. If students’ unions were powerful enough to balance the lobbying of teachers’ unions, students’ interest might be more considered in reforms.
A French mayor backed by the far-right Front National has been accused of racism after using the names of schoolchildren in his town to decide how many were Muslim.
Under France’s strict secularism laws, the government does not keep statistics on people’s religion or ethnicity.
But Robert Ménard, mayor of Béziers in the south of the country, said his administration had used lists of pupils’ names to decide how many were Muslim, and claimed the figure came to 64.6%.
“Sorry to say this, but the mayor has, class by class, the names of the children,” he said on France 2 television on Tuesday night.
“I know I don’t have the right to do it. Sorry to say it, but the first names tell us their religion. To say otherwise is to deny the evidence,” he added.
Asian nations cemented their top positions in an eagerly awaited report on global education on Tuesday, as their students continued to outshine Western counterparts in maths, science and reading. Shanghai again ranked first in maths, science and reading…
PARIS has come out top as the best city in the world to be a student, beating London into second place.
The QS Best Student Cities list puts the French capital number one, with low tuition fees being a major reason, but also because studying there was so much cheaper than London.
Paris was also recognised for the employability of its graduates and the good quality of life students can enjoy in the city, ensuring it is once again the world's best student city.
FRENCH schools will have to display a 'secular charter' from today (9 September) stressing the principles of the education system.
Education minister Vincent Peillon will require all public schools to display la charte de la laïcité, which explains how the state and religion are separate entities and he said that the poster will instil the “values of the Republic” in the country’s young people.
There are 15 statements featured on the poster, for example, one says that secularism ensures freedom of thought, and that people can believe or not believe, with individuals entitled to the free expression of their beliefs.
And the poster also says that school children can not use religious or political affiliations to challenge teachers when teaching certain parts of the curriculum.
WITH the final week of the summer holidays almost upon us, the Calendrier Scolaire points out the different term times for the coming academic year amongst the different educational zones in France.
There are three distinct geographical zones when it comes to the dates of when classes break up, to try and ensure holiday periods are spread out across France.
The 2013 - 2014 academic year starts on Tuesday 3 September for all school children, with the Toussaint and Christmas holidays being taken by all three zones at the same time, although holidays next year will be staggered.
And if you want there is a useful calendar you can print off showing the school holiday periods over the coming academic year.
THE French education minister, Vincent Peillon, has outlined plans to provide children with education in 'secular morality' or morale laïque.
In a report the minister said that children will have an hour a week in the subject at primaire and collège level, and 18 hours a year at lycée.
The new classes are set to be in place by September 2015 are designed to promote the Republican values of France and ensure there is a clear line between the state and religion.
However, opponents have said see the measures as decisive and question the effectiveness of the lessons, especially as they will not be strictly timetabled and are expected to be incorporated into existing classes.
WITH the final week of the summer holidays almost upon us, the