All priority education colleges will be open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the start of the September school year, an extension of a measure implemented in 2023 in 200 colleges, Gabriel Attal announced on Friday, December 15, without providing details on this. device. “We are going to go from 200 to 1,100 colleges which will have this system,” declared the Minister of National Education, during a trip to a college in Epinay-sur-Seine (Seine-Saint-Denis) concerned. through experimentation.
In establishments that set up this organization, students are welcomed “before their lessons, after their lessons, with breakfast served to them in the morning”. Support “in homework help, for sporting and cultural activities and for orientation activities” is also offered, he said.
At the start of the school year in September 2024, “600,000 students in France will benefit” from this system, according to the minister, which “unlocks an exceptional envelope of 80 million euros from next year”.
Sophie Vénétitay, general secretary of SNES-FSU, regrets “a form of generalization without assessment, which is quite problematic”. “We never got an answer” about the organization of the 200 colleges which have experimented with the system, she adds: “Are all children welcomed from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.? “, “who intervenes outside of class hours? “, etc.
6,980 colleges, including 731 in REP and 361 in REP
Currently, the opening and closing times of a college or high school are decided by a vote by the establishment’s board of directors. The head of the establishment must then obtain the opinion of the department or region, which takes care of school transport, explained Sophie Vénétitay. “In fact, there are colleges which are already open quite widely,” she added, but “that does not mean that all the students are there from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m..”
France has 6,980 colleges. At the start of the 2022 school year, 731 public colleges were classified in REP (priority education network) and 361 in REP (neighborhoods with major social difficulties), according to ministry figures. Emmanuel Macron announced at the end of June in Marseille that colleges would gradually be open from 8 a.m. to a minimum of 6 p.m. in priority education districts, regretting “the educational inequality” which “is created in these times when the child has been sent home.”