The Secretary of State for Youth, Sarah El Haïry, announced Thursday, June 15 that the universal national service (SNU) will be integrated into school time from March 2024, with a twelve-day internship for voluntary second class students. .
“There will be no obligation, much like a school trip. This stay will cost nothing to the establishments or the parents. This new modality will coexist with the cohesion stays chosen individually by the young people during their holidays ”, detailed in an interview with Figaro Sarah El Haïry.
This formula “will allow second-year students, from voluntary high schools, to carry out the twelve-day cohesion stay – first stage of the SNU – during school time, as part of a class educational project”, continued Sarah El Haïry, indicating that these stays will begin “around March 2024”, “in another department than theirs”. These students aged between 15 and 16 “will stay in the same place as the rest of their class, but they will be mixed in households with other young people they do not know”.
“Our goal is to create excitement”
Responding to criticism from unions who point in particular to the loss of lesson hours for the benefit of the SNU, Sarah El Haïry believes that she is proposing “a new modality for a class”, which it would be “a pity to deprive yourself of”. Asked about the “generalization of this device”, the Secretary of State explained that “the debate is open”. “The question of obligation is not a taboo. But our goal is to create excitement, not coercion,” she said.
The SNU, Emmanuel Macron’s promise, was launched in 2019 in a targeted manner, with the aim of eventually making it universal, therefore generalized and compulsory. For the moment, it only concerns young volunteers (32,000 in 2022), and its generalization is encountering strong resistance. The Head of State had promised, in his wishes of December 31, to lay, “in the next few weeks or [the] next few months, the first milestones of a universal national service”.