2023-07-07 13:00:12
The Minister of Education and Youth, Pap Ndiaye, in Matignon, June 30, 2023. GEOFFROY VAN DER HASSELT / AFP
At what point in their university career should future teachers be recruited? This question, which may seem settled since 2011 – to teach, you need a master’s degree – is in fact still under debate. At the end of June, in the columns of Monde, Pap Ndiaye proposed to position the competition for the recruitment of school teachers at the end of the license, whereas it is today at the end of the master 2, like the capes and the aggregation. This would be the competition’s fourth trip in fifteen years.
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With this project, the Minister of National Education aims to mechanically expand the recruitment pool at a time when the profession is going through a serious crisis of attractiveness. Bachelor’s students are on the one hand more numerous, and on the other hand more inclined, it is thought, to engage in a master’s degree that is somehow “secure”, since they would already be winners of the competition. The minister assured that there was no question of going back on the master’s degree: the students would always need a master’s degree to teach.
“Each reform raising the level of entry into the profession has caused a period of recruitment crisis, recalls the former rector Alain Boissinot. There is a waltz-hesitation on this subject, including for budgetary reasons: lowering the level of the competition makes it possible to save on a cohort of teachers who are no longer obliged to pay. »
A slump in applications
The master’s degree, in 2011, thus generated a collapse in applications, by diverting some of the most modest students from teaching, faced with the uncertain prospect of two additional years of study. In 2013, the competition was moved from master 2 to master 1, then postponed to the end of master 2 in 2019. A decision that national education paid dearly, since the number of candidates was almost halved in the recruitment competition teachers in schools and capes between 2021 and 2022, the year the measure comes into force, forcing the ministry to hire more than 5,000 additional contract workers at the start of the 2022 school year.
Voices have since come together to highlight the chronic instability of the teacher recruitment and training system. In February, the Court of Auditors issued a severe report on the subject. It recommended a better articulation of the path to access the profession of school teacher, in particular by opening specialized licenses, to improve the readability of the system from L1 to M2.
For its part, the High Council for Programs proposed scenarios for overhauling the recruitment system, in an opinion issued in March. He also pointed out the importance of the continuity of the course from the bachelor’s degree to the master’s degree. “Shifting the competition to the end of the license means that we finally accept that teacher training takes five years, three years before the competition and two years after”, notes Mark Sherringham, its president. The displacement of the competition will indeed have an impact on the content of the licenses which allow access to it, the university aligning itself with the new system by opening specific programs.
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