Watching the enthusiastic Tom and Lilian, CP students at the Albert-Camus school in La Machine in the Nièvre, show her their scribbled exercise sheets, maybe she forgot, if only a few instants, the dispute around the pension reform. The objective for Elisabeth Borne, during her trip to the rural school on Friday March 31 – the first since the start of the social movement – was to project herself into the future.
The Prime Minister has been working for several days on the development of her new government program, of which education is one of the three pillars, along with health and ecology. For Elisabeth Borne, if “general answers” must be made on educational issues, such as “ensure all teacher replacements, including short-term ones”, “specific responses are to be built according to the territories”.
The same applies to class closures. The elimination of a thousand posts in primary schools at the start of the 2023 school year undertaken with the demographic decline – France will lose 500,000 pupils during the five-year term – makes the question even more eruptive this year. According to a count by the main primary school union, the SNUipp-FSU, more than 2,200 classes will close at the start of the school year, around 1,500 according to the Minister of Education Pap Ndiaye. A situation which takes on particular relief in rural areas with small schools in danger.
“A school map of incredible violence”
So, Elisabeth Borne says she wants “change method” for these territories. “We must be able to anticipate and provide more transparency on the evolution of the school map”, judges the Prime Minister. She wants to give “a three-year vision of class closures”considering that one can establish forecasts according to the number of births.
A way to bring “concrete response” as requested by the President of the Republic. Thursday, March 30, the Prime Minister brought together Pap Ndiaye, her minister delegate for vocational education, Carole Grandjean, and a dozen parliamentarians from the majority for a “work meeting on the obstacles to education”. The latter told him, among other things, of the need to work more closely with local elected officials.
Class closures crystallize, it is true, tensions both with teachers and parents and with communities. Fabien Bazin, president of the departmental council of Nièvre, wrote to Pap Ndiaye before this trip. Proposing that his department become “a rural school laboratory”he denounces in this letter “a school card of incredible violence” with some “removals of posts and hours” which are “so many attacks on our Republic”.
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