From Orange, Emmanuel Macron considers the situation of vocational high schools “unacceptable”

2023-09-01 16:21:29

Visiting a vocational high school in Orange (Vaucluse) this Friday, Emmanuel Macron estimated on Friday that the situation of vocational high schools was “unacceptable”, but that there was “no fatality” in “keeping the same number of dropouts”. “The situation is unacceptable, because it is at the bottom of the house arrest that I denounced six years ago, of a lot of injustice and family determinism”, affirmed the Head of State in this teachers’ return day.

A reform announced last May

“We know that we have many of our young people who are oriented in professional high school, not always by choice, but because they did not in fact succeed in college and that it is the fruit of a dropout which has started before”, he added, in front of teachers from the Argensol high school and local business leaders who hire young people from this high school. “We had not touched this sector for decades. And I think that, moreover, if it affected many more children of political, media or other officials, we would have done it much earlier, ”he said.

In May, the president presented the reform of the vocational high school in Saintes (Charente-Maritime), one of his campaign promises in 2022. The objective is to strengthen the attractiveness of these sectors, by giving access to more training. qualifying, improve the professional integration of young people and fight against dropping out of school. In particular, it provides for the creation of new measures against dropping out and for the integration of young people, the creation of “business offices” in high schools or the remuneration of high school students during their internships.

“Training after graduation”

Stressing that “we still have many of our courses which either do not lead to a diploma or do not lead to a job”, with on average “40% of our young people who will have a job within six months of their diploma” baccalaureate level, the Head of State affirmed that in this new school year, “there is an unprecedented commitment of the nation for the sectors, the students you serve”. A third of high school students, or approximately 621,000 students, are educated in vocational high schools.

On the sidelines of this trip, Emmanuel Macron announced that the government “will not let anything pass” on the abaya and the qamis, now prohibited in schools in the name of secularism. The president also wants to overhaul access to this profession. “What I asked the minister is to work on training. What we want to do is also a post-baccalaureate training, professionalizing, more visible, which will allow us to better plan our needs, and in a way to return to a system that we knew in the past. , which was working, which is a bit like that of the Normal Schools”, indicated the Head of State.