2023-11-08 07:00:00
Emmanuel Macron, during a visit to the Daniel-Argote college in Orthez (Pyrénées-Atlantiques), with former professional football player Laure Boulleau, September 5, 2023. CAROLINE BLUMBERG / AFP
In France, 14% of school time is devoted to physical education and sports: this is significantly more than in other developed countries (around 7% on average). However, at the age of 11, only 9% of girls and 17% of boys practiced, in 2018, the physical activity recommended (sixty minutes per day) by the World Health Organization, school and extracurricular time combined. . Well below the European average (19% of girls, 26% of boys).
As Paris prepares to host the Olympic and Paralympic Games (JOP), this paradox is of concern. Emmanuel Macron declared the practice of sport “great national cause” for the year 2024, and would like France to become a « nation sportive ». The State is clearly counting on the school to carry out this ambition.
At the start of the 2020 school year, the “30 minutes of daily physical activity” (APQ) program was launched in primary schools, before being generalized in 2022. A second measure has been tested in 700 middle schools since September (around a hundred had already taken the step in 2022), which consists of adding two hours of sport per week, in addition to the compulsory physical and sports education (PE) course. The objective is to enable students “dropouts” sport to (re)discover a physical activity.
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At the Ministry of National Education and Youth, we admit to being faced with difficulties. Primary school teachers say they lack time, training and ideas to carry out the thirty minutes of APQ. The Minister of Sports and JOPs, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, assured, at the beginning of September, that only 10% to 15% of schools have not implemented the half-hour, but this figure is not confirmed by the Primary education sports union, nor by teaching unions.
In the colleges affected by the two additional hours of sports, difficulties of another order arise. Establishments have been invited to form partnerships with sports clubs, but, by definition, the latter welcome children who have entered the club themselves, with their parents. Hanging up non-athletes is a completely different job, for which trained facilitators are lacking. The Ministry of National Education admits that it is currently unable to bring in students who do not already have the desire to practice.
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“In these systems, the pivot should be the teacher”, argues Coralie Benech, general secretary of SNEP-FSU, the PE teachers’ union. For the trade unionist, these initiatives compete with the EPS, which she considers more effective for “embark” all the children. The SNEP-FSU is demanding, contrary to government projects, an increase in the time devoted to the discipline; particularly in 6th grade, where students only have three hours of PE per week.
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