Missions more and more fragmented and too little focused on support for teachers… The Court of Auditors calls on the government to “refocus” the missions of the territorial inspectors of National Education on the pedagogical support of teachers, in a summary published on Tuesday.
Some 3,650 territorial inspectors of the first and second degrees of National Education carry out very diverse missions in France, underlines the Court: evaluation of teachers, participation in the organization of examinations and competitions, promotion of major reforms, control of the home instruction, or even administrative and pedagogical management of schools in conjunction with school principals.
A “scattering” in the missions
However “this scattering is carried out to the detriment of their primary mission, which remains the monitoring of teachers and educational support”, deplores the Court in this summary, sent in January to the Minister of National Education Jean-Michel Blanquer.
In addition, the individual evaluation of teachers absorbs about 30% of the activity of inspectors of the first degree and 20 to 30% in the second degree, she notes. This leaves “only a residual place for team meetings around the inspector, for advisory visits, for the support that is nevertheless necessary for teachers entering the profession”.
An “unequal distribution” of resources
The Court, which makes six recommendations, calls in particular for “carrying out a selective review of the missions” of the inspectors, in order to refocus their work “on the educational support of teachers and teaching teams”. She also points to an “uneven distribution of resources in inspectors” between the academies, stressing in particular that the large academies, with very dense areas, are less favored.
In the first public degree, certain departments such as Seine-Saint-Denis, where great academic difficulties and young teachers are concentrated, are thus penalized, she notes, with an average of 307 teachers per inspector in 2020, against 229 in the National level. In the second public degree also, the number of teachers per inspector was established for example in 2020 at 228 in the academy of Versailles, against 137 in the academy of Limoges, she indicates.
Faced with these inequalities, the Court recommends in particular to “define a target number of inspectors for each academy”. It also pleads in favor of a “functional rapprochement of the inspection bodies of the first and second degrees”, which “will make it possible both to strengthen the links between the school and the college, and, within the second degree, between different types of education.