“A student who enters 6th grade without knowing how to read or count is almost abuse,” said Gabriel Attal. The Minister of National Education affirmed on Wednesday that “we must review” the “question of the taboo of repeating a year” and promised to “take decisions” on this subject, which he will announce at the beginning of December.
Gabriel Attal plans to make a series of announcements on December 5 “to raise the general level” of students, particularly in middle school where his proposal for “level groups” in maths and French is causing debate. “How do you want to learn history and geography if you can’t read? Physics-chemistry without knowing how to count? », insisted the minister. “We have to make decisions.” “I will take responsibility for them,” he added, giving “an appointment at the beginning of December” to find out the details.
The controversial issue of grade repetition
Repeating a year, of which France has long been the champion, has never been banned in the country but simply made exceptional in 2014 by a decree from Minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem. Then Jean-Michel Blanquer decided, upon his arrival at the Ministry of National Education in 2017, to modify the rules so that “repetition remains possible when it is in the interest of the student, and in cases which must remain rare.
For Guislaine David, general secretary of FSU-SNUipp, the main primary school union, “thinking that repeating a year can be beneficial for a child is a belief because no study demonstrates this. We must therefore stop making counter declarations,” she asserted. “Talking about level groups and repeating a year is a conservative way of seeing school and it is not ours because all of this is based on a form of sorting of students,” regrets Jérôme Fournier, national secretary of SE-Unsa.
Sophie Vénétitay, general secretary of Snes-FSU, the main secondary education union (middle and high schools) also believes that this can create a “two-speed school” with “the good ones on one side and the less good ones on the other” . But, she concedes, repeating a year “can be a solution in certain cases” in middle and high school.