A new version of the decree relating to the organization of teaching in college classes, published in Official newspaper on the night of Saturday March 16 to Sunday March 17, clarifies the executive’s strategy after several weeks of uncertainty on the extent of the so-called “level groups” reform, desired by Prime Minister Gabriel Attal since his visit to the of Grenelle but qualified on several occasions by the current Minister of Education, Nicole Belloubet.
The text formalizes the timetable announced by the government: in French and mathematics, classes can be divided into groups formed according to the skills of the students in 6e and in 5e from the start of the 2024 school year, then in 4e and in 3e at the start of the 2025 school year.
Classes will be able to leave this group system and be grouped together for these lessons for a period ranging from“one to ten weeks in the year”, also says the decree. This point was the subject of a divergence of views between Mr. Attal and Mr.me Belloubet, the latter having said on several occasions that it was in favor of a “great flexibility” be left to the management of establishments.
The groups will therefore be there ” ruler ” and whole class groupings” exception “, as the Prime Minister decided during an interview with Agence France-Press on Wednesday. A large part of the educational community is opposed to this measure, considering, like many studies, that grouping by groups is only beneficial for occasional teaching sequences – the expression “need groups” is then usually used – and not in the long term – these are “level groups”.
Failing to have been able to put forward her plan for limited group teaching time, Nicole Belloubet seems to have won the vocabulary argument, since the expression “level groups” does not appear in the decree. THE “groups are formed according to the needs of the students”is it written several times in the regulatory text.
“The composition of the groups is re-examined during the school year, particularly during regroupings, in order to take into account the progress and needs of the students”, also details the decree. The upcoming version of this text in a memo published in the Official Bulletin of National Education should provide further details on the modalities of application of the measure.