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15 million students, i.e. a quarter of the population, are in the education system. Just over 2 million are in higher education.

In 1999, France's GDP was close to EUR 1,330 billion, i.e. EUR 22,000 per inhabitant. Of this total, just over EUR 95 billion were devoted to initial or continuing education: 7.2% of GDP. As far as school education spending is concerned, France is in a middle position, behind the Nordic countries (Sweden and Denmark), but significantly ahead of Italy and Japan.

Today, France has a workforce of 26 million, of whom fewer than 2 million are unemployed: the unemployment rate has just fallen to below 9%. 6% of the labour force (about 1.5 million jobs, including 1 million civil servants and local government officers) are undergoing training.

Organization of school education
Division of responsibilities
Regions have increased powers
Major trends and developments
Level of training of young people is increasingly high
Current problems
Quest for an education tailored to individual needs and abilities

Around 13 million pupils attend school in France. The system is a unified one, whose present general structure (primary schools, collèges, lycées) was gradually put in place during the 1960s and 1970s, ending the former, more compartmentalized system based on a clear separation between primary and secondary education.

Since the 1970s, France has also had an outstanding record regarding the development of pre-school education; all 3-5 year olds can attend the nursery classes.

Since 1967, school attendance has been compulsory from ages 6 to 16. France has 60,000 primary schools catering to pupils during their first five years of formal education: the first three years (CP - cours préparatoire - and CEl/CE2 - cours élementaire 1 and 2) provide a grounding in the basic skills. The next stage - CM1/CM2 (cours moyen 1 and 2) carries the children up to the end of primary school.

Secondary schooling is divided into two successive stages, known as cycles. From 11 to 15 years, almost all children now attend a collège, taking them from form 6 (sixième) to form 3 (troisième). (1). Since 1975 there has been a single mixed-ability collège for all pupils regardless of their level of achievement. After form 3, they move onto a general, technical or vocational lycée. These prepare pupils for the corresponding baccalauréat examinations, which they usually take at the age of 18.

Decisions about pupils (repeating years, moving up to a higher class, changing course) are taken through a procedure involving a dialogue between the school (teachers, administrative and ancillary staff) and the families and pupils. Although the teachers give their opinions in what is known as a "class council", formed of representatives of pupils, teachers and parents, parents can appeal against a decision and demand, depending on the pupil's level, that the pupil move up rather than repeat the year, or repeat the year rather than do a course they do not wish their son or daughter to pursue. In every school, there are specialist counselors to help pupils, parents and teachers resolve any problems they encounter.

Form 3, which is the final year at collège, is the first point at which children have a choice regarding some of the subjects they study and the direction they would like their studies to take [although they have to choose a foreign language in form 6 and another in form 4.]

The vast majority of pupils attend schools under the responsibility of the Ministry of National Education. However, around 100,000 (suffering from various disabilities) attend specialized schools run under the aegis of the Ministry of Health and 200,000 go to agricultural lycées (technical and vocational courses). Finally, 300,000 others, aged 16+ undergo apprenticeships (work contract), which, since the 1987 reform, can prepare them for all types of vocational qualification.

Alongside the ordinary school education system, there are also specialist or adapted classes, which are often integrated into primary and secondary schools, such as the CLIS classes - which act as bridges to bring children back into the mainstream system - and the SEGPA - adapted general and vocational education sections designed particularly for children and adolescents having difficulty at school because of psychological, emotional or behavioral problems - but are also found in special schools, especially those under the aegis of the Health Ministry. The aim is to get these children, around 5% of the children in one yearly class, to achieve a minimum skills level: the CAP (certificat d'aptitude professionnel) which sanctions training in a specific vocational skill.

Schools managed under the aegis of the National Education Ministry may be public or private. The private sector educates around 15% of primary school and 20% of secondary school pupils, percentages which have remained stable over the past decade. The bulk of private schools are Catholic schools with contracts with the State (which inter alia pays their staff salaries). Families of the fewer than 50,000 pupils in private schools without such contracts pay high fees.

France has a strong, centralized, republican tradition and has built and consolidated her identity through a school system tasked with educating her future citizens; consequently, her education system is very largely the responsibility of the State. Central government thus retains fundamental powers when it comes to defining and implementing education policy and national education curricula. It is responsible for the recruitment, training and salaries of teachers, most of whom are civil servants trained at university-level schools of education, the Instituts universitaires de formation des maîtres (IUFM). Established in 1991, these train future primary and secondary school teachers, including those of the latter who are aggrégés (2), who, when fully trained, will all have completed five years of post-baccalauréat study. Since 1808, the baccalauréat has been the symbolic national diploma both crowning the successful completion of secondary education and providing a passport for entry into higher education. From the beginning of the twentieth century, France has also been developing State vocational education by "scholarizing apprenticeships", i.e. establishing vocational qualifications which can be attained at school: the CAP and the BEP (brevet d'enseignement professionnel, which sanctions the completion of adequate training within a range of technical skills required in a particular trade, industrial, commercial, administrative or social field).

The State continues to provide about two thirds of the total funding (EUR 91.47 billion) for the education system, principally because it pays the teachers, but it also disburses various forms of financial assistance, such as scholarships, New School Year Allowances (3), etc.

However, for over ten years now, France has been engaged in a process of decentralization. In the education sphere, this has brought greater diversity and more flexible organization to what was a uniform, or even monolithic education system.

Greater power is now given to regional and other local authorities placed under the authority of the National Education Minister. Everything is no longer decided by Paris or ministerial private offices. Each year, the recteurs d'académie [cf. Chief Education Officers in UK or Commissioners of Education in the US], responsible for schools in each of the 30 education areas (académies), receive from Paris a single sum of money for each item of expenditure, which they themselves allocate to the various educational establishments. Since 1999, decentralization of the management of teachers' careers has given the recteurs the new and important responsibility of assigning new teaching posts and promoting and moving teachers between schools within their académie.

At local level, this has also given those on the ground and particularly school head teachers greater freedom and room to manoeuver. Collèges and lycées, but not primary schools, have become local public education establishments (EPLE - établissements publics locaux d’enseignement) which are legal entities enjoying financial autonomy. They have also gradually acquired greater educational autonomy in that each school creates an "establishment project" setting out how it is implementing the national objectives and curricula; this enables them to match their courses more closely to the children in their school and to better address their specific needs.

The 1982 and 1983 Decentralization Acts also significantly increased the role of the elected local authorities, i.e. regional, departmental and communal assemblies which have substantial budgets of their own. Today they fund about 20% of the total cost of education.

Each tier of local authority is responsible for one level of education. Communes are responsible for primary and nursery-school building, equipment and maintenance, and paying the non-teaching staff. Departments are responsible for building, equipping and maintaining collèges, and financing the school transport system. The regions have these same responsibilities for the lycées and contribute to education planning (regional training plan, forward investment programme).

The last few decades have seen huge changes in the number of pupils and students in the French education system. In the 1960s the sudden expansion of access to secondary education to all children led to a veritable "explosion" of the numbers of pupils in collèges. In 1985, the announcement of the goal of 80% of young people obtaining the baccalauréat [a vocational baccalauréat was introduced that year] by the end of the century, reaffirmed in the Outline Act of July 1989, led to a second influx of pupils. The lycées and then higher education were becoming accessible to the great majority of young people.

Today, around 70% of young people complete their secondary education in schools run by the National Education System, in agricultural lycées or through apprenticeships. This percentage has virtually doubled in 15 years, rising particularly in the case of those taking technological and vocational courses. In 2000, out of those leaving school with the baccalauréat, 30% had a technological baccalauréat (4), 18% a vocational baccalauréat and 52% a "general series" baccalauréat (5).

The 1989 Outline Act also included another major goal by laying down the principle that "before leaving the education system and regardless of their level of achievement, all young people must be offered vocational training". This became a reality with the Five-Year Act of December 1993 on working, employment and vocational training.

Annual statistics on the number of young people completing their studies, together with a breakdown of these by level of education attained, show the scale of the progress. The proportion of youngsters leaving school without any recognized qualifications (i.e. without having at least reached the final year of a short vocational training course) fell from around a third in the 1960s to under 10% in the 1990s.

After ten years of compulsory education, the system must today ensure that everyone acquires not just academic, but also vocational skills, so that not even a small proportion of young people leave school clearly ill-equipped to face adulthood and working life.

Consequently, the 1990s therefore saw two major developments on the education front in France:

1. The advent of mass education to a higher level, thereby substantially raising the level of training of the young generations and so of the whole population. Children entering nursery school today can hope to continue their education for 19 years, i.e. three years more than their own parents. 60% of a yearly class now pass their baccalauréat, compared with only 24% a quarter of a century earlier. And in higher education, now undertaken by over half the young people in France, the number of students has risen sevenfold in three decades (from 300,000 to 2.1 million).

2. That first change, the huge rise in the number of students continuing their education beyond the school leaving age, which seems to be stabilizing at a high level, has occurred simultaneously with a significant fall in the birth rate since the mid-1970s, thus resulting in the second major development: a reduction throughout the education system of pupil and student numbers. This had already been the case in nursery and primary education, but is more recent in secondary and higher education.

This reduction in numbers, combined with the maintenance and even increase in educational resources, particularly in the numbers of teachers, pupils and students, has enabled the improvement of school facilities and pupil-teacher ratios. This has been particularly the case in nursery and primary schools, which have been enjoying regular reductions in class sizes: currently an average of 26 in nursery schools and 23 in primary schools compared with, respectively, 40 and 30 in the 1960s.

The developments on the education front have successively opened the doors of collèges and then lycées to the vast majority of children in France. They have allowed new categories of pupils, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, to reach levels of education and training from which they used to be excluded. But this democratization is posing a new challenge: to ensure a common education and the same chances of academic success to all young people regardless of their home circumstances.

These huge increases in the number of successful students must not mask the persistence of children who fail at school, with the failure often coming to light in the first years at school. Under France's education system, such children have traditionally been "punished" by making them repeat classes and labelling them "slow learners", and so far no way has been found to remedy the situation. These early difficulties were highlighted during a detailed investigation carried out in 1997 with children in the first year of collège: 15% were poor readers and 4% were nearly illiterate. Most of these children will find it hard to overcome this handicap. A few years later they will be among the cohorts of young people leaving school without any qualifications and will still, around the age of 17 or 18, reveal serious gaps in their education in the tests they take during the day of introduction to defense and the French armed forces (JAPD - Journées d’appel de préparation à la défense (5)).

The national tests to assess the progress in French and mathematics of all children in CE2 (8 years) and the first year of collège (11 years), introduced over ten years ago, are designed precisely to identify pupils struggling in school. To ensure not only genuine equality of access to collèges and lycées, but also an equal chance of achieving success in them requires giving more support to children experiencing learning difficulties, so as not to let them "fall by the wayside".

At nursery and primary level, where the emphasis must be on language, the organization of cycles (educational stages) covering more than one year has brought greater flexibility and allows account to be taken of the different speeds at which children learn. An extra two hours a week is reserved for extra tutoring for individual children. Networks of specialist help for pupils with learning difficulties (RASED) cater for those at greatest risk.

All the children in a locality attend the same collège, before going their separate ways in lycées. Collèges are therefore faced with the task of providing the same standard of education for all their pupils, while of necessity adapting it to children who may be at very different standards, if only as a result of varying levels of achievement at primary school. The practice of teachers standing up in front of mixed-ability classes giving standard lessons is no longer tenable. Collèges now have the requisite extra resources to allocate at least two hours a week in form 6 to bringing children up to the required level or to provide children lagging behind with extra supervised tuition in forms 6 and 5. Teaching methods capable of arousing the pupils' interest and making their studies more meaningful are being used in the new more diversified and "cross curricula" lessons to address the difficulties some children have in coping with a relatively compartmentalized teaching system. Similarly, in lycées, two hours a week of individual tuition in French and mathematics can be given to pupils who are struggling. The modular courses and personal supervised work (TPE - travaux personnels encadrés) introduced in autumn 2000 in form 1 (penultimate year of lycée) for pupils studying for a "general series" baccalauréat (6) are designed to develop independent learning.

More generally, to help the most disadvantaged children, France has opted for the development within her education system of a policy of positive discrimination, which takes the form of allocating additional funds to schools in so-called "priority education areas" (ZEPs) where a disadvantaged social and cultural environment makes educating the pupils especially difficult - 18% of all primary-school children and 21% of collège pupils attend schools in ZEPs.

Going beyond the basic knowledge necessary for any responsible adult, schools must also prepare young people for a successful working life. A prestigious qualification is still highly sought after in France. It continues to afford a large degree of protection against unemployment and is a crucial asset when it comes to quickly finding a stable job and then progressing in a career.

Links between qualifications and jobs

For twenty years, young people leaving school without qualifications have been the hardest hit by the increase in unemployment. In the mid 1990s, the best qualified young people, relatively spared until then, began to find things significantly more difficult. Since 1998, they have, however, been the first to benefit from the general improvement in the first-job market.

A person's future position in society is in fact to a fairly large extent dependent on his/her academic achievements. Five years after the end of their studies, people with degrees are five times more likely to hold an executive or middle-ranking managerial position than those who started work immediately after the baccalauréat. The bulk of the people in top jobs in both the engineering field and the professions hold diplomas from a grande école [prestigious higher education establishment with a competitive examination] or have successfully completed a third university cycle (7).

While this is reassuring in that it demonstrates the value accorded to academic qualifications, it is also a matter for concern, since the inequalities often picked up very early on in school and overcome with difficulty have a lasting effect on an individual's future working life. The aim of continuing education, vital for what is now known as life-long learning, was originally to offer a second chance, attenuating or correcting the legacy of an inadequate basic education, but it only very imperfectly fulfils this role. At the same time, the idea is gaining ground that experience in a trade is as valid as qualifications obtained at school or in higher education. But the procedures for validating vocational achievements, brought in by the 1985 and 1993 Acts, still come up against serious obstacles. In 1998, only 12,000 people managed to validate the achievements of their experience, principally in university education. Today a Bill on social modernization envisages adding to and going beyond the present system so as to allow a genuine second chance to those whose skills were not detected at school.