Education in France. Private preferences

Date: 11/03/06

The French school system is more class-ridden than it pretends

THE right to a good, free state school is part of France's republican folklore, the guarantor of its secular meritocracy. So new figures this week, based on the 2005 school-leaving exam (the baccalaureat or bac), may come as a surprise. Of the top 29 schools, all but one--the Lycee Henri IV on Paris's left bank--are private.

The ranking, carried out by Le Figaro, took all lycees (secondary schools) with a 100% pass rate in the three main academic streams. This list was then compared with expected results, based on the socio-economic background of pupils: the results revealed the startlingly superior performance of private schools. Interestingly, central Paris does not monopolise the top places. At the pinnacle is the Lycee Epin, in the capital's suburbs. Others include the Lycee de Marcq, in Lille, and the Lycee Ozar Hatorah in Toulouse.

Despite the popular myth of a decent state education for all, many middle-class parents choose private schools. Some 14% of primary pupils attend a private school, and the figure for lycees is over 20%. Admittedly, French private schools bear little resemblance to, say, British ones, not least because they do not compel parents to remortgage their houses to pay the fees. As the state pays teachers' salaries at schools "under contract" with the education ministry, fees are usually well under euro3,000 ($3,600) a year. Moreover, some parents choose private schools for a religious instruction that is forbidden in the secular state system. Many, like the Lycee de Marcq, are Catholic; some, like the Lycee Ozar Hatorah, are Jewish.

Nonetheless, the popularity of private schools points to a growing dissatisfaction with the state's offering, which is under assault from other quarters too. Nicolas Sarkozy, the interior minister, recently caused controversy by floating the idea of putting police officers inside rough schools, in response to rising violence. A schoolteacher near Paris was knifed several times by one of her pupils in December.

Mr Sarkozy has also blasted the system for not promoting social mobility, another cornerstone of French republicanism. The proportion of pupils passing the bac has risen from 25% in 1980 to 62% in 2004, but this has not opened up the top universities. The share of working-class children going to France's grandes ecoles (elite higher-education colleges) is lower than in the 1950s, says Mr Sarkozy. "For a century, free secular republican schooling has proudly ensured equal opportunity, permitting thousands of children from modest families to obtain secondary and higher education," he said last month. "But today it has become inegalitarian."

Above all, as the bac has spread, those without it have become marginalised. As Patrick Fauconnier points out in a recent book on French education's failings, these days you need the bac to be a supermarket cashier. Yet every year 160,000 pupils leave school without it. Most have no qualifications, and many are functionally illiterate. The penalty in France is severe, says Eric Charbonnier, of the OECD: the difference in the unemployment rate of those with and without the diploma is far above the OECD average.

What can be done? Mr Fauconnier suggests less abstract teaching, less rote-learning, and a system less built around failure. Richard Descoings, head of Sciences-Po, a grande ecole, wants to create a lycee d'excellence in one of Paris's grim banlieues. Mr Sarkozy wants to give schools more freedom to experiment and specialise, to pay good teachers more, and to introduce more sport. All fine stuff; but the difficulty is France's formidable, centrally employed, 1m-strong teaching body. It equates decentralisation and diversity with an assault on republican uniformity--even though that means more in theory than in reality.

The French school system is more class-ridden than it pretends.