A significant change awaits the 170,000 or so students who will complete their vocational baccalaureate in June 2025. Their cohort is launching the new organisation of the final year, the final act of a reform of vocational secondary schools announced in 2023 by Emmanuel Macron, just four years after the previous one, implemented during his first five-year term.
The Ministry of National Education, which wishes “to allow for better preparation for postgraduate studies” of these students, whose unemployment and failure rates in higher education are high, have chosen to create itineraries “differentiated” in the final year. Depending on whether they want to start working after graduation or continue their studies, the last six weeks of the high school year will be spent doing internships in a company or preparing for higher education. To free up this time, the “common core” of the year is reduced to thirty weeks, of which twenty-two are courses and six are “vocational training periods”. The written exams for the baccalaureate are mainly held in mid-May, with a written exam and an oral exam being organised at the end of June.
“A loss of 170 hours of classes”
All teachers’ unions have expressed their concern about this new version of the last year. Snetaa-FO denounces a “pedagogical, logistical and organizational nonsense” and a reform “which harms students who are already academically and socially vulnerable”.
This reorganization “generate significant losses for the students of the course and (…) Much confusion in the teams »also alerted Snuep-FSU during its back-to-school press conference, deploring a “loss of one hundred and seventy hours of classes in three years”The ministry admits this, but points out that students who opt for preparation for studies will have two weeks of additional classes compared to the previous situation, and that the teaching of mathematics and French has been reinforced throughout the three years since secondary school.
In vocational secondary schools, the reform that school leaders and teachers are responsible for implementing is causing more reservations and concerns than enthusiasm. For teachers, the tightening of the school year to twenty-two weeks of classes to prepare for the baccalaureate exams, the programmes of which have not been modified, is a source of incomprehension. “We will have to get straight to the point, be very fast in advancing the program, and that will inevitably pose difficulties for our students, who have a much more fragile academic level than that of the general sector”anticipates Muriel Wendling, professor of literature, history and geography in Strasbourg and national secretary of Snetaa-FO.
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