“At least this year no one has committed to having a teacher in charge of each class at the beginning of the school year”Bruno Bobkiewicz jokes. The general secretary of the SNPDEN-UNSA school principals’ union refers, not without irony, to the promises of the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, and of Gabriel Attal, then Minister of National Education, at the start of the 2023 school year.
Assigning 850,000 teachers to 12 million students represents the biggest challenge facing national education at the start of each school year. With the recruitment crisis taking hold, it is now a challenge. If the vast majority of schoolchildren, middle and high school students know their teachers as of Monday, September 2, there will undoubtedly be gaps.
Despite a slight improvement compared to the 2023 call for applications, the recruitment competitions for teachers left more than 3,000 vacant posts for the start of the 2024 school year, in addition to the posts not filled in previous years. According to the Court of Auditors, more than 5,500 teachers were missing between 2017 and 2021. This situation, which varies according to the academies and disciplines, has worsened since then, particularly after the transfer to 2022 of the competitions at the end of the bac+ 5 in 2022.
Cautious optimism
Mechanically, the hiring of subcontracted workers has increased. There are now 49,000 in public education (almost 7% of the population), or 10,000 more than two years ago.
Faced with this observation, the outgoing Minister of Education, Nicole Belloubet, was cautiously optimistic on Tuesday, August 27, during her press conference on the return to school. According to her, the rectorates are “very close to achieving 100% coverage of teaching needs” thanks to a “important anticipation work” for the recruitment of subcontracted workers. Rectory offices such as Créteil and Versailles, which have significant needs for non-tenured staff, recruit throughout the year and can offer two-year contracts.
On Friday 30 August, however, during their return to school, teachers counted the empty chairs in the staff room, like this teacher from Dordogne (he did not want to give his name) who already has on the list a SVT teacher, a physics and chemistry teacher, or even a music education teacher that is missing at his university. The job offers for contract teachers still available on the France Travail website do not go unnoticed either. According to the annual report on the implementation of the 2023 school education budget, rectorates now need an average of almost twenty-nine days to fill the approximately 3,000 vacancies observed in middle and high schools at the start of the school year and to assign a teacher there, twice as many as fifteen years ago.
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