Patrick Hetzel’s roadmap is very similar to that of his predecessor at the Ministry of Higher Education and Research, Sylvie Retailleau. Except for one detail: rather than putting the work back into practice, the new minister showed, on Tuesday, November 19, his desire to start from scratch on a series of issues.
Firstly, with the reform of scholarships for students with financial difficulties, which will be the subject of a “consultation” in the spring of 2025, two and a half years after the one hundred hearings held by Professor Jean-Michel Jolion, charged in October 2022 with leading this project. Since then, the observation has been clear: we must overcome the shortcomings of the current allocation system, which excludes a proportion of low-income students due to threshold effects linked to the sometimes minimal change in their parents’ income.
Constrained by a 2025 finance bill that did not foresee increasing either the amounts allocated or the allocation scales to reach more students, Patrick Hetzel justified his decision to reform everything: “I work with the current finance law, so the direction we should aim for is the start of the 2026 school year.” The Student Union spokesperson is surprised: “Nothing justifies a new consultation if the objective is not to listen to the demands of student organizations, particularly around independent income,” warns Eléonore Schmitt.
“Cleaning” in training
Another project, the regulation of lucrative private higher education, whose “label” was to be presented by Sylvie Retailleau just before the dissolution of the National Assembly, interrupted government action. Patrick Hetzel commits to making proposals for the 2026 school year “a common basis for quality training” at the same time that controls are reinforced. “We need to clean up”agreed, referring to the case of between 400 and 500 training courses already identified as fraudulent. A “charter of ethics” for orientation fairs should also assure the public of the quality of the training present and limit aggressive business practices.
The reform of primary and secondary teacher training, also suspended due to the dissolution, is also relaunched on new bases. “With national education, we list all possible scenarios, even at the competition site. [pas nécessairement placé en fin de licence, comme le prévoyait le projet précédent]. We do not prohibit anything”, said Patricio Hetzel. In October, Anne Genetet declared that it was “an excellent reform”, that the two ministers “he would be in charge of moving forward”, without specifying the terms.
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