Yannick Jadot, the Europe Ecologie-Les Verts candidate for the 2022 presidential election, presented his program for the school at the start of the week. In particular, it provides for the creation of 65,000 teaching posts and a review of school timetables, without increasing teachers’ working hours. He said it on Tuesday March 22 on France Inter: “There is no question of increasing the workload of teachers. They are already at 42 hours a week.”
.@yjadot “There is no question of increasing the workload of #teachers. They are already at 42 hours a week” #Presidential2022 #le79Inter pic.twitter.com/U0yB5SRacl
– France Inter (@franceinter) March 22, 2022
What Yannick Jadot says is rather true. According to an INSEE survey, published in 2018 and based on data from 2014, teachers work an average of 40 hours per week. Precisely 41 hours in primary and 39 hours in secondary. It is even a little more for teachers at the start of their career, in particular because they take more time to prepare their lessons.
The result of this study, based on the declarations of teachers in the public in France, is very close to previous studies, already carried out by Insee or by the Ministry of National Education, whether in primary or secondary .
How do these 40 hours break down? There is the time spent in front of the students, it represents almost half of the working time, ie 25 hours in primary school and around twenty in college and high school.
Overall in secondary school, for one hour of lessons, there is one hour of work outside the classroom, says the Ministry of Education. This includes preparing, researching or correcting copies. In total, a little over fifteen hours of work that can be done at home. Then there are the class councils, the meetings with the other teachers or the exchanges with the parents… All these tasks, quite diverse, represent an average of 4 hours per week.
And even if teachers benefit from more holidays with 16 weeks of school holidays per year, they also work during these periods, notes INSEE. On average 5 hours per week to prepare for the start of the school year, which is the equivalent of 11 full days per year.