Guest of Wendy Bouchard on the program “Ma France” this Thursday, Emmanuel Macron confirmed his desire to allow AESH, Accompanying students with disabilities, to work 35 hours a week. People who perform this function usually work 24 hours a week, and are therefore paid below the minimum wage.
Emmanuel Macron was challenged on the remuneration of AESH by Nathalie, auditor of France Bleu Nord who works in Pas-de-Calais. “We talk a lot about the increase in teachers’ salaries, but we have the impression of being forgotten in National Education”, lamented Nathalie, who works 24 hours a week and earns around 800 euros per month.
In five years, 100,000 more children have been allowed to go to school
The outgoing president began by defending his record: “What have we been doing during the past five years? We have hired more carers for children with disabilities. Many were not on permanent contracts, they were contract workers or short contracts. So we tried as much as possible to give a status, a framework, stability on this, to CDDs who were very little paid or very badly paid”, he argued. “During these five years, we have created more jobs, we have stabilized jobs and we have allowed to give a status and to remove precariousness. Which means that in five years, we have allowed 100,000 children to going to school. That is to say, we have gone from just over 300,000 children who were disabled and who went to school at the start of the five-year term, to today today 400,000”, said the President. “Which is still not enough”, he acknowledged.
“Accompany extracurricular time” to reach 35 hours
“IToday there are some of our compatriots who do this work and are discouraged because full-time jobs are rare and few AESH earn the minimum wage”admitted the Head of State before outlining his proposals: “What is in my program for the next five years – it’s a real investment, because it costs a lot of public money – is to allow our carers of children with disabilities, to be able to work 35 hours. This means being able to accompany extracurricular time, to recognize the accompaniment of time in the canteen and time after school to be able to do homework, in order to allow them to work 35 hours, and therefore to go from minimum wage to part-time to a full-time minimum wage”, he detailed, for be “decently remunerated”.
For Emmanuel Macron, this proposal is more viable than accompanying several children to reach 35 hoursan operation that is not always possible or relevant: “Some companions have a full time because they accompany several children. But it’s not always easy, because there are children who require a complete investment”, he detailed. “It’s complicated when you have twenty hours, to find an additional 15 hours with a second child”he recalled.