Teachers’ unions and parents’ federations claim that absent teachers are more and more frequently not replaced.
Are you ready to go to court if your children’s teachers are not replaced when they are absent? In certain classes, everywhere in France, the hours lost amount to tens. The collective #OnVeutDesProfs, which brings together parents of students from all over France dissatisfied with the non-replaced absences of teachers, with the key to a loss of lesson hours for their children, will launch a second collective legal action on Monday against the state, learned this Sunday franceinfo from their lawyer Joyce Pitcher.
>> Unreplaced absences of teachers: the collective #OnVeutDesProfs will launch a second legal action against the State on Monday
“There was no one to replace him”
Parents’ associations are overflowing with examples of these patchy timetables: in Montreuil, in Seine-Saint-Denis, the FCPE has 190 cumulative lost teaching hours for a 4th grade class, four months of absence in a CE2, almost as much for one of the two teachers of a class of CP… Result: nine pupils of the group still do not know how to read, in this month of May.
It’s getting worse and worse, testifies Alexandra Barcon, co-president of the FCPE de Montreuil: “Even absences for retirement or annualized half-time are no longer replaced. For example, a sports teacher was to leave in January, there was no one to replace him. The same for a maths teacher who was retiring in January: the college found itself without a maths teacher. And the only answer we have is ‘We have nobody’.”
“This year, I think we are at the pinnacle of what we have been able to experience since I became a parent. I have never seen a situation like this, with such long absences not being replaced.”
Alexandra Barcon, FCPEat franceinfo
National Education is unable, today, to count precisely the number of hours lost because of absent teachers who have not been replaced. The Court of Auditors evaluated it in 2018-2019 at two million, just in colleges and high schools. Two-thirds of these hours are related to service obligations, such as training, meetings, or related to exams.
“A referent or a referent in each academy”
Despite the reassuring speeches of Emmanuel Macron and Pap Ndiaye on this subject (“A teacher in front of each student”), the FCPE ensures that the situation has not improved at all. The federation points the finger, among other things, at more recurring problems than before to replace long-term absences.
Last January, the Minister of National Education declared on BFMTV that the “we lose fifteen million hours of lessons annually linked to uninsured replacements“. On France Inter, in April, he added that”when it comes to short-term replacement, we need a small third of volunteers“, referring in particular to his “pact” providing up to 500 euros net per month for teachers who agree to engage in additional missions.
At the end of 2022, the #OnVeutDesProfs collective had already filed 127 requests for compensation relating to unreplaced class hours before 17 administrative courts in France, asking for fifty euros per day of lost class in the first degree and ten euros per hour of lesson not given in the second degree. In addition to this new legal action, the collective #OnVeutDesProfs now wants to have “a referent in each academy“.