Faced with constantly decreasing results for ministerial exams in French, Quebec will double the annual budget of the Alloprof organization to administer a new platform called “Allofrançais”. We need improvement “as quickly as possible,” says Minister Bernard Drainville.
The Minister of Education Bernard Drainville announced funding of 54 million over the next three years for the establishment of this platform. The annual budget of the Alloprof organization is currently 15 million per year.
“Since my arrival, it has been said several times that [la maîtrise du français] was a priority for us. We must work to improve the quality of French among our students,” declared Minister Drainville, who was visiting an elementary school in Greenfield Park.
Although he has made mastering French one of his priorities, the effects are not felt immediately. The most recent examination results from the Ministry of Education show that mastery of French is far from being acquired for many young people.
In the public network, the success rate for the June 2024 writing exam was only 66.9%, down 4.2 percentage points compared to last year, even if the content was reduced due to the strike, which deprived some students of a month of school.
The “historical trend of results is not favorable,” Mr. Drainville admitted on Monday. So when does he expect to see an improvement in young people’s French?
PHOTO ALAIN ROBERGE, THE PRESS
Minister of Education Bernard Drainville
“I’m not patient. I think that when it comes to learning French, we cannot afford to be patient. I think we have to be very impatient to get things back on track and that’s my state of mind,” declared Bernard Drainville, who believes that we need to “make students love the language more.”
The Allofrançais platform, which is already online, allows young people to access videos or exercises, but we will also rely on artificial intelligence to create personalized courses for the students who go there.
Ultimately, Alloprof wants to provide 22 million support sessions with students over the next three years. This is the largest amount received by Alloprof, founded in 1996. The organization intends to hire around fifty people to carry out the “Allofrançais” project.
The co-founder and general director of Alloprof, Sandrine Faust, says that young people are increasingly turning to this platform for help in French. “At the beginning, the questions came a lot in mathematics, and they are more and more about French. French is complicated,” says M.me Faust.