this is what the system will look like at the start of the school year in September

The Minister of Education announced a relaxation of future level groups in middle school in mathematics and French. The system should come into place at the start of the school year in September.

This is an explosive topic in colleges. They must prepare the organization of future level groups in mathematics and French, desired and announced by Gabriel Attal last December, when he was Minister of Education. These groups are supposed to raise the general level of students. Teachers’ unions were fiercely opposed to it. The new minister Nicole Belloubet announced her decisions on Thursday March 7.

The result is a version quite different from Gabriel Attal’s initial project. The establishments will have a margin of freedom to apply this measure as they see fit, this was a request on their part. Nicole Belloubet never pronounces the expression “level groups” but she says “need or skill groups”.

Concretely, the organization is as follows: let’s imagine a college where there are four 6th grade classes. They have classes as usual, in history-geography, physics, plastic arts, etc. Everyone in their class. But in mathematics and French, for each big chapter, for example in geometry, all the students from these four classes will be mixed. Groups will be reformed according to the skills of each person, those who are comfortable, those who are average and finally those who are in difficulty on this topic.

The risk of a gas plant

It is the teachers who make this distribution. After a few weeks, we reform the initial classes, where all levels are mixed. There is a week or two of brewing. In the next chapter, fractions for example, we reform groups according to the identified needs of each student, but we may very well have been with the best in geometry, and be with the weakest for fractions. It all depends on your level in each theme. In any case, this is what the ministry imagines: a fairly fluid system.

Others already see it as a gas plant, very complex to implement. Because if we alternate whole class periods and periods in skill groups, it is necessary that all the teachers progress at exactly the same speed, and that all have finished the fraction chapter, for example, on the same date. Will this freedom given to establishments not result in a reform applied at a minimum if the educational teams are opposed to it? We will have to see the implementation in concrete terms.