Posted on September 26, 2022 at 14:08Updated on September 26, 2022 at 2:20 pm
How to defend the priority of education by eliminating almost 2,000 teaching positions? This is the very delicate task that the Minister of National Education, Pap Ndiaye, will have to tackle.
It is true that the first state budget will increase by 3.7 billion euros in 2023. The budget for school education, which finances the schooling of 12 million students, from kindergarten to high school, thus reaches 60.2 billion (excluding the CAS pension), compared to 56.5 billion last year.
Close to 1,000 million for revaluations
For the updating of the teaching staff, 935 million euros are foreseen. But the vagueness remains total about the distribution of the envelope. The only certainty, reaffirmed this Monday by the Minister of Public Accounts Gabriel Attal, refers to the new teachers. “No teacher will receive less than 2,000 euros net per month from the start of the next school year,” he said. This is what Emmanuel Macron had recently written to teachers. But concern is growing on the side of mid-career teachers, who have reached 2,000 euros a month after fifteen years of service.
The increase in the budget “allows financing the increase in the index point of July 2022 (1,700 million) as well as the increases in remuneration (935 million) from the start of the 2023 school year that will be negotiated in the framework of consultations in the future ”, according to Bercy. Where it is indicated that all this will translate into “an average increase in teachers’ remuneration of 10% accompanied by an additional increase for volunteer teachers who join new missions.” It is this idea of ”average” that worries teachers who understood that the 10% increase promised by Emmanuel Macron would be “unconditional” and would apply to each one of them.
In a full year, the cost of revaluations will exceed 2,000 million euros, underlines Bercy. For the remuneration of non-teaching staff of the ministry, 140 million euros are foreseen.
During the campaign, Emmanuel Macron had promised to dedicate 6,000 million euros a year to updating teachers. The National Education budget must reach 63 billion by 2025.
class closures
At a time of teacher shortage, the proposed budget also provides for the elimination of 1,985 full-time equivalent teaching positions. “The budget for 2023 takes note of the sharp drop in the number of students observed since 2017 and expected in the coming years, which translates into a lower need for teachers,” according to Bercy, who assures that there will be no “degradation of the supervisory fee. And that she reminds us that there will be 500,000 fewer students between 2022 and 2027.
“We are going to close classes,” the Minister of National Education said this summer, while assuring that they would be done “with much discernment.” “It would be absurd to close classes in a somewhat isolated rural world in the same way as in urban worlds, given the general environment,” Pap Ndiaye continued.
The innovation fund at 300 million by 2025
In the entourage of the Minister of Economy Bruno Le Maire, we prefer to highlight the global increase of 2,000 jobs through support for people with disabilities (+4,000 at the start of the 2023 school year) and educational assistants. “There is a very strong demand from parents for assistants for children with disabilities”, it is further specified, assuring that “the duplication of classes in large sections will continue”.
To finance the innovative projects announced by Emmanuel Macron, the promised dedicated fund will ultimately be €300 million by 2025, then €500 million at the end of the five-year period. There will be “at least 500 million”, declared the Head of State at the end of August, before the rectors. While, during the presidential campaign, the amount was going to be 1,000 million.