The students are on vacation and, during this time, the start of the school year is preparing. Faced with the lack of teachers, academies seem to revise their requirements downwards when recruiting new teachers, sometimes drastically. Do they still have the level?
We often hear about a drop in the level of students in France. Last May, a report by the Court of Auditors on Primary Education deplored in particular a level “unacceptable”noting that a pupil in three is in difficulty in French, just like one in four students in mathematics in sixth grade. Among the factors that can explain this situation, one can wonder about the level of certain teachers.
As we know, in recent years, even when there have been job cuts, the recruitment of teachers remains difficult. This is due to the low attractiveness of the teaching profession, which has difficult working conditions and low wages, as well as the fact that the public service is less and less attractive. To have as many teachers as possible, academies must make concessions regarding the levels of aspiring teachers.
So, as reported Le Figarosome academies have established the “threshold notes” which allow access to the oral of the particularly low school teacher competition this year: 8/20 in those of Paris and Orleans-Tours, 7 in that of Versailles, and even 6 in that of Créteil. In comparison, it is in Rennes that it is the highest, fixed at 13.25. And the reports of the juries say a lot about the level of candidates. To the French test, that of the Academy of Amiens notes, for example, that many of them do not adapt their level of language to the situation, do not master certain concepts of elementary or college, or that “Almost 25 % of copies contain more than ten spelling or syntactic errors, with recurring faults such as” despite that “,” among “,” as even “,” the lexical field “, and confusion between homophones (a/to, CE/se)”. On the side of the mathematics test, the juries could still see gaps on basic skills (formula for calculating the circumference, difference between odd and negative numbers, decimal numbers, etc.).
At the end of the competitions, 500 positions were not provided for the start of the 2025 school year. To try to fill the holes, the National Education calls on contract workers, which are less well remunerated and which are recruited from Bac+3. Some of them applied to the school teacher competition or CAPES, without obtaining the exam. Others have not yet finished their training. As for teachers who are – or have been trained in one of the higher national institutes of professorship and education (inspected), many of them deplore a training disconnected from reality, which does not really teach them to deal with a class or learning disabilities which their future students can be reached.
