Implementing Changes in Belgian Education: Language Courses, Digital Education, and Repetition Reform

2023-08-22 04:40:00

As every year for the past five years, the implementation of the Pact for teaching excellence has new things in store for French-speaking students at the start of the new school year. This year, the common core will be implemented in third and fourth primary. This entry into force involves a series of changes that will have a concrete impact on students. Here are some examples.

1. Mandatory language courses

Pupils entering ninth grade this year will thus be the first to benefit from a compulsory second language course (Dutch, English or German, depending on the choice of the school). Schoolchildren in Brussels already had 3 hours of Dutch per week, but this was not an obligation for Walloons.

2. Digital education

Another novelty this year: the entry of digital technology into the classroom. Computers and tablets entered the classroom a long time ago, but the learning of digital skills as such was not on the students’ agenda until now. But one of the main novelties concerns grade repetition.

Teacher sickness absence rates steadily rising

3. Repetition limited to the strict minimum

From this year, new procedures will be put in place. They aim to significantly reduce the repetition rate in schools.

“If within the framework of the common core, repeating a year is no longer prohibited, it is made exceptional and is conditional on the prior implementation of specific and complementary systems for differentiation and personality support. Maintaining it in one year will therefore become exceptional and conditioned by the fact that everything that was possible to do to help the student was done and did not bear fruit”, indicates the administration of education.

Concretely, it will therefore be up to the teachers to prove that they have done everything possible to avoid the student’s failure. All these efforts should be recorded in balance sheets

Belgium is regularly singled out as the champion in all categories of grade repetition. At the age of 15, one in two children has already repeated a year at least once in their school career. This “habit” has a significant cost.

In 2019, school failure generated an additional cost of approximately €391 million in ordinary full-time compulsory education for a total budget of €8 billion 125 million. Repetition is also singled out for its inefficiency or even its negative effect on the pupils who are subject to it: increased risk of dropping out, decline in the chances of obtaining a diploma or enrollment in education and risk increase in school dropouts are part of it.

“For some students, there is no other solution”

For Joseph Thonon, president of the CGSP-Teaching, no teacher decides to overtake a student lightly.

Do Belgian teachers have easy repetition? For Joseph Thonon, president of the CGSP-Enseignement, no teacher decides to keep a student in his year lightly.

“Repetition is always experienced as a personal failure for teachers. There are of course exceptions, but a normal teacher does everything he can to avoid getting there,” he says. The union official therefore wonders regarding the means that will be put in place to prevent teachers from having to make some students double. “I think that the real question to ask is rather: are we giving teachers enough resources to reduce repetition? Resources have been allocated for personalized support and for the territorial poles, but I’m afraid that the means promised by the minister are not enough. Very often, repeating a year remains the teachers’ only weapon. If a student comes home, puts his schoolbag in the hallway and never touches it, does not study anything and does not nothing in class, what can they do? We can question ourselves, wonder if we are a good teacher, put a lot of things in place to remedy it, we will always have cases like that. For these students , there is no other solution”, he observes.

“There are two ways to conceive repetition for the school environment: either repetition aims to help students in difficulty. It then offers them a second chance. But other actors in the school environment consider rather than repeating a year is a punitive method”, notes for its part the Ufapec (Francophone Union of Parents’ Associations of Catholic Education).

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