The early school year approaching might be socially heckled. Several organizational changes stemming from the Excellence Pact make this difficult for several reasons.
After its traditional summer break, the French-speaking school is preparing to experience a return to school in regarding ten days, destined to go down in history. Indeed, with the entry into force of the new school calendar in the Wallonia-Brussels Federation, students and their teachers will return to school no longer on September 1, as has been the custom for decades, but from Monday 29 August already.
For the occasion, the Minister-President of the FWB, Pierre-Yves Jeholet and the Minister of Education, Caroline Désir, have decided this year to make their return to field politics together. They agreed to meet on this historic day at the IRSA special education school in Uccle, where they will be from 8:30 a.m.
Marked by several major organizational changes resulting from the Pact for teaching excellence, this new year that is opening up for French-language schools also promises to be quite delicate politically. And this for many reasons.
This new school year does not come in complete social peace
Socially first. At the beginning of July, following months of negotiations with the government and three major demonstrations in Brussels, Mons and Liège, the teachers’ unions had finally rejected with one and the same voice the draft sectoral agreement submitted to them.
In their eyes, the proposed package contained many promises, but too few concrete measures to meet their demands. And two months following this failure, the bitterness is necessarily still a little present on the union side.
“This new school year does not come in complete social peace“, deplores Joseph Thonon, president of the CGSP-Enseignement. He now expects the government to initiate without delay the promised debates on class size and workload in connection with the new school management plans. .
“We will see what happens, but we are considering actions for the month of October“, already warns the trade unionist. “We will have a union common front meeting next week to take stock“.
Dreaded reforms
Another file in the works, namely the new evaluation procedure that the government wishes to apply to teachers, might also quickly reignite discontent in the rooms of teachers.
Last spring, faced with thousands of teachers taking to the streets, the government had agreed to postpone the entry into force of the dreaded reform until January 2024, that is to say by just over a year.
If the dialogue is not broken with the unions, it will however remain difficult in the months to come, in particular concerning the sanctions to be applied in the event of a negative evaluation of a teacher.
A political promise included in the majority agreement and a concern of many parents, Minister Désir also hopes to be able to make progress this year on the issue of school fees. The stated objective is to extend the “free” decree – already applied to the three years of nursery school – to the 1st and 2nd primary and this from September 2023, but “subject of course to budgetary possibilities”, it is specified. cautiously around him.
Alongside this, another major construction site is also beginning its home straight. It is that of the reform of qualifying education.
With the programmed extension of the common core by one year (until the end of secondary 3, editor’s note), all of the technical and professional humanities are amputated by one year. These must therefore be reorganized, rethought, even rationalized given the low success of certain sectors.
Quite a rare fact: last May, the CPEONS, the body which represents all the organizing powers of the technical and professional schools of the municipalities and provinces, did not hesitate to cry out loud and clear all the evil it thought of the announced reform. A project driven by an “accounting logic” and very little respectful of the autonomy of establishments, he had notably denounced at the time.
The Désir firm reacts
The rant seems since then to have been well heard at the Désir firm.
“The discussions are going in the right direction. We seek solutions together“, welcomes today Sébastien Schetgen, the managing director of the CPEONS.
On the Minister’s side, it is confirmed that a first version of the project will be officially presented to the actors of the Pact of Excellence at their meeting in September. So things are moving forward. Finally, last but not least, beyond these legislative projects, the FWB government will also have to find a solution in the next few weeks to a recent, to say the least, emblematic court decision.
Seized by the SeGEC in 2019, the Constitutional Court has indeed forced the FWB since 2020 to grant subsidized education establishments – including Catholic schools – operating resources equivalent to 75% of the budgets allocated to schools in the WBE network. (ex-French Community), once morest only 50% until now.
This catch-up had already been negotiated in 2001 during the so-called intra-Francophone agreements of Saint-Boniface, but it had never been applied since.
While upholding the grievances of the SeGEC, which considered itself injured, the Constitutional Court had, however, given the budgetary impact of its decision, left the government of the FWB until December 2022 at the latest to regularize the situation. The count is therefore coming to an end.
According to some estimates, the measure should cost each year several tens of millions of additional euros to an already largely deficit FWB budget…
