The stated goal of this new participatory platform is to give a voice to all the players in the sector and to broaden the point of view on French education abroad beyond institutional words.
The senator is planning six meetings to officially bring decision-makers in the sector closer to political decision-makers, also to promote the most modest educational actions that take place online and to make this platform a new tool for information and expression.
After listening to the interventions of the Minister of National Education, the president of the Odyssey group, Luc Chatel, and the director of the secular mission, among others, we had the opportunity to speak for UNSA Education together with other trade union representatives and actors in the field, such as the principal of the French school in Prague. Here is the pronouncement of our speech.
“Madam Senator,
it is without priori that we have engaged in this first exercise of listening to the speakers of the interview. Of course we welcome all these speakers, but we cannot silence our questions by listening to the first part of the interview which concerned “the decision makers”.
Is this exercise presented as Apolitical? However, the overwhelming majority of stakeholders are calling for greater liberalization of our system.
Whether it hides behind the periphrases or the newspeak of super-managers, whether we are talking about a system that will be more agile tomorrow, like Luc Chatel, or that in the future it will be subject to a quality approach, such as make the representatives of Fapee , we see that the ideological presuppositions are always the same:
The private can do better what the public would do wrong or more slowly. We speak of teachers only to suggest that they should be more closely evaluated and submitted to the wishes of their parents. It is well known that the paying parent knows better than the teacher what is good in terms of education for their children. I have a proposal: we should give Fapee’s parents an honorary degree in education. One wonders why these parents do not teach at home without teachers, it would be more practical I think and they would save money.
Pedagogy? It is not mentioned. It is certainly a taboo word that was not uttered more than twice in the two-hour interview.
The governance of our institutions and the Agency would also be a major concern for families. We totally disagree with this idea brought by Fapee and supported by the elected representatives of the majority whose political melting pot we know.
We also meet the parents of the students, we work alongside the educational staff:
The first concern of families is what happens in the classroom, it is the level of education of the children and not what happens on the school board. There is talk of excellence everywhere, the director of AEFE Mr. Brochet spoke about it a little while ago. So, if the teaching is excellent, it could be because the teachers and staff aren’t entirely out of place.
Mr. Chatel regretted the absence of a group of teachers from France. Too bad he didn’t realize that this team is called AEFE, an agency that has just celebrated its 32nd anniversary.
Mr. Chatel also opened an interesting debate: if we compare French education internationally and Anglo-Saxon education, it must be done on a broad spectrum. UNSA Education is a member of Education International, an organization with over 30 million members. The privatization of specific education in the Anglo-Saxon world is actually the precariousness of personnel everywhere. We also compare the salaries of teachers with that of North American school leaders. The differences are abysmal.
Promoting French education abroad means first of all promoting staff.
This is how we respond to the vocational crisis that everyone is talking about at this moment. He is equally amazed that the brilliant managers who succeeded one another on the podium at the beginning of the conference did not talk about remuneration and the symbolic enhancement of teachers at a time when hiring pools are reaching their limits. Personnel is the cornerstone of the system. They are not privileged, they are evaluated annually by the management staff and regularly by the pedagogical inspectors and are also evaluated every day by the pupils in some way in front of them and judged by the families. They are and remain missionaries of the public educational service despite the heavy pressure on their shoulders.
The State, instead of defending tooth and nail, the public educational service unfortunately organizes its own weakening: on the real estate sector for example, but also with the multiplication of contractual types and levels of staff remuneration that the great diversity of actors and employment status at more than 500 accredited institutions leads.
We remind you that the heart of the AEFE system is the search for greater equality with the scholarship system in particular and its over 100 million funding.
Equality is also for human resources, a common core for the recruitment and training of teachers who have taken and passed the civil service competitions. It is also a common core of training and recruitment for executive staff or assistant administrative and financial directors, general secretaries or accountants.
This concern for equality is specific to France. Even if it remains unfinished because equality is a permanent struggle in school as elsewhere.
Also remember that the French nation was built around secular and free public education.
We do not create a nation simply by liberalizing or setting up an expensive system for an elite and forgetting secular and republican values in the process.
That’s what’s at stake here in this interview beyond the talk of super managers who are experts in better governance and emotional hatreds of privatization.
The Republicans in the room will understand that the essential is elsewhere. And that we try to defend the essential rather than the accessory as staff representatives.
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