One would not bet, by meeting Claire, Joshoa or Anis, that they were one day pupils “in difficulty”, encountering problems of concentration, organization or discipline. This group of interns, which shows us around the Pierre-Coton vocational school in Néronde (Loire), has little to do with the image of Epinal as a “problem” high school student.
Claire managed the arrival of the “compost” project in high school and is preparing her internship in Ireland, in 2022, “To progress in English”. Anis, who will join an architecture school after his professional baccalaureate, is president of the students’ association, the one that has made it possible over the years to buy the poufs for the relaxation room, the coffee machine and the console of games. Joshoa, “boarding school delegate”, recounts with stars in his eyes his trip to Shoreditch – a London street art center – the previous year with his English teacher.
Their establishment, “Aging”, as the CPE modestly puts it, has just joined the list of “Boarding schools of excellence”, as part of a wave of labeling announced at the end of May by Nathalie Elimas, Secretary of State in charge of priority education to the Minister of National Education. The culmination of the “boarding plan” announced in July 2019 by Jean-Michel Blanquer, the label was granted, on application, to 253 school boarding schools, to which are added 54 others who benefit in addition to the “recovery plan” – sometimes large envelopes to build or modernize the premises. In all, 35,000 boarding places now benefit from this label, out of the 222,812 in the country.
Jean-Michel Blanquer’s personal fad, “boarding schools of excellence” no longer have much to do with those launched under the mandate of Nicolas Sarkozy. They were symbolized by the boarding school of Sourdun (Seine-et-Marne), opened in 2009 in a former military barracks when the current Minister of Education was rector of Créteil. The “boarding schools of excellence” of 2021 do not resemble the boarding schools of yesteryear, some symbols of which Sourdun wanted to use. To the point of wondering what justifies labeling one rather than another?
“The educational project, the team’s investment, the anchoring in the territory and the objective of social mix have counted in the labeling”, does one enumerate in the cabinet of Nathalie Elimas. The objective is to bring students back to boarding school, where places are only 79.6% occupied, for 82.3% in 2015.
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