Some absences are more noticeable than others. Frustrated, she said, to see “lots of hours which were not seriously replaced”, the new Minister of National Education, Youth, Sports and the Olympic and Paralympic Games, Amélie Oudéa -Castéra, chose to send her children to Stanislas, a prestigious private school in the capital. Are teachers absent more than the average employee?
A report from the Court of Audit, dating from 2021, puts the church back in the center of the village. First of all, in this file of almost 100 pages, the Sages of rue Cambon explain that the perception of teacher absences by families and students does not reflect the “statistical measurement” of the real absence rate.
“Part of their absences are not recorded while a fraction of their activity, because it takes place outside the classroom, is unfairly assimilated to an absence,” we can read. In addition, “part of the absences comes from the very functioning of National Education”, notes the Court of Auditors.
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5.5% of teachers absent during a typical week
By comparing the resources made available to it, the Court of Auditors affirms that 45% of teachers in the public sector were absent for health reasons during the 2018-2019 school year. The number of sick leaves per teacher remains at a fairly low level: in 2017-2018, 2.3% of public teachers were absent between five and ten times and 0.1% more than ten times.
As for the duration of these absences, they are “short for around a third of them (less than 30% stopped between one and three days)” and “long” for one teacher in five (22% for 30 days or more ). But 20 to 40% of short-term replacement needs in secondary education are due to continuing training and institutional missions (participation on the jury, commissions responsible for choosing examination subjects, etc.).
But a question remains: are teachers absent more than the rest of the workforce? According to a report from the General Directorate of Administration and Civil Service (DGAFP) of 2023, in 2022, almost 5.5% of teachers were absent at least one day during a given week. In comparison, that same year, 8% of hospital civil service agents, but also 8% of territorial civil service agents were absent at least one day during a given week. Overall, a little less than 7% of civil service agents were not at their post over this same period.
Finally, the absence rate of teachers is comparable to that of private sector employees (around 5.5%). Still according to this same DGAFP report, the average number of days of absence due to sick leave in 2022 among teachers is also equal to that of private sector workers: 12 days.
Millions of hours lost due to lack of replacements
The problem is the failure to replace absent teachers. In a column published in 2022 in The world, the former Minister of National Education Pap Ndiaye declared that “the organization of the school system today leads to the loss of approximately 15 million hours of teaching due to the inability of the system to replace absent teachers” . “We made this problem a fight […] already going from 5 to 15% of replaced absences,” said the newly appointed Minister of Education, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, this Saturday.
The shortage of teachers has consequences on the number of hours lost. President Macron said on July 24 that there would be “a teacher in front of each class at the start of the school year”. However, according to a survey carried out by the Snes-FSU, the leading secondary education union, there was an average shortage of “at least one teacher in 48% of middle and high schools” at the start of the 2023 school year.
For his part, the Minister of National Education at the time, the current Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, recognized at the start of the school year that nearly 200 teaching positions remained vacant in middle and high schools. The latter’s entourage also indicated that 190 positions were unfilled in primary schools. “The teaching profession is suffering from a deep crisis of attractiveness,” said Gabriel Attal in October. To see if Amélie Oudéa-Castéra will manage to break this “crisis of attractiveness” and reverse the situation.
2024-01-15 17:52:54
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