French lose their taste for teaching

France is facing a severe teacher shortage. In the next few years, it will have to replace half the workforce, but young people are reluctant to enter the profession.

Last month, after three years in which the number of new teachers dipped, the education ministry increased by 10 per cent the allocation of secondary teaching posts to be filled from September to 23,465. The measure is a first step in a long-term recruitment plan announced last November by education minister Jack Lang.

Jobs are awarded to the most successful trainees leaving postgraduate teacher training colleges, as judged by competitive exams that everyone sits at the end of the two-year course.

Ministry estimates indicate that 185,000 new primary and secondary teachers must be recruited over the next five years to replace those retiring or leaving the profession for other reasons. Those leaving represent nearly half the teaching force.

But young people who leave university with a licence (equivalent to a bachelors degree) are losing enthusiasm about teaching as a career. The number of candidates has been falling since 1997.

Few university graduates view teaching as a respected, fulfilling profession spent in public service with cast-iron job security (French teachers are civil servants). They increasingly see it as a job that is low paid and stressful, carried out in difficult conditions with rising pupil incivility and risks of violence - and one that is difficult to enter in the first place, with fixed low pass rates in the competitive exams.

As France's economy has picked up in recent years and unemployment has fallen, the private sector increasingly offers brighter employment prospects. Teacher shortages are especially acute in secondary schools and in scientific, technical and vocational subjects.

Mr Lang is due to launch teacher training reforms designed to better prepare new teachers for the job. These will be followed by a campaign to try to attract young graduates to the profession.

• Mr Lang announced last week that all new primary teachers will have to be competent in language teaching.

The measure is part of a programme that, from September 2002, will extend foreign-language teaching to all pupils from the last year of nursery school and will introduce a second compulsory language at the beginning of secondary education.

Mr Lang has instructed the teacher training institutes to start offering courses specialising in languages. From 2003, primary-level trainees will take compulsory language exams as part of their qualification.