“It would put everyone in danger”: faced with high school anger, the Minister of National Education refuses to change the baccalaureate schedule

The Minister of Education Édouard Geffray does not want to modify the bac schedule to take into account the hours lost by high school students due to the current movement, he indicates in an interview published on Saturday by Le Parisien.

“I will be very clear: I do not intend to touch the exams. We cannot say, on the one hand, that we want a national diploma, and on the other, that we can adapt it according to each person's situation,” he declared during an exchange organized by the newspaper with high school students, parents and teachers. “However, in establishments where students have been prevented from going to class, we are looking to allocate additional resources, in particular remedial courses,” he adds.

“Adapting continuous monitoring”

According to the minister, two thirds of high schools experienced no disruption, or only experienced “very slight disruptions over one to two days”. To catch up, “we need to look in detail, adapt continuous monitoring, perhaps smooth over a semester rather than a quarter,” he explains. The deadlines set by Parcoursup, the system for directing high school students to higher education, will not be changed either, specifies Édouard Geffray. “I don’t want to speak for the Minister of Higher Education, but disrupting the Parcoursup schedule this year would put everyone in danger. This will not prevent us from transforming the platform,” he notes.

For this year, however, the government promises to “put an end to the mandatory cover letter” on Parcoursup, while “certain training courses do not even read it,” notes Édouard Geffray. Furthermore, he said, “we are organizing total transparency on the local criteria and algorithms used by higher education establishments to select their students”. “Rejected students will be able to know why they were not accepted,” he emphasizes.