CRIS Scientific Seminar 2024-2025

Friday, December 13th 2024, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K011 (1, St-Thomas)

Changing the way social inequality in education is treated in France and Germany:  "Schule macht stark" (2019) and "Les contrats locaux d’accompagnement" (2020)
as contrasting examples of layering

Anne-Clemence Le Noan

PhD Candidate (Hertie School Berlin & Sciences Po-CRIS)

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International surveys such as PISA demonstrate that France and Germany are among the OECD countries where pupils’ performance at school is most influenced by their social background. This shared reality has emerged from very different education systems and policy environments. Whereas in Germany the early streaming of pupils at the end of primary school into different tracks according to their level is often seen as one of the main causes of social reproduction, in France a comprehensive high school delays the distribution of pupils till the second part of secondary school. Whereas Germany is a federal state in which education is constitutionally the responsibility of the regions, which means that most decisions concerning education are made at the regional level, France is a centralised country in which education policies are largely designed at the national level in Paris.

Surprisingly, despite these differences, both nations have the same problem with pupils’ performance being heavily influenced by their social background and in both countries highly similar policies were launched - in Germany and France in 2019 and 2020 respectively: "Schule macht stark" (school makes you strong) (SchuMaS) and "Les contrats locaux d'accompagnement" (local support contracts) (CLA). The content of these policies is analogous: the problem of social inequality is linked to the difficulties faced by schools “in difficult social situations”, to use the words of the German policy. In the name of equal opportunities, the proposed solution aims to provide additional support to this type of school. In both cases, this support is inspired by the principles of New Public Management: in France this materializes essentially in the form of project funding, whereas in Germany, it consists mainly of research accompaniment of teaching and administration. In terms of policy-making, SchuMaS is a federal policy implemented throughout Germany, whereas CLA is a policy initially implemented in only three of thirty regions in France. In other words, decentralised Germany has a more centralized SchuMaS, whereas centralized France has a decentralised CLA. These policies are only examples within large, interconnected attempts to tackle social inequalities. Nevertheless, they seem to indicate shifts and convergences that I critically disentangle and challenge by comparing their underlying ideas, the instruments mobilised, and the policy format chosen.

The two policies are strikingly similar in form: both are experimental policies, designed initially on a small scale for around two hundred schools, with a budget limited to a few million euros per year, but with the idea of extending them later if the results are convincing. In both cases, these policies were introduced alongside others that preceded them and, in this sense, correspond to incremental policies. The recourse by French and German politicians to policies launched in a restricted form with a view to extending them later appears to indicate that these actors were confronted with significant resistance, potentially caused by other actors opposed to change or constrained by strong institutional factors. This limited their immediate actions and capacity to address the political problem they sought to tackle. However, the deployment of modest policies may alternatively indicate that politicians intentionally introduced measures constrained in scope and financial resources to avoid significantly disrupting the established school system, which they regarded as their responsibility to safeguard.

I ask the following main questions: How and why have German and French policymakers adopted incremental policies to address the problem of social inequalities in education? What changes have SchuMaS and CLA triggered? I study changes in the treatment of social inequalities, how these changes have been brought about and highlight the similarities and differences of policymaking.