A new version of the decree relating to the organization of teaching in middle school classes, published in the Official Journal on the night of Saturday March 16 to Sunday March 17, puts an end to several weeks of uncertainty over the extent of the reform known as “level groups”, desired by Prime Minister Gabriel Attal since his visit to Rue de Grenelle but nuanced on several occasions by the current Minister of Education, Nicole Belloubet.
The text formalizes the timetable announced by the government: in French and mathematics, classes can be divided into groups formed according to the skills of the students in 6th and 5th grade from the start of the 2024 school year, then in 4th and 3rd at the start of the 2025 school year. .
Classes will be able to leave this group system and be grouped together for these lessons for a period ranging from “one to ten weeks in the year”, also says the decree. This point was the subject of a divergence of views between Mr. Attal and Ms. Belloubet, the latter having said on several occasions that she was in favor of “great flexibility” being left to the management of establishments.
Groups will therefore be the “rule” and whole class groupings the “exception”, as the Prime Minister decided during an interview with Agence France-Press on Wednesday. A large part of the educational community is opposed to this measure, considering, like many studies, that grouping by groups is only beneficial for occasional teaching sequences – the expression “need groups” is then usually used – and not in the long term – these are then “level groups”.
Failing to have been able to put forward her plan for limited group teaching time, Nicole Belloubet seems to have won the vocabulary argument, since the expression "level groups" does not appear in the decree. The “groups are formed according to the needs of the students”, it is written several times in the regulatory text.
“The composition of the groups is re-examined during the school year, particularly during regroupings, in order to take into account the progress and needs of the students,” the decree also details.
