thegreatdivide
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From Prof. Michael Roberts' blog: France’s pouvoir d’achat crisis ("purchasing power crisis") (excerpt) The recent high school and student protests in France have a simple objective: to get more resources for education. France’s education crisis is defined by severe teacher shortages, deteriorating student outcomes, and massive funding deficits spanning primary schools to public universities. State education in France is among the most unequal in the developed world: schools in poorer areas are so under-resourced that the education system is cementing inequality. Students from the poorest neighbourhoods are disproportionately hard hit by staff shortages.
French students have experienced a catastrophic and unprecedented 20% drop in the education budget per student since 2017. As French leftist economist Thomas Piketty put it: “The government, in bad faith, sometimes boasts that the nominal budget for higher education rose from €13.3 billion to €15.5 billion between 2017 and 2026 (+17%). That is true, except that inflation over the same period was 22%, meaning the budget actually fell by 5% in real terms. Add to this that the number of students rose from 2.6 million to over 3 million, an increase of 15%. The result is that the budget per student dropped by about 20%”. https://lucaschancel.com/etudiants/.
Research by the economist Asma Benhenda, based on payroll data from the French national education system, shows that the proportion of contract or beginning teachers in privileged areas like Paris or Hauts-de-Seine is just 10%. That figure rises to 50% in poorer departments, like Seine-Saint-Denis and Val-de-Marne, around the capital. The average salary per secondary school teacher is about 20% lower in the poorest areas than in the wealthiest, even after taking into account the (meager) bonuses awarded for priority education.
French teachers’ salaries consistently fall below the average for advanced economies (OECD). A French teacher with 15 years’ experience earns less than €40,000, 20% below average. Early-career teachers in Germany earn twice as much as their French counterparts. Yet French teachers have to cope with longer hours of teaching and some of the worst pupil-teacher ratios in Europe. As a result, record numbers are leaving the profession.
To plug staffing gaps, the government launched a scheme in 2022 to recruit “contract” teachers (as opposed to the standard tenure system, under which they count as fonctionnaires or civil servants). They were given four days’ training, despite often having no previous teaching experience. Predictably many quit within six months, owing to lack of adequate training or supervision.
It is not just teachers who are leaving. With a dearth of supervisors, careers advisers, school doctors and nurses, among others, it is virtually impossible to deliver the school support services pupils need. The independent defender of rights for France, Claire Hédon, warned last year that the shortage of qualified staff and suitable facilities meant that almost a quarter of all disabled children never go to school at all.
No wonder then that, as state schools slowly disintegrate, more prosperous families are turning to private education. Few government ministers have any direct experience of the state school system as many go to posh private schools. Yet these fee-paying schools also receive public funding. Meanwhile French public universities are grappling with with an estimated €8 billion shortfall, which has pushed nearly all 75 public institutions into deficit budgets.
Christine Renon, the head of an infant school in Seine-Saint-Denis, died by suicide at her workplace in 2019. According to a letter she had sent to the school management board, she was “exhausted”. She went on to detail the deficiencies and inadequate resources of an organisation that had been left to rot. This tragedy should have shocked the authorities into a profound reappraisal. Macron pledged to make education a priority for his second presidential term. But nothing has changed for the better, only for the worse.
It’s education that primarily worries students and teachers (and parents) in France, But education is just one aspect of the deterioration of basic public services in France. France used to have a healthcare system that was the envy of the world, let alone Europe. Spending was high at 11.5% of annual GDP. As a result, life expectancy was much higher than the EU average. But over the last few decades, government healthcare spending has been cut back well below the increased demand for health service as French people get older and subsuequently need health support. Before 2008, health spending was rising at 0.3% of GDP a year. Since 2009, the rate of health spending growth has halved to just 0.17% of GDP a year. And yet the share of over 65s in France has risen 40% over the same period, or more than ten times the rise in health spending. As a result, life expectancy has virtually stopped rising. (at the bottom in figure below).[i]
Just as in all the major capitalist economies, The cost of living for the average French household has risen sharply, especially since the end of the pandemic slump that saw a significant inflation spike, and now more recently compounded by the energy shortages from the ongoing Iran war.cont. reading at link https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2026/10/23/frances-pouvoir-dachat-crisis/
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