Are schools reinforcing social inequalities?

France has a rep­u­ta­tion for under­per­for­mance when it comes to inequal­i­ties in edu­ca­tion. “As in all coun­tries, pupils do not arrive at pri­ma­ry school on an equal foot­ing: chil­dren from poor­er back­grounds, for exam­ple, know few­er words than those from more priv­i­leged back­grounds. But unlike oth­er coun­tries, French schools are unable to reduce this gap. On the con­trary, it increas­es over the course of a child’s edu­ca­tion” com­ments Camille Peugny. And in a coun­try where the high­est diplo­ma obtained plays a cru­cial role in social sta­tus, these inequal­i­ties extend into social repro­duc­tion. “Sev­en out of ten chil­dren of man­agers have man­age­r­i­al jobs. On the oth­er hand, sev­en out of ten chil­dren of blue-col­lar work­ers work in man­u­al jobs” con­tin­ues the researcher.

The France Stratégie 2023 report “Sco­lar­ités. Poids des héritages¹” , details the many social deter­mi­nants that influ­ence a child’s suc­cess and their choice of course, lead­ing to a sed­i­men­ta­tion of inequal­i­ties through­out their school career. These include the par­ents’ eco­nom­ic cap­i­tal, which enables them to ben­e­fit from tutor­ing if they need it and fam­i­ly finan­cial sup­port if they want to go on to high­er edu­ca­tion; geo­graph­i­cal mobil­i­ty, which gives them the oppor­tu­ni­ty to go to a wider range of estab­lish­ments; infor­ma­tion cap­i­tal, which broad­ens the range of options avail­able; and per­son­al aspi­ra­tions, which are some­times self-cen­sored in the most dis­ad­van­taged backgrounds.

A student’s abil­i­ty to envis­age a future for them­selves also has an impact. “Numer­ous sur­veys have shown that, at each new stage of the edu­ca­tion­al process, fam­i­lies need to under­stand that their invest­ment in the child’s edu­ca­tion will pay off fur­ther and fur­ther into the future. When you’re in a more pre­car­i­ous sit­u­a­tion, life is like a series of chal­lenges that you have to over­come, and your abil­i­ty to envis­age your future is lim­it­ed,” com­ments Camille Peugny.

How­ev­er, the last few decades have seen a sig­nif­i­cant increase in school atten­dance, and all socio-eco­nom­ic back­grounds have recog­nised the impor­tance of study­ing for as long as pos­si­ble². In 1950, 5% of young peo­ple took the bac­calau­réat. Today, almost 80% do, and half of them go on to high­er edu­ca­tion. “But this democ­ra­ti­sa­tion is, as soci­ol­o­gist Pierre Mer­le points out, seg­re­gat­ed. At high school and beyond, the pro­grammes lead­ing to the most high­ly qual­i­fied jobs are over­whelm­ing­ly tak­en by the most advan­taged young peo­ple,” adds Camille Peugny.

This grad­ual rein­force­ment of inequal­i­ties begins very ear­ly on. The France Stratégie report shows that 19.4% of pupils from dis­ad­van­taged back­grounds (35% of pupils accord­ing to the def­i­n­i­tion adopt­ed by the authors) have already had to repeat a year by the time they enter 6ème (11–12 years), com­pared with 8.3% of pupils from more priv­i­leged back­grounds (30% of pupils). At the start of sec­ondary school, around 80% of pupils from well-off back­grounds go on to study in the “2nde générale and tech­nologique” [Editor’s note: a impor­tant branch in the French edu­ca­tion sys­tem at 14–16 years, deter­min­ing stu­dents lat­er options] while only 36% of pupils from dis­ad­van­taged back­grounds do so. The gap widens even fur­ther in final year, where, for exam­ple, near­ly 35% of stu­dents from priv­i­leged back­grounds go on to study in S [Editor’s note: sci­en­tif­ic branch], which is con­sid­ered to be the stream lead­ing to the most high­ly qual­i­fied jobs, com­pared with just 7.5% of stu­dents from less priv­i­leged backgrounds.

As for the prepara­to­ry class­es, more than two-thirds of these are tak­en by stu­dents from very priv­i­leged back­grounds, 40% of stu­dents are girls (30% in sci­ence sub­jects), and stu­dents from the Paris region account for 32% of the total³. The gaps widen even fur­ther when it comes to enter­ing the most pres­ti­gious schools. “With the same marks at the bac­calau­re­ate, a for­mer pupil from Paris has six times more chance of get­ting into the most pres­ti­gious schools, such as Poly­tech­nique, HEC or ENS Ulm, than a pupil from a more rur­al area,” explains Guil­laume Hollard.

But why is France, which spends 5.4% of its GDP on schools at all lev­els (com­pared with an OECD aver­age of 4.9%), unable to com­bat these inequal­i­ties? And, above all, how can we reset a sys­tem that seems to no longer work? Sev­er­al pub­li­ca­tions attempt to answer these two ques­tions, using a vari­ety of approaches.

For soci­ol­o­gist Camille Peugny, “we are deeply influ­enced by the mod­el of the Republic’s schools, which are both equal­is­ing and eman­ci­pat­ing, and which are sup­posed to reward only the mer­it of their pupils, a mod­el that was estab­lished at the end of the 19^th Cen­tu­ry. We’re hav­ing trou­ble let­ting go of this myth.” In his view, the French sys­tem is in fact built around one major objec­tive: select­ing the elite of tomor­row from an ear­ly age. He points to evi­dence of this in the French system’s ten­den­cy towards assess­ment at a very ear­ly age and in the dis­tri­b­u­tion of finan­cial flows between the dif­fer­ent lev­els of edu­ca­tion, with the bud­get for nurs­ery and pri­ma­ry edu­ca­tion alone being low­er in France than the OECD aver­age. “To this main objec­tive of select­ing the elite, new sub-objec­tives are con­stant­ly being added, such as edu­ca­tion for cit­i­zen­ship or road safe­ty. Our expec­ta­tions of the school sys­tem have become unrea­son­able” adds the researcher. 

True equal­i­ty may lie in ensur­ing that people’s des­tinies are nev­er set in stone.

In his view, there are two par­al­lel avenues to be pur­sued to halt the accu­mu­la­tion of inequal­i­ties: first­ly, greater invest­ment in the first and sec­ond cycles of edu­ca­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly to lim­it ear­ly school leav­ing, which is one of the nation­al pri­or­i­ties. Every year, around 8% of young peo­ple leave the school sys­tem with no qual­i­fi­ca­tions high­er than the Brevet. This per­cent­age is low­er than the OECD aver­age but is still social­ly very marked: 38% of ear­ly school leavers have par­ents who are unem­ployed, 19% are unskilled work­ers and 13% are employ­ees, while only 8% come from the fam­i­lies of teach­ers or pro­fes­sion­als⁴. The sec­ond approach is to cham­pi­on life­long learn­ing. Because, at the end of the day, “true equal­i­ty may lie in ensur­ing that people’s des­tinies are nev­er set in stone” adds Camille Peugny.

Guil­laume Hol­lard and his col­leagues at the Cen­tre de recherche en économie et sta­tis­tiques (CREST), who are look­ing more specif­i­cal­ly at the lack of diver­si­ty in sci­ence cours­es, are tak­ing a dif­fer­ent approach to the issue as part of a project sup­port­ed by the Fon­da­tion Poly­tech­nique. “Every­one agrees that the school sys­tem rein­forces exist­ing inequal­i­ties, but there is rarely a con­sen­sus on what needs to be done. One of the rea­sons for this is that there are no solid­ly estab­lished argu­ments for rec­om­mend­ing a par­tic­u­lar mea­sure, espe­cial­ly as reforms in France are rarely sub­ject to upstream exper­i­men­ta­tion or sub­se­quent eval­u­a­tion”, explains Guil­laume Hol­lard. The researchers there­fore set out to iden­ti­fy con­crete actions in the lit­er­a­ture that have been shown to have a sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly sound impact on inequal­i­ty. One of the avenues iden­ti­fied was a ran­domised exper­i­ment that showed that inform­ing pupils, at key moments in the guid­ance process, of their actu­al posi­tion in the dis­tri­b­u­tion of marks had a sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence on their choic­es and helped to sig­nif­i­cant­ly cor­rect the under-con­fi­dence shown by young girls and pupils from the most dis­ad­van­taged back­grounds⁵.

Using the exten­sive data avail­able from school life soft­ware and AI tech­niques, Guil­laume Hol­lard and his col­leagues are propos­ing to pro­vide school heads with a tool that will inform pupils of their pre­dict­ed suc­cess rates in dif­fer­ent streams when they choose their options or career choic­es at the end of the 2nde, 1ère and Ter­mi­nale. A part­ner­ship has already been set up with Index Édu­ca­tion, the com­pa­ny that pub­lish­es the Pronote school life soft­ware used by the major­i­ty of col­lèges and lycées, and a beta ver­sion of the tool should be test­ed from the start of the 2025–2026 aca­d­e­m­ic year on ini­tial sam­ples of pupils.

Anne Orliac