Analysis of French Education Funding

Paradox. This is today. The demonstration started with students in upper secondary education, and that's the level of education that receive the highest amount of money. Now, you guys might be thinking the same as me right now, that this isn't really a story about how much money there is. Rather it's about what's actually done with that money. So what is done with all that funding? Take time for a quick lesson on the French education system. The first thing to know is that French school days are very long by international standards. Eric told us that students in French high school complete around 1,200 working hours in every year, compared to the OECD average of around 960 hours a year. In France, we have close to the doubles of instructional hours in comparison to some Eastern European countries like Estonia, Latvia, we have also more instructional hours than in Germany. In uk, you might think that they spread those longer hours out across longer terms. They don't. The school year is only 36 weeks. The OECD average is 38 weeks. So French pupils have fewer days in school, but longer days when they are in to pack in a large number of teaching hours. The second thing is that a large chunk of the French education budget is being spent on pensions. The teachers pension scheme in France involves the people working now making payments towards current retirees rather than saving into their own pension pot. These contributions, known as contribut pici, are paid into a fund covering the wider civil service, not just teachers. And a recent government report found that pension payments represent about one third of the entire French education budget. And this is one third of the budget that is not allocated to to improve learning outcomes, to improve teacher salaries. That same report found that government spending on pensions overall had risen by 2.5 percentage points of GDP between 2000 and 2003. Meanwhile, education spending had declined by 0.5 percentage points in that same time. So while the French secondary education system might seem relatively well funded compared to other similar countries and is actually producing a lot more hours of education for that money,