Jules Ferry 3.0

Published on 3 October 2014 after ten months of work and more than a hundred hearings, in the wake of the Council’s earlier work on digital inclusion. The report appeared a few weeks after the presidential announcement of a “digital plan for schools”: it was read, and sometimes used, as a contribution to that plan. Its reception in parliament was unusual for a report from an advisory body: at least six written questions from members of parliament named it explicitly in the weeks that followed.

What succeeded, and at what cost. The central recommendation was followed: computer science became a fully-fledged school subject, through the SNT (sciences numériques et technologie — digital sciences and technology) course in seconde (the first year of lycée, roughly Year 10) and then the NSI (numérique et sciences informatiques — digital and computer science) specialisation, both introduced from the 2019 school year onward. But the gap with the original intention is stark. The report called for computer science to be extended to all tracks; the ISN option (informatique et sciences du numérique — information technology and digital sciences) had already existed since 2012, confined to the science track. The reform produced one more specialisation, chosen by pupils already headed toward the sciences, where the report aimed at a general, critical digital culture for everyone. A niche option became a track of excellence, not a common foundation.

Teacher training: the instrument obtained, the scale missed. This was the bottleneck the report had correctly identified, and it was not ignored: a CAPES (the secondary school teaching certification exam) in digital and computer science opened as early as the 2020 session, an agrégation (a more senior, competitive teaching qualification) in computer science followed from 2022, and continuing-education diplomas were offered to volunteer teachers, mostly mathematics teachers. But the numbers stayed wildly out of scale with the stated ambition: thirty CAPES places in 2020, fifty in 2022, fifty for the CAPES and twenty-two for the agrégation in 2023. By the end of 2022, only two out of three lycées (upper-secondary schools) offered the specialisation. The Société informatique de France (France’s computer science learned society) calculated that, at the observed pace, full coverage of lycées would not be reached until around 2037. Getting the instrument without getting the numbers is losing in twelve years what one thought had been won in five.

What has aged worst. The assumptions. The 2014 text shared its era’s optimism about the effects of digital equipment in the classroom. Research conducted since has not confirmed that link, and several countries have since restricted the use of screens in schools. The report was probably right to want computer science taught, and wrong to believe that equipment would transform pedagogy. The comparison that structured its reasoning (England folding computer science into the science curriculum in 2013, following the Royal Society’s Shut down or restart report) was about the discipline, not the machines. Only half the message got through.