Combating social and territorial inequalities: how to build a more equitable school?

The event will be held exclusively in French.

The annual conference of the Education Policy and Social Mobility Chair will focus on social and territorial inequalities in the education system and the public policies implemented to address them.

With the participation of Pascal Bressoux (Professor of Education Sciences at the University of Grenoble-Alpes), Jérôme Deauvieau (Professor of Sociology at the École Normale Supérieure – PSL and researcher at the Maurice Halbwachs Center), Christophe Kerrero (Advisor to the School Evaluation Council and former Rector of the Paris Education Authority), Catherine Moisan (Member of the Ethical and Scientific Committee of Parcoursup), Bénédicte Robert (Inspector General for Education, Sports and Research and former Rector of the Poitiers Education Authority), and Magda Tomasini (Director of the DEPP – Directorate for Evaluation, Forecasting and Performance – at the Ministry of National Education).

The roundtable will be moderated by Violaine Morin, journalist at Le Monde.

Despite the stated ambitions of the French republican school system, social and territorial inequalities remain particularly pronounced within the French educational system. These inequalities manifest in persistent disparities in academic achievement, access to higher education, and teaching conditions depending on schools and regions.

In response to this situation, several policies have been implemented in recent years as levers to build a more equitable school system: reducing class sizes in priority education networks, increasing bonuses for teachers working in schools with socially disadvantaged students, initiatives to strengthen the relationship between parents and schools, experiments to promote social diversity in middle schools, excellence boarding schools, as well as reforms in the procedures for assigning students to high schools and higher education institutions…

What can we learn from these policies? What insights can be drawn from available evaluations to inform future decisions? How can we coordinate the different levels of intervention—from the State to local authorities—while building on grassroots initiatives and field experiments? These are some of the questions that will be addressed in this roundtable, bringing together the perspectives of researchers and experts in the education system.