France’s Public Schools Are Falling Apart, and the Budget Explains Why

I

Créteil, eastern suburbs of Paris. On the morning of September 28, 2025, students at Lycée Saint-Exupéry did not walk into class. They dragged trash cans to the school gate and piled them into a low wall. Someone pulled a desk out of a classroom and laid it across the entrance.

A boy in a gray hoodie sat on the desk and spoke to the classmates around him. A France24 reporter recorded it. “We kids from the suburbs are like people society has forgotten.”

That was not a slogan. It described one school. The Lycée Saint-Exupéry building went up in the 1970s. Its roof waterproofing expired years ago. When it rains, plastic buckets line the third-floor corridor. Toilet paper often runs out. Students bring their own. Some classes do not have enough desks. Two students share one, elbows bumping as they write.

Sixteen-year-old Victoire stood in the crowd. “The classrooms leak,” she said. “It is freezing in winter and stifling in summer. How are we supposed to study?”

Within four days, that sentence traveled from Créteil to Lille, Rennes, Toulouse, Nantes, Marseille, and Strasbourg. Hundreds of high schools were blockaded. By October 2, French authorities had closed 400 schools, and police had taken nearly 2,000 people away, including minors. The principal of a middle school in Marseille had gasoline poured on him.

The prime minister called an emergency meeting. Officials warned the protest could become nationwide unrest.

A public high school in a developed country, with a leaking roof, a shortage of desks, and two students squeezed into one desk. This is daily life in France in 2025.

II

To understand why this happened, start with a payslip.

In January 2026, France’s full-time minimum wage, the SMIC, was 1,823.03 euros a month before tax. A newly hired certified public middle school teacher had a base salary of about 2,000 euros. After inflation and years of frozen wage indexes, a union representative did the math: in 1981, a new teacher earned 2.2 times the minimum wage. Today, 1.1 times.

France Stratégie reports that new teachers’ pay fell from 2.3 times the SMIC in the early 2000s to about 1.2 times today. At the end of a career, the picture is just as bad. In 1989, a teacher about to retire could earn 3.5 times the SMIC. Today, 2.3 times. The lifetime earnings curve for teachers has been flattened over four decades.

Compared with European neighbors, French teachers fare worse. The OECD’s 2025 Education at a Glance says French primary school teachers’ salaries are 20.6 percent below the OECD average. New teachers in Germany start at about 3,300 euros. Belgium, about 2,700. Finland, about 2,600. France, at 2,000, is at the bottom.

In a report to the Council of the European Union, the French education system’s statistical service wrote that at every level, teacher salaries are lower than those of other workers with equivalent qualifications. Primary school teachers earn 26 percent less. Lower secondary, 17 percent less. Upper secondary, 8 percent less.

The pay collapse drove away new teachers. In the 2024–2025 school year, 2,100 formal teachers voluntarily left the national education system. That is 3 out of every 1,000. In 2008, the rate was 0.5 per 1,000. More than half of those who left were trainees. They quit in their first year.

A 2025 UNSA Education survey covered 53,209 education workers. Sixty-four percent of lower and upper secondary teachers had considered resigning in the past two years. Thirty-seven percent wanted another public-sector job. Twenty-five percent planned to enter the private sector.

Two-thirds of teachers are present but not really there. Those who stay are not necessarily unwilling to leave. They cannot leave yet.

The cost of staying is visible. In 2022–2023, 9.5 percent of lower and upper secondary teachers in public education were contract substitutes. Of those, 71.5 percent were on temporary contracts. These substitutes have not completed full teacher certification. Their turnover is high. In suburban schools with the worst shortages, students may see three or four different teachers in one semester.

One teacher may cover 10 classes. To finish the required lessons, the school day stretches longer. Students put up a slogan: “Class time is longer than sleep time.” They chanted: “From 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., are we students or prisoners?”

III

Teacher pay cannot rise. The reason is simple: the government has no money.

That “no money” needs unpacking. France does not lack resources. It sends them elsewhere first. In 2026, public debt interest payments are expected to reach about 80 billion euros. The Ministry of National Education’s annual budget is about 65 billion euros. The president of the Court of Accounts warned publicly that debt interest is becoming the state’s largest budget item, ahead of education.

Debt is rigid. France’s public debt has passed 3.5 trillion euros, and interest grows by billions each year. Pensions are rigid too. France’s pension system takes one of the highest shares of GDP among developed countries. Any cut triggers mass protest. The 2023 pension reform proved it: more than a million people in the streets, months of strikes, and the government forcing the bill through with Article 49.3.

Defense spending has risen since the Russia-Ukraine war. Macron has promised to push defense spending above 2 percent of GDP. In 2024, France’s military aid to Ukraine topped 3 billion euros.

Squeezed by these three fixed costs, education becomes the flexible line. In 2024, the national education budget was cut by 683 million euros. The 2026 budget nominally added about 200 million euros, but it cut 4,018 formal teacher posts: 1,891 in primary schools, 1,365 in lower and upper secondary, and 762 in private contract schools.

The political logic is cold and clear. Middle and high school students do not vote. Teacher unions have less influence. Cutting education saves money now.

Pension money cannot be touched. Military money cannot be touched. Only education money can be touched.

In the long run, this is fiscal shortsightedness. The money saved by cutting teacher posts is smaller than the productivity losses and social costs that weaker education will create. OECD research has repeatedly found a positive link between PISA scores and long-term economic growth. France is mortgaging tomorrow’s competitiveness with today’s teacher payroll.

IV

The squeeze shows up on students’ report cards.

In the 2022 PISA assessment, France’s math score was 474, down 21 points from 2018. Reading was also 474, down 19 points. The share of low-achieving students rose by 7.6 percentage points in math and 5.9 points in reading. Both increases were above the EU average.

The average decline matters. So does the widening gap.

In France, a student’s socioeconomic background explains 21.5 percent of the variance in math scores. The OECD average is 15.5 percent. What family a child is born into predicts academic performance more than what the child learns at school.

The gap at the bottom is starker. In France, disadvantaged students are 10 times more likely than advantaged students to miss the minimum proficiency level in math. The OECD average is 7 times. Nearly half, 49.4 percent, of disadvantaged students do not reach minimum proficiency in math. In 2018, the figure was 39.1 percent.

The French Ministry of Education confirms this in a document to the Council of the European Union. France is listed as one of the OECD countries with the largest between-school student inequality. The gap in written comprehension between students from different socioeconomic backgrounds is 107 points. In a 2024 report, France’s Higher Council for Education called the problem “structural inequality.” The French school system, the report said, has neither raised the abilities of students at the bottom nor narrowed the gap caused by family background.

France is not alone. But in France, fiscal austerity makes it worse. When public schools deteriorate, with leaking classrooms, missing desks, and rotating substitutes, the families with no choices suffer most. Wealthy families can send children to private schools or move to good districts. Low-income families stay and take what a declining public school can give.

V

The decay of French public schools is speeding up an old sorting machine: educational stratification.

According to the French Ministry of Education, 79 percent of lower and upper secondary students are in public schools. Twenty-one percent are in private schools. At the gates of elite higher education, that ratio flips.

Sciences Po is a cradle of France’s political elite. Its politics and international relations program ranks third globally in the QS rankings. About 35 percent of first-year students come from private high schools. Private high schools make up about 20 percent of all high schools. An academic study of admissions data found that among the high schools sending the most students to Sciences Po and Paris Dauphine University, private schools accounted for 41 to 47 percent.

Private education is not the cause of the gap. After controlling for social origin, academic achievement, and school characteristics, the study found that private school students were no more likely, and sometimes less likely, to be admitted to Sciences Po than public school students. Private school overrepresentation comes from two sources. Private school students apply more often and apply more strategically. Their student body is also wealthier.

Research in the sociology of French education has long shown this cycle. In private contract lower secondary schools, the share of students from “very wealthy” families rose from 29 percent two decades ago to 40 percent. In public schools, the share is 20 percent. Students from disadvantaged families make up 42 percent of public schools but only 18 percent of private schools. A 2024 French Senate report said private schools “are becoming a form of social segregation.”

Public schools take in most children from low-income families. Their resources are shrinking. Their buildings are aging. Private schools concentrate children from wealthy families and offer better teachers and facilities. Elite university admissions show that private school students hold a disproportionate place on the path to power and opportunity.

The United States follows a similar pattern. Nine percent of K–12 students attend private schools, but nearly 40 percent of Harvard freshmen come from private high schools. Research by Harvard economist Raj Chetty’s team found that about 70 percent of students at 12 top U.S. universities come from families in the top 20 percent of income. 14.5 percent come from the top 1 percent. The number of students from top 1 percent families exceeds the number from the bottom 50 percent combined.

France is heading down the same road. The difference is that France’s public education tradition runs deeper. The free, secular, compulsory system built by Jules Ferry in the 1880s was a pillar of the French social contract. Regardless of origin, every child had a chance to change their life through school.

That contract is being eroded by budget cuts, resignation letters, and leaking classrooms.

VI

The surface story is that the government has no money. The story underneath is that it spends money elsewhere.

In 2025, France’s fiscal deficit was 5.8 percent of GDP, far above the EU’s 3 percent ceiling. Public debt exceeds 3.5 trillion euros. Under those constraints, cutting education looks like rational restraint.

That reasoning misses a fact. Cutting education spending shifts costs onto students and families through worse learning conditions, lower teacher quality, and narrower social mobility. Those costs return to public finances later: lower productivity, higher unemployment, greater demand for welfare, and more social conflict in a polarized country.

French high school students carried a slogan: “Class time is longer than sleep time.” They chanted: “From 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., are we students or prisoners?” Those questions go beyond the timetable. They ask what kind of future a society is preparing when it will not spend reasonable money on the next generation.

Back to Créteil. The Lycée Saint-Exupéry building is still there. The roof waterproofing has not been repaired. The plastic buckets in the third-floor corridor wait for the next rain. Toilet paper still runs out. Some classes still do not have enough desks. Two students share one.

By now, you know why.

A 16-year-old girl stands at the school gate. “We kids from the suburbs are like people society has forgotten.”

She was not wrong.