College Results?

[Stefan]

We are hearing a lot of gossip about the low academic standards in our local collèges

Is there anyway of establishing the true level of attainment at the local collèges?

 

[Mistral]

It's very difficult to assess the true levels of collèges in France. The system is such that all teachers are supposed to be trained to the same level and the recrutement is done through a points system that barely takes teaching ability into acount. The schools themselves have no say in teacher recrutement. The teacher staff can change radically from one year to the next (I've worked in collèges where more than 50% has changed) Officially every school teaches the same programme to the same level.

About the only way that French parents judge collèges is on rumour, (my son did the pythagoras theorem before christmas and yours did it in March....) Reputations are notoriously slow to change. My last collège had a very bad reputation, to the extent that parents would try very hard to avoid it, but it actually had the highest brevet score in the town. The reputation was about 10 years out of date. A lot of parents judge more the sort of pupils who go to the collège than the collège itself.

I suppse ways that you could get some sort of idea would be from asking, what percentage of 3eme pass the brevet or go on to lycée general, but then you have to take into acount the catchment area, if the school is in an area where professional training is seen as important, more pupils will logically choose to go to lycée pro. This could be good careers advice rather than bad teaching.

You might be able to get hold of the 6eme evaluations and compare them with the brevet results from the rectorat, but the system isn't very good at sharing information.

About 10 years ago, my academie released their classement of all the collèges in the academie. It was based on various criteria such as parents being unemployed, parents being foreign (I loved that one!!) how many pupils had retaken a year, 6eme evaluation results.... All of it judged the pupils but not the school itself.

[Stefan]

Mistral

 

Many thanks for the reply, it was a great help.  Your comments regarding the rumours certainly tie in with the sort of stuff we've heard, especially folks judging the College by it's pupils, not it's academic performance.

 

Regards

Stefan