French teachers are quitting in record numbers, overwhelmed by low pay, crowded classrooms and increasing demands. Despite successive reforms by previous governments, staffing shortages persist. And leaving the profession is often a difficult process. With the announcement of a new education minister just around the corner, will France’s public education crisis finally ease up?

Rémi Boyer taught history and geography in French public schools for 21 years but decided to retire early because the job “had become too difficult”. Paul* only lasted three years as a design teacher at a vocational high school before he became exhausted and quit. A German teacher who has spent the past five years teaching at a school a two-hour drive from her home is still in the trenches, trying to get transferred.

Public school teachers in France are reaching a breaking point. Faced with overcrowded classrooms, heavy workloads and low pay, many feel the commitment required by the profession is no longer sustainable.

Years of neglect and underfunding have left French public schools struggling, and teachers are bearing the brunt of these challenges – often with little support or recognition.

Despite promises by successive governments to address the issue, reforms have failed to tackle core problems. There have been four education ministers in the last year alone. Measures introduced by former education minister Gabriel Attal in 2023 and implemented for the 2024-2025 school term include more testing in primary schools, a controversial plan to separate middle school students into groups according to their mathematics and French levels, and experimenting with mandatory school uniforms – moves fiercely opposed by education unions, who have called for successive strikes since the start of the year.

Coupled with the fact that since 2010, the requirements to be hired as a tenured public sector teacher became more stringent, the share of teachers voluntarily leaving the profession is at an all-time high.

Inheriting a tarnished track record, the incoming education minister should be announced by Prime Minister Michel Barnier next week, and will have to put actions to words if they want to curb the trend.

 

Staffing shortages
Although resignations are relatively moderate in comparison to the total number of teachers in France, they are growing exponentially. In the space of just ten years, the number of departures quadrupled from 2012 to 2022.

And that is due to multiple reasons. Not only are teachers facing heftier workloads, particularly administrative tasks, but they are also required to carry out differentiated teaching in packed classrooms of 30 or more students. Many feel they suffer from a lack of recognition and support, with salaries that don’t reflect the efforts they put in their job.

These contributing factors are compounded by the fact that the French public education system – which schools 80 percent of French pupils – is grappling with significant staffing shortages in its public schools.

3,185 teaching posts went unfilled for the start of this year’s school term, according to figures published by the French ministry of education in July. And the absence of teachers amounted to around 15 million hours of teaching lost in the 2022-2023 school year – stripping students of essential learning hours.

“I never really planned on being a teacher,” said Paul, who previously worked as a graphic designer and DJ. After the Covid-19 pandemic first hit in early 2020, he was looking for something more stable. “My mum taught first-graders and I knew that teaching was something I could be interested in.”

So when a friend told Paul there was an opening for a design teacher at a vocational high school in the Seine-et-Marne region east of Paris, he applied. “One week later, I was standing in a classroom full of students,” he said. Short-staffed, the school was in dire need of someone to fill the position. “All I needed to do was prove I had a Master’s degree in design, that my criminal record was clean and fill out some administrative forms. Nobody met with me or interviewed me before I started to see whether I knew how to teach. It was crazy,” he recalled.  

In an effort to fill gaping staffing shortages, the French government launched a scheme in 2022 to hire contract teachers on fixed-term contracts in public schools. Prospective teachers in France normally have to go through a competitive tenure system and pass demanding exams to eventually become “titulaires” – civil servants working as licensed teachers in the public sector.

By introducing this short-cut and simplifying requirements, the hope was that staffing shortages could be quelled and the strain on the educated system eased. But many contracted teachers, many of whom had no previous teaching experience, received little to no training and quit shortly after.

Though a disorienting first year as a teacher was to be expected for Paul, over time, he began to run into difficulties. The school board would pile on his workload, change the format of exams without explanation and rarely show support when teachers would ask for clarifications. “I had the impression I was caught in the middle. Students were expecting a lot from me to help them get their high school diploma. And at the same time, the people who are meant to tell me how to prepare them were throwing the ball back in my court as if it were all up to me,” he said.

Quickly, the job became overwhelming. “I also had psychologically fragile students. I am not equipped to help someone who tells me that they thought of jumping out of their window that morning, or that they can’t be around sharp objects with scars all over their arms,” he outlined. “It’s the kind of job that you never stop thinking about. It’s exhausting.”

After three years of teaching, he decided he had had enough and quit at the end of the 2023 school term. “I told myself that these students don’t deserve someone who isn’t one hundred percent invested,” he explained.

 

Working conditions
Reforms set for the 2024-2025 school term sparked mass strikes earlier this year as teachers condemned the lack of measures tackling serious issues. Challenging conditions mean public schools in France struggle to attract fresh recruits. As a result, they are disproportionately reliant on teachers who are young, inexperienced and at the lower end of the pay scale – many of whom end up dropping out.

Rather than improving conditions of the profession by increasing pay or finding solutions for overcrowded classrooms, the downsides of the job continue to gain the upper hand.

A German teacher in a French public school with a hefty following on social media recently outlined how difficult working conditions coupled with a lack of support from education authorities can quickly unfurl into a nightmare. On X, she detailed how she had spent the last five years working at a school two hours away by car from her home – waiting to gather enough points to be transferred.

The French education ministry uses a points system to grant job transfers to tenured teachers who wish to switch school. Points are awarded based on things like seniority, the school they teach in, how many children they have, whether they live with a disability and where their spouse lives and their ranking.

In March of this year, she finally gathered enough points to be transferred, only to learn that the two schools she would be working in were both even further away – a two-and-a-half hour drive from her house. She contested the decision with support from the SNES teacher’s union but was told that “the lack of German teachers” in the area meant “they have no wiggle room”.

“I went to see my doctor … and he wrote me a leave notice, which I sent to the middle school I was transferred to. I explained that the notice would be renewed until they found a solution, because I simply can’t work there, physically and materially speaking,” she wrote.

“Imagine if I had accepted the transfer. How long until I would have had an accident on my way to work?” she added.

The salaries of French teachers regularly fall below the OECD average, despite the government spending more on education per student than the average OECD country. Early career teachers in Germany, for example, earn twice as much as their French counterparts – even with the salary hikes introduced in 2023.

To add to the list of hostile conditions, French teachers also cope with longer hours of teaching and have one of the worst pupil-teacher ratios in Europe.

Recent violent outbreaks in schools have further added to the long list of grievances. In March this year, for example, a principal at a Parisian high school resigned after receiving death threats online following an altercation with a student.

Rémi Boyer spent a total of 21 years teaching history and geography in Rouen to middle schoolers in high-priority education networks (REP), school districts in France that are disadvantaged. He described the last six years of his career as “nerve-wracking”.

“I was being put through the ringer by pupils in overcrowded classrooms five hours a day each day,” he recalled. “I no longer had the patience … So at 63, I said to myself that I would rather be healthy than deal with the working conditions I was facing.” 

Boyer decided to leave teaching and retire three years before receiving his full pension. “I knew I could not last any longer as a teacher,” he said.

Despite the tough conditions they face, teachers in France are some of the most qualified across OECD countries.

 

That’s no way to say goodbye
To make matters worse, it is often very difficult for tenured teachers to leave their profession.

Contractual terminations or “ruptures conventionelles” were only introduced for tenured teachers in 2020 as part of a five-year experiment. This form of terminating a contract gives a tenured public sector teacher the right to access unemployment benefits and other severance support. An initial assessment by education unions in 2020 found that 80 percent of contractual terminations were rejected. The alternative is to resign without warning, or “abandon de poste”, meaning the employee would have no safety net.

Tenured teachers, or “titulaires”, cannot leave unless the education ministry gives them the green light to do so – a procedure that can last months. As civil servants, their request to quit must be validated by the regional education authority and can be refused on the grounds that their service is necessary. Once they leave, they lose their status as civil servants, meaning they can’t jump back on the tenured teaching bandwagon or any other government job for six years.

“If a teacher decides to quit and this doesn’t suit the local education authorities, they can issue a service requirement [and force them to stay]. In other words, they can say: ‘No, we need you, we are short-staffed and you can’t leave’,” explained Boyer.

Teachers looking for greener pastures also come up against a lack of resources, both in terms of information and support. Information provided to teachers on the education ministry website is sparse and the procedure is so complex, many blogs and social media groups have propped up to fill the gaps.

That is why in 2006 Boyer decided to launch Aide Aux Profs, a non-profit that supports teachers by providing information on their rights as well as advice on how to quit.

“Those who are really determined will just quit without a safety net. Maybe they recently touched an inheritance, maybe they won the lotto. Maybe they’re young and can go back to living with their parents while they find their footing. But that is not the case for most of us,” he said.

And while contract teachers also have the right to contractual terminations, negotiating one is no easy feat. Paul waited until the end of the school year to refuse a contract renewal and take up studying again. This way, he was sure to be able to access unemployment benefits. “I’m happy that I wasn’t a tenured teacher,” he said. “I have colleagues who told me when I left that they would love to quit but don’t have the means to.”

The German teacher thinks quitting “is a great idea” and “is all for it”. While she has toyed with the idea for the first time in her eight years as a teacher, she will not be resigning for now.

“Why resign?” she wrote in her X thread. “I did my work. I studied five years, took the competitive exams, accepted constraints while teaching for eight years. I’m not the problem here. I shouldn’t be the one getting into sh*t just because the French education system is not working.”