Question 15344 — municipalities

Summary

Mr. Jérôme End draws the attention of the Minister of National Education to the situation of municipalities faced with the drop in school demographics and the cost of dismissing certain non-teaching staff. France has experienced a constant decline in the birth rate since 2011, which has led to a reduction in the number of students in its schools. The Department of Evaluation, Foresight and Performance (DEPP) of the Ministry of National Education published in April 2026 projections of student numbers for 2035, which confirm the extent of the demographic decline affecting French schools: almost 1.7 million fewer students in ten years, i.e. a drop of 14.2% in the school population. From the next school year, the first level is expected to lose 125,400 students and the second level 36,200 students, i.e. more than 160,000 fewer students at total. The decline would be mainly driven by nursery school, where the arrival of children born in 2023 would alone lead to a decline of 46,500 students in the junior section. Faced with this drop in the number of students, certain municipalities find themselves obliged to part with part of their supervisory staff to avoid overstaffing. Article 212-5 of the education code provides that the municipality manages non-staff teachers, in particular specialized territorial agents for nursery schools (ATSEM). It covers their remuneration, but also their unemployment compensation. Under article L. 5424-2 of the labor code, municipalities have the possibility of joining the unemployment insurance scheme, but only for their non-permanent agents. Thus, when they find themselves forced to lay off established staff hired on a permanent contract, the amount of unemployment benefits they must pay can be particularly high and have a strong impact on their financial situation, particularly when it comes to small rural communities. Given the burden that this represents for them, a burden imposed on them due to a demographic decline that they did not choose and in view of the student population projections which announce a deterioration of the situation in the years to come, he asks what measures he intends to take to support municipalities in difficulty to finance redundancies linked to the reduction in the number of students.

Machine translation from French. The official text remains authoritative.

Timeline

No timeline events have been ingested for this record yet.

Votes

No vote records are attached yet.

Versions

No version snapshots stored. Document URLs remain at the source.

Documents

No documents linked.

Sponsors

No sponsors or actors listed by the source.

Related records

No cross-record relationships stored yet.