Question 17859 — teaching

Summary

Mr. Aurélien Dutremble draws the attention of the Minister of National Education to the future of the rural school network in Saône-et-Loire and to the consequences of the experiment carried out in the department to prepare the school map for the 2027 to 2031 school years. According to national education projections, Saône-et-Loire could lose up to 7,666 students by 2035. This demographic drop must be anticipated, but it cannot lead to consider that fewer students necessarily mean fewer classes, fewer schools and fewer resources. 63% of municipalities in Saône-et-Loire still have a public school. This network constitutes an asset for a rural department: it contributes to the academic success of all, guarantees a local public service, contributes to the attractiveness of municipalities and promotes the settling in of families. However, the documents presented in the framework of the experiment explicitly questions the advisability of “concentrating the network of schools”. Such an orientation cannot become the systematic response to the decline in numbers. It would lead to further distances from schools, longer transport times for children and could render significant investments made by communities useless. Mayors, who know the realities and needs of their territory, must retain a determining place in the future of their schools. Residents of rural communities pay the same taxes and have the right, like all French people, to an accessible and local public education service. The departmental services of national education having submitted to the ministry, in July 2026, their report on the evolution of the school offer in Saône-et-Loire, it asks it to make it public the conclusions and to specify the orientations that it intends to adopt for the 2027 to 2031 school years. It also asks if it guarantees that this programming will not become a programming of closures of classes and rural schools, that no reorganization will be imposed against the opinion of the municipalities concerned and that the demographic decline will on the contrary make it possible to maintain classes with reasonable numbers, in the service of the academic success of all students; the demographic decline must not become the social plan of rural schools.

Machine translation from French. The official text remains authoritative.

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1. 1 September 2026

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• Aurélien Dutremble · auteur

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