French citizens' assembly calls for school reforms
On 23 November 2025, a Citizens' Assembly in France adopted 20 recommendations on the length of school hours and other school reforms. Among other things, the mini-public proposes introducing five full school days per week instead of the four days that are standard in 90 per cent of municipalities. To prevent sleep deprivation, lessons for middle and upper school pupils should not start until 9 a.m.
Mornings would be used for theoretical instruction and afternoons for practical instruction. Practical instruction would include everyday workshops on crafts, cooking, sewing, housework, plumbing, and even financial management and preparation for tax returns. The Citizens' Assembly wants to reduce the amount of material to be learned and homework. The length of school holidays would remain unchanged.
Another proposal aims to introduce a mobility plan to ensure that travel time between home and school never exceeds 45 minutes ‘anywhere’.
Ministry for Children
The Citizens' Assembly's proposals also include the creation of a Ministry for Children. Among other things, the ministry would ensure coherent nationwide coordination between schools, extracurricular activities, education, health, culture and families.
The mini-public also lists working topics for the ministry: creating a youth campus, implementing a national plan for youth mobility, and considering spaces and times for providing meals to schoolchildren. Participative governance is to serve as the basis for the ministry's work.
Reducing class sizes
In order for all these changes to work, the Citizens' Assembly members believe that class sizes must be reduced. The participants also criticise the job cuts in the education sector planned in the 2026 budget. In order for the proposals to bear fruit, the citizens believe that curricula must also be reviewed and simplified, school buildings adapted and, finally, professions in the education sector upgraded.
School hours are ‘not adapted to children's biological rhythms,’ the Citizens' Assembly states in its citizens' report. Children are exposed to a ‘social model that values productivity and performance,’ with ‘increasingly scarce’ free time and the ubiquity of screens, which has ‘a significant impact on their health, learning and development.’
Criticism from trade unions
According to the Snes-FSU trade union, implementing the Citizens' Assembly's proposals would lead to an ‘organisational dead end’ and a ‘devalued school’ with ‘permanent channel surfing’, the effects of which would be ‘particularly detrimental to the pupils with the greatest difficulties’.
The Snalc union is even more severe. It considers that the €4 million spent on the Citizens' Assembly is ‘€4 million thrown out the window’. ‘The entire report is completely detached from the conditions under which it was produced and the actual functioning of our country,’ it complains.
Unfavourable conditions for implementation
The stars are not aligned for the implementation of the recommendations of the mini-public. The Citizens' Assembly was created by Prime Minister François Bayrou, who has since been dismissed and replaced by Sébastien Lecornu, who does not know how long he will remain in office. The ministers responsible are no longer the same. Budgetary constraints do not favour the investments necessary for reforms. And the National Assembly remains divided.
Another difficulty is that the timetable for reforms is tight. Local elections will be held in March 2026 and presidential elections in April 2027.
Ministries process recommendations
The Economic, Social and Environmental Council (CESE) has received assurances from the government that the relevant ministries will process the Citizens' Assembly's recommendations and issue a statement on them.
Anne Genetet, a member of the Renaissance party and former Minister of Education, has ensured that participants in the Citizens' Assembly will be heard by the National Assembly's Committee on Culture and Education in the first quarter of 2026.
‘Keeping the debate alive’
"We must keep the debate alive and give weight to these recommendations, because the issue of schools is of crucial importance. The Citizens' Assembly report reflects what many experts have been saying for years, even decades, and what many countries are taking up, while France is lagging behind,‘ Genetet explained.
CESE Kenza Occansey hopes that the proposals will ’live on thanks to the local election campaign" over the next four months. If this does not happen, he and the 133 members of the Citizens' Assembly will do everything they can to put the issue on the agenda for the 2027 presidential elections. ‘The issue will not go away until we have dealt with it. It is high time to make children's needs a priority,’ says Occansey.
‘Children are falling behind in performance levels’
President Emmanuel Macron announced the Citizens' Assembly on 2 May 2025 in an interview with the French daily newspaper Le Parisien. ‘I believe it is necessary for us to work on organising the school day in such a way that it is more conducive to pupils' development and learning, and to find a balance that makes life easier for families.’
‘We have very, very long summer holidays. Children who don't have family support often fall behind in their performance levels. The Citizens‘ Assembly seems to me to be the most suitable instrument for consulting the French population,’ said Macron. However, the mini-public has set different priorities in its recommendations.
Two months of summer holidays
French schoolchildren generally have a two-month summer holiday, with the school year ending in the first week of July and starting again on or shortly after 1 September.
Although the ‘grandes vacances’ are the longest holidays, there are many other holidays during the school year. Pupils (and teachers) have several two-week holidays. These include the autumn holidays on All Saints' Day, the Christmas holidays in December, the winter holidays in February/March and the spring holidays in April/May.
In total, schools have 16 weeks of holidays per year and 36 weeks of lessons. This means that France has one of the shortest school years in the world - the average in OECD countries is 38 weeks. Around a third of all countries worldwide have a school year of 40 weeks or more. However, according to the OECD, France is above average in terms of the number of lessons per year.
133 assembly members
The Citizens' Assembly on school and care times for children and young people between the ages of 3 and 18 started on 20 June 2025 and ran until the autumn. It consisted of 133 members who represented the French population in terms of age, gender, education, profession, place of residence and region of origin. The opinion research institute Harris Interactive recruited participants by calling randomly generated telephone numbers. All mini-public members received an expense allowance. All costs for travelling, accommodation and meals were covered. There was also a childcare allowance.
Seven working sessions took place from June to November 2025. Teachers, head teachers, parents, local politicians, sports and cultural organisations as well as medical, social and economic experts were involved in the consultations. A group of 20 children and young people aged between 12 and 17 came together to share their experiences and express their expectations.
Steering committee accompanied the process
A steering committee oversaw the process and monitored compliance with the principles of transparency and neutrality.
The CESE was tasked with organising the mini-public. ‘Our fellow citizens' unease with democracy is also a crisis of the effectiveness of government action. And this is precisely where participatory and social democracy comes into play, providing the necessary material for better designed, more implementable and more widely accepted public policies,’ said its president, Thierry Beaudet, on the Citizens' Assembly.
Third national assembly in France
The Citizens' Assembly on school and childcare hours was the third national assembly in France. Previously, there had already been citizens' assemblies on climate action and assisted dying.