France’s Education Minister Launches New Middle School General Competition

The French Minister of Education announced on April 2, 2026, the establishment of a concours général for middle schools. The initiative is designed to create émulation and promote achievement among students within the lower-secondary education system.

This announcement coincides with broader national reforms scheduled for the 2026-2027 implementation period. These reforms specifically target approximately 800 lower-secondary schools where at least 40% of pupils score below 8/20 in both French and mathematics on the Brevet examination, with the objective of reducing significant academic difficulties.

Integration with Industrial and Technical Goals

The push for academic excellence follows the 2025-2026 Year of Engineering, a joint effort by the Ministry of National Education and the National Centre for Scientific Research. This program aims to prepare students for 21st-century challenges, including the preservation of resources, climate change adaptation, and energy and ecological transitions.

A central objective of the Year of Engineering is to bolster industrial sovereignty by bringing together the sectors of education, research, and business to showcase technological applications. The initiative also focuses on promoting engineering careers to students, particularly young women, to increase gender diversity in scientific and technical fields.

To support these goals, the government has utilized several resources, including:

• A dedicated website, engineeringyear.co.uk, providing career information and educational resources.
• Classroom and laboratory presentations by researchers, engineers, and technicians.
• The Back to My Secondary School initiative, which allows engineering students to interact with current pupils regarding their academic pathways.

Curriculum and Standard Reforms

The current initiatives are part of a wider systemic overhaul that began with the 2025 academic year. These reforms, unveiled by Minister of National Education Elisabeth Borne, were designed to modernize teaching practices and address academic decline for approximately 12 million students and 850,000 teachers.

A significant component of this overhaul was the reinstatement of mandatory mathematics in the core curriculum. Beginning in the 2023 school year, students in their final two years of high school (Première and Terminale) who did not choose mathematics as a specialty subject are required to take a mandatory 1.5-hour weekly mathematics course.

This move followed a sharp decline in the number of final-year high school students taking mathematics, which dropped from 90% prior to the 2019 reform to 59% afterward, impacting France’s international rankings in the OECD’s PISA report.