National Education: The new roadmap

“70% of pupils in the public system do not master the program at the end of primary school”. This sentence in the mouth of the Minister of National Education slams like a burst of machine gun fire. And for good reason, the public school does not provide basic learning and arouses the mistrust of citizens.

For the schooling of their children, they have chosen schools in the private sector or the foreign schools present in certain cities. In secondary schools, things are no better: on average, 10% of students in the public system do not master the program at the end of the course. With these figures, it is normal for school dropouts to exceed 300,000 students per year, and precisely, Chakib Benmoussa wants to reduce this figure by one third by 2026,  i.e. the date of the end of the term of office of this government. In any case, his task is not small. This is why the minister has drawn up a roadmap supposed to rectify the situation which he presented to the Government Council before giving his outline to the press on Thursday 10 November. For Chakib Benmoussa, this is a long-term reform whose impacts are staggered over time, starting from the 2022-2023 prefiguration, then the inflection during 2024-2025, before arriving at expansion in 2026-2027. The roadmap is based on three pillars: the student, the teacher, and the school. The first version proposed was shared and discussed by more than 100,000 people including students, teachers, and families, which enriched the final 2022-2026 roadmap for a quality public school for all. This reform prioritizes the impact on students and proposes solutions and practical measures to improve the quality of public schools. This roadmap is considered as a window of opportunity which is offered today to materialize the reform resulting from the royal orientations and to rebuild the confidence of the citizens in this public school, say our sources.

Mohamed CHAOUI