Social:Nursery Schools of France

A nursery school (école maternelle) in Pointe-à-Pitre in the department of Guadeloupe, France

In France, nursery school (l'école maternelle) accommodates children aged 3 to 5, and some schools will accept students as young as 2 years old.

The école maternelle is an integral part of the broader French educational system. It precedes the elementary school and is fully integrated with it — its students feed directly into the elementary school programme. In 2014, it educated 11.8% of two-year-old children and almost all three- to five-year-old children. Nursery school was optional until the start of the 2019 school year, but is now compulsory from the age of three.

There are currently 14,283 public nursery schools in France, as well as 135 private establishments. The nursery school cycle is an important element of the French education system and aims to ensure the awakening and socialisation of young children.

History

18th century origins

Before the development of more formal institutions of early childhood care, there were only haphazard shelters for young children. They functioned more as a babysitting services. They had no educational mission.

Other centres for caring for very young children opened at the end of the 18th century with initiatives such as that of Pastor Jean-Frédéric Oberlin who, in 1771, created the so-called “knitting school” in the Vosges. Oberlin's objective was not only to protect children from the dangers of the streets, but also to teach them. The work in early childhood education of Oberlin and of his collaborators, Sara Banzet and Louise Scheppler, continued for many years. However, it took many years before their ideas caught on.

This type of school developed at the beginning of the 19th century in parallel with the industrial revolution. The schools’ first vocation was essentially social protection: they offered a secure place to the children of the workers in order to protect them from the dangers of the street. For that reason, the precursors of the nursery school were called “rooms of asylum” or “rooms of hospitality”.

19th century developments

A building still marked as housing a 'room of asylum' (salle d'asile) in Trondes, northeast France

The idea that children of the working class needed protection carried into the 19th century, but with an influx of new ideas. The creation of “rooms of asylum” in France was influenced by developments in Scotland and England. In 1810, the famous Robert Owen founded a school for small children in his cotton mills at New Lanark, Scotland. He entrusted the direction of the school to a simple weaver, James Buchanan, a man without education, but possessing remarkable aptitudes for education. Buchanan's successes in the New Lanark school attracted notice: in 1819 he was called to London by Henri Brougham and tasked with organising infant schools in the capital. He succeeded at this new task and created a whole set of processes forming a method of education and teaching.

In 1825, accounts describing with admiration the English infant schools began to circulate in Parisian salons. Mme de Pastoret - a wealthy philanthropist who had already started a kind of crèche for the care of very young, working class children in Paris - heard these accounts and resolved to put these ideas into practice in France. She then formed a Women's Committee, which obtained a subsidy of 3000 francs and a concession of premises. An asylum receiving 80 children was opened in April 1826.

It was at this time that Jean-Denis Cochin, mayor of the second arrondissement of Paris, who was devoted to the cause of protecting and developing children, contacted the Women's Committee. He feared a setback for Mme de Pastoret's work (she had earlier created a crèche that had to be closed because

Jules Ferry, a key architect of the French education system, including the écoles maternelles

was insufficient personnel to take care of the number of children), which would have compromised their project of providing early childhood care and education. He shared his apprehensions with the Committee and persuaded a woman to go and study infant schools in London. Wanting to learn Buchanan's method himself, Cochin also went to London. After a year of study, he returned to France with the translation of Buchanan's manuals, which he published in 1833. He and Mme de Pastoret then created various schools modeled on the London schools. However, in 1833, asylum rooms were still extremely rare and few cities had them (9 in Paris and Strasbourg, 4 in Lyon, 1 in Chartres).

During this same year, the Guizot law required each municipality with more than 500 inhabitants to open a primary school for boys and, though schooling was not free, the communes were required to make free education available to poor students. This was the first step in the creation of a universal system of public education.

The Falloux law of 1850 took a further step toward universal education by requiring towns with more than 800 inhabitants to create schools for girls. The law devoted just three short articles to the écoles maternelles. It sought to provide a certain amount of freedom to private asylum rooms, while also organising state control over them and integrating them into the broader school system.

The year 1881 marked many changes to primary education in France. In 1881, the asylum rooms were replaced by the first nursery schools and the staff was replaced by teachers trained specifically for teaching in elementary schools. The law of June 16, 1881, proposed by Jules Ferry, made schools public and secular. The écoles maternelles were non-compulsory, but were provided as a free public service and fully integrated with elementary school education. The decree of August 2, 1881 established the primary mission of nursery schools as one of providing young children with the possibility of obtaining the care necessary for their physical, moral and intellectual development.

On March 28, 1882, a law made education compulsory for children aged six to thirteen.

From the outset, nursery schools were designed to receive children of both sexes and thus constituted, until a relatively recent past, the only level of schooling in France to practice co-education.

Post-World War II developments

Nursery schools changed little during the first few decades of the 20th century. It was after World War II that their positioning shifted away from a focus on social protection and onto to one of early childhood education for families of all social classes. At the end of the 1950s, child mortality had already fallen considerably and the birth rate was experiencing a marked recovery. In addition, the development of the service sector led to a boom in female employment which created a need for childcare services.

During the 1960s and 1970s, education and child development became concerns that families of all social classes shared to varying degrees. In addition, the popularisation of child psychology introduced new perspectives on child development to non-specialists and highlighted the importance of the environment and stimulation in early childhood.

Until the 1950s, attendance at nursery schools was mainly limited to cities and large towns located in industrial France and it remained relatively low. This changed significantly in subsequent decades. While about 40% of children aged 2 to 5 were enrolled in kindergarten in 1950, 70% were enrolled in 1972 and were more evenly distributed across French territory. More recently, almost all children aged three to five are enrolled in school (e.g. 98.9% at the start of the 2018). This growing recourse by all social classes to the école maternelle system appears to be largely due to changes in lifestyles (e.g. the influence of urbanisation and the growing involvement of women in the labour market). Also, the evolving views of the status of the child reinforced the nursery schools' pedagogical prestige inasmuch as they were seen as educating the child, without being boring.

Training nursery school teachers

During part of the French Third Republic, nursery schools were under the supervision of Pauline Kergomard, the system's first general inspector. Her emphasis was on promoting the natural development of the child and the full integration of the écoles maternelles into the broader school system. Specifically, her somewhat avant-garde objectives were: Show respect for young children; do not over-emphasise academic exercises; encourage play as a natural form of child activity; deepen child psychology; and adapt the buildings and furniture to the needs of young children.

As for the adults responsible for looking after the children in these schools, the dominant tendency was for a professionalisation of their role. This was and is accomplished through a combination of academic studies and on-site training. The on-site training takes place in demonstration schools, which are normal elementary or nursery schools, but which also participate in the training of future school teachers. Until 1991, the demonstration schools were attached to the teacher training colleges whose students applied what they have learned, under the direction of experienced teachers. The teacher training colleges were replaced in 1991 by the University Teacher Training Institutes (IUFM).

The objectives of modern nursery schools

In 2022, the weekly duration of lessons in nursery school is 24 hours. According to the French Ministry of National Education, the nursery school programme is organized into five learning areas that seek to promote:

• Mobilizing language in all its dimensions
• Acting, expressing oneself and understanding through physical activity
• Acting, expressing oneself and understanding through artistic activities
• Building the first tools to structure the child's thinking
• Exploring the world.

Nursery school becomes obligatory from the age of three

Nursery schools in France traditionally offer three classes corresponding to three age groups: the small section (PS), the middle section (MS) and the large section (GS), and sometimes also has a very small section (TPS) for children under three years old.

Before the start of the school year in 2019, attendance at nursery school was not mandatory — education of children was only compulsory from the year in which the child celebrated his sixth birthday. The law promulgated on July 28, 2019, lowered the age of compulsory schooling for children to the year in which they have their third birthday.

Nursery school is open to all children residing in France, regardless of their nationality.

See also

• Education in France
• History of education in France
• Preschool
• Early childhood education