Vincent Dupriez

While freedom of education can be considered as a key foundation of the French-speaking Belgian educational quasi-market, a series of political measures have been passed since 2007, aimdc at regulating the enrolment procedures at the entrance of secondary schooling. This chapter outlines these four successive “enrolment decrees”, scrutinizes their normative grounds and technical instruments, and aims to understand their limited empirical effects by situating them in a broader historical and policy framework. The text documents the political rise of a new problematization of the links between free choice, school market and inequalities/segregation, and identifies the two conflicting cause-based coalitions of actors that have been shaping this debate. The chapter puts these findings under discussion through the lens of a neo-institutionalist approach to path dependence and path-shifting processes (Hall, 1993) and of the sociology of educational markets and their instruments (Karpik, 2007; Draelants, 2023). We argue that the recent transformations of the quasi-market – now clearly embedded in a new institutional configuration, marked by post-bureaucratic modes of regulation (Maroy, 2008) – lead to ambivalent singularization and de-singularization movements that could reinforce the singularizing and differentiating market forces they pretend to control.

La littérature scientifique sur le développement professionnel des enseignants identifie l’établissement scolaire et son collectif enseignant comme vecteur d’apprentissage professionnel. Notre étude compréhensive interroge le rôle de l’établissement scolaire parmi les multiples opportunités d’apprentissage offertes aux enseignants, en assumant une vision multispatialisée du lieu de travail des enseignants. Les résultats de l’analyse de 37 entretiens semi-directifs d’enseignants expérimentés invitent à penser l’apprentissage en situation de travail des enseignants comme un paysage d’apprentissage professionnel au sein duquel les enseignants adoptent différentes postures et trajectoires d’apprentissage.

De nombreuses recherches montrent que le défi de l’attractivité de l’enseignement serait lié aux causes du décrochage professionnel, parmi lesquelles figurent la pénibilité des conditions de travail, le manque de reconnaissance sociale et un salaire qui ne correspond pas à l’investissement en temps et en efforts que réclame une formation initiale de plus en plus exigeante. Des facteurs culturels peuvent-ils également expliquer la tendance à l’attrition ? Un travail de plus en plus évalué et transformé au nom de l’efficacité correspond-il toujours aux valeurs et aux finalités dont se réclament les enseignants ? Un travail qui échappe au contrôle de ceux qui le réalisent entraîne-t-il une déprofessionnalisation ? L’article analyse l’attrition des enseignants dans quatre pays francophones : la France, la Suisse, la Belgique et le Québec.

This chapter focuses on the construction and development of the teaching profession in French-speaking Belgium. Using a socio-historical approach, it first shows how educational provision – from the very origin of the Belgian state, in the context of a consociational democracy – differentiated between public education and Catholic education, resulting in differences in the employment conditions of teachers, their initial training and their remuneration that persisted until the mid-twentieth century. Consolidation of an integrated educational system – covering primary and secondary education, general and vocational training – resulted in the emergence of a body of teachers more integrated as professional group but did not eliminate traces of the original forms of segmentation. Since 1989, the three language communities have supported education in Belgium, resulting in three parallel educational systems. In this context, important developments have taken place in French-speaking Belgium, which have confirmed the desegmentation trends previously observed, with the reinforcement of state regulation of both the educational system and the labour market for teachers, while new forms of segmentation have also emerged, in part linked to this tighter regulation of teachers’ work and of the teaching profession.