The 3,000 substitute teachers promised by the government will not reach La Réunion. That is the immediate consequence for the island’s high school students of an announcement made Thursday by Education Minister Édouard Geffray, who said the new recruits would go to more than 500 lycées where the situation is most critical. According to the rectorat, “no lycée in the académie is among the very problematic establishments,” even as students and unions denounce the absence of teachers. For families and pupils on the island, the message is stark: their daily difficulties in the classroom are not, in official terms, severe enough to qualify.
The rectorat frames the local situation differently. In the académie of La Réunion, it says, “the expressed needs concern short-term occasional replacements,” lasting between 2 and 15 days. To cover those absences, the académie relies on a pool of substitutes made up of titulaires sur zone de remplacement (TZR) and contractuels on permanent contracts across a range of subjects. The rectorat nevertheless acknowledges that “the situations in which replacement solutions are harder to implement concern subjects for which there is little or no local pool of substitutes (notably rare specialisms in vocational education).”
Additional reference context is available at https://imazpress.com/colere-lyceenne/lycees-douard-greffey-annonce-3-000-postes-de-professeurs-remplacants-mais-pas-pour-la-reunion.
Meanwhile, the national picture behind the announcement matters for what students can expect in the years ahead. At the start of the school year in August, 86 posts were cut in the académie of La Réunion. The minister has also announced the removal of 1,588 teaching posts at the 2027 rentrée, including 836 in secondary education, a choice he has defended in light of an expected fall of 180,000 pupils. For a public already worried about missing teachers, these figures weigh on any promise of improvement.
The sense of unequal treatment has now moved into the political arena. In a letter to the minister of national education, deputy Émeline K/Bidi asked the government to guarantee that the national announcements would be applied in La Réunion under the same conditions and the same timelines as in the Hexagone. The facts as stated suggest this is not the case. As she put it, “Réunionnais high school students cannot be asked to wait several weeks to be heard while young people in the Hexagone immediately benefit from the framework of dialogue announced by the government.”
That dialogue framework is taking shape nationally. The platform launched by the ministry of national education, which gathered more than 40,000 contributions, is due to be reported back at the end of October. The Prime Minister has also launched “un temps de démocratie,” with exchange sessions that can be organised from the resumption of school on Monday 26 October. Whether island students get the same access remains the question the deputy has pressed.
The students’ grievances themselves are broad: timetables that are too full, classes that are too large, difficult working conditions, unsanitary establishments and the absence of teachers. In an attempt to defuse the lycée anger, the government has announced five areas of work: better ensuring lessons during teacher absences, improving buildings, notably in the face of high heat, rethinking the organisation of school time, making Parcoursup more legible, and offering a new framework for expression to lycéens. “The government’s first decisions will be presented at the end of October,” promised Sébastien Lecornu. The 2027 budget, he added, provides 64 billion euros for national education, an extra 1.2 billion.
For the students of La Réunion, the test of these promises will be whether their classrooms, and not only those in the Hexagone, feel the difference.