Two extra hours of sports in middle school cancelled ? Yes, but not in all establishments

The executive wanted to propose Two additional hours of sport per week for volunteer middle school students. This measure did not hold and will be tightened to priority education networks (REP and REP+).

< p>&Just a few months after the end of the Olympic Games, which had given the French a new love of sport, the executive has made an about-face. Emmanuel Macron had promised that all middle school students in France would be offered two extra hours of sport per week, on a voluntary basis, with the aim of "preparing the champions of tomorrow". But this measure was abandoned after two years of testing. All is not lost for the priority education networks (REP and REP+), which are the only ones affected by this measure. While 7,000 middle schools were supposed to benefit from it, these two additional hours will be offered in just over 1,000. This system will be “refocused” on only “priority education establishments”, we learn from a circular from the National Education, reported by BFMTV.
Financial reasons for this change of mind

What seemed like a good idea was abandoned for mainly financial reasons. First, the students who volunteered for these two additional hours were mostly already members of a sports club. The measure will therefore focus on colleges classified as REP and REP+, where the number of sports members is the lowest. A good way for the ministry to make savings, even though it was recognized in the circular that “the generalization” of this system “to all 7,000 colleges does not appear sustainable”.

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The government justifies itself

But this about-face is not to everyone's taste, and certainly not to athletes. Among those who raised their voices was swimmer Léon Marchand, who had made France proud during the Olympic Games with his four gold medals. The swimmer simply retweeted this information given by the newspaper L'&Equipe, with a clown emoji. A message of childish simplicity but which pushed the Minister of National Education, Anne Genetet, to justify herself: “We are not abandoning this ambition, quite the contrary: we are adapting it to make it more effective. More fair,” she tries to explain, adding that “sports practice at school is now reinforced and targeted at priority education establishments, where éstudents practice the least sport due to lack of resources".

The Minister of Sports, Gil Avérous, also reacted to this éclown emoji. On a trip to Toulouse on Friday, November 15, he assured before the press that “the state is not canceling the two hours in middle schools” but “there is a refocusing of the system today”. He then added that “this experimentation was sometimes very uneven depending on the establishments because we did not necessarily have the resources necessary to approach the clubs, other times because the young people themselves were not interested. It is not obligatory, it is during extracurricular time”.