The French minister for education, Édouard Geffray, has made headlines following a sensational statement: putting an end to decades of laxity in this area, he has announced that spelling, grammar, and syntax will henceforth be fully taken into account when marking papers for the final-year exams, the Brevet and the Baccalaureate, taken by all young French people aged 15–18—effective June 2026. While we may welcome this U-turn, which puts a proper command of the language back at the heart of learning, the measure is not straightforward to implement and has sparked waves of outrage among pupils, their teachers, and their parents.
For years, we have tolerated all manner of things in the exam papers of young secondary school pupils. Spelling was once considered sacred—in French, we do not speak of spelling mistakes but of ‘fautes,’ which means, faults, signalling that there would be something profoundly immoral in butchering the language of Molière and Hugo. But this has gradually been devalued as a criterion for assessing pupils’ standards, under the influence of educational fads tinged with Marxism or imported from the United States, which held that spelling was not essential for making oneself understood and that it could even be a ‘marker of class’ prone to creating unjust inequalities among pupils.
As a result, teachers marking exams were given explicit and official instructions not to penalise pupils for poor spelling (or grammar or syntax), to the point of reaching certain absurdities: an answer script written in improbable pidgin but containing ‘good ideas’ could end up with an average mark. That era is over, announced Geffray, as just over 850,000 secondary school pupils and 700,000 sixth-formers prepare to sit their exams in May and June. “Any paper that does not meet the required standard in terms of spelling, syntax, and grammar cannot be awarded a pass mark in the baccalaureate,” explained the minister. A “statement of common sense,” given that the baccalaureate is the first qualification marking entry into higher education.
Teachers will nevertheless be given some discretion and are asked to mark “with discernment.” Having been accustomed for years to lowering their standards through joint marking committees and harmonisation, will they follow their superiors’ instructions? Nothing is less certain. For the teachers’ unions, always quick to demand more funding but notably silent when it comes to the requirement to impart knowledge, this is merely a “public relations exercise” to which they will pay lip service.
Among pupils, the concern is more palpable, and not without reason, it must be said. The minister’s decision gives the impression that the rules of the game are being changed mid-match; hence, there is a certain panic among those who have grown accustomed to viewing the plural ‘s’ or the use of accents as a charming but vanishing folkloric tradition.
More fundamentally, introducing “zero tolerance” for spelling is a fine and worthy thing, but the decision to apply it at the end of the school curriculum comes a little too late. Today’s pupils will be held responsible for not knowing what we refused to teach them yesterday. Zero tolerance should have been applied a long time ago, from a very young age, and not as if by magic at the end of their school years. Spelling standards have plummeted over the last forty years or so, as numerous surveys reveal. In spelling, the average number of errors in dictation has risen from 11 in 1987 to 19 in 2021. 75% of pupils in 2021 do not reach the 1987 average score in dictation, and 28% make more than 25 errors, compared with 7% in 1987.
If the minister wants results, he will have to set about overhauling the entire French curriculum over a number of years; it is not certain that he is ready to embark on such a project now, given the ideological challenges involved.
