While left-wing and public education unions have been stepping up their attacks on private schools for many months in order to curb their educational freedom, the Catholic education authorities have revealed that the French State owes them nearly €1 billion under the association contract that links most Catholic schools to the national education system. This debunks the myth peddled by the Left that private schools are unduly benefiting from public funds, which they use to argue for their prohibition.
The French education system, divided between public schools, private schools under contract with the state, and independent schools without public funding, is the result of a historic compromise and long and painful battles. It has been an administrative and political struggle with far-reaching implications, as control over the education of young people means control over the formation of minds—and therefore over future believers and future voters.
The compromise reached after the war in several stages, including the Debré Law of 1959, provides that private schools under contract—the vast majority of which are Catholic—receive funding equal to that of state schools, provided that they comply with a set of educational criteria. In other words, the state undertakes to fund a private school pupil to the same extent as a pupil attending a public school, via municipal, departmental or regional flat-rate payments.
A study conducted by the Catholic education authority shows a shortfall of more than €900 million for private schools, or nearly €450 per year per child. This could happen despite public subsidies being a legal obligation because, under pressure from education unions, predominantly left-wing and very hostile to Catholic schools, many local authorities have decided that this financial support is discretionary and optional, and that they are free to fund or not fund private schools. The latter are accused of being refuges for the privileged, of going against social diversity, or even of spreading teachings that are contrary to the ‘values of the Republic.’
In both private and public schools, the state covers teachers’ salaries. Local authorities are supposed to cover non-teaching staff and operating costs. However, the study points to funding disparities between local authorities in the same category that are considered “difficult to understand.”
Catholic institutions complain about “a breach of equity” in taxation, as the amount of public funding for Catholic schools across municipalities dramatically differs, with some paying 35 times more than others, with 200 local governments “excessively” underfunding the schools.
The secretary general of Catholic Education, Guillaume Prévost, is sounding the alarm. A few weeks ago, he entered a standoff with the ministry to ensure that the specific nature of Catholic schools is respected and to guarantee their right to offer religious education to pupils, as well as the possibility for teachers to offer prayers during classes—causing an outcry among left-wing politicians and unions.
Prévost warns
The risk is that they will try to close our schools to keep the state school system afloat.
Apart from withholding actual funding, discrimination against Catholic schools can take many other forms. For example, in the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté and Occitanie regions, school transport schemes ignore private schools.
After decades of putting up with such unlawful practices, Guillaume Prévost intends to bring the issue to the forefront of public discussion, including the debates between candidates in the run-up to the 2027 presidential election.
While Prévost prefers not to limit the debate to the age-old war between secular and Catholic education, there is indeed an ideological dimension to the bullying that Catholic education is currently suffering at the hands of French public authorities. The secretary general also highlights a paradox that completely escapes the Left, blinded by its hatred of an ideological system that is not its own: cutting public funding for Catholic schools necessarily means that their operation will depend entirely on tuition fees, thus creating a ‘barrier of money’ for families. “The less we fund Catholic schools, the more they become a tool for the privileged,” he laments.
The state has everything to gain by rebalancing the accounts: in absolute terms, even when paying the flat rates required by law, a pupil enrolled in a better-managed private school costs the public purse much less than a pupil in a state school.
