Secondary schools: fewer overtime hours, and homework lands back in the kitchen

According to Le Monde, heads of collèges and lycées (the French middle and secondary schools) have been calling the situation a "cauchemar" since the start of the school year. Their overtime budgets have been cut. Yet those hours pay in particular for homework support and cultural projects. One testimony cited by the paper sums it up: "There are schemes we no longer have the means to fund." The daily sees a double cause: shrinking budgets, and a political instability that makes it impossible to know what the following year's finance bill will contain.

What we don't yet know, from this article alone, is how many schools have already dropped schemes, which ones, and in which areas. The file is too thin to put numbers on it. What follows is therefore our reading, not an established finding.

An hour of overtime sounds like a line in an accounts ledger. In reality it is a piece of social reproduction work: the labour that produces people rather than commodities. Doing homework with an adult, discovering a theatre or an exhibition, is what helps a child stay upright in the school system. When the school stops paying for it, the work does not vanish. It moves.

Where to? In two directions, in our view. First towards teachers, who can put together a workshop in their free time out of professional conscience, which is to say for nothing. A system that relies on the goodwill of those it already underpays has found a bargain. Then towards families, after work, at seven in the evening, between the laundry and dinner. There, everything depends on what each household has: time, a diploma, a quiet room, money for a private tutor. Children whose parents have none of that, or who carry everything alone, pick up the bill.

And who, in most households, opens the exercise book in the evening? Mothers, overwhelmingly, which is a constant finding of surveys on the "double day" (paid work followed by unpaid domestic work). Savings made on schooling thus reappear as hours of unpaid female labour. The state budget looks better on paper; the real cost has simply been moved out of the accounts.

The other ingredient, budget uncertainty, adds another layer. Planning a cultural project means knowing in September what you will have in March. Without visibility, nothing gets committed, and the first projects sacrificed are those with no mandatory budget line: precisely the ones that open horizons for the least-resourced pupils.

What Marxist tradition calls socialising the care of raising children is exactly the opposite of this movement: shifting the burden from the family to the collective. Here we are witnessing a quiet step backwards, through an envelope that keeps shrinking. Nobody votes to end homework support. It fades away for lack of funds, and the kitchen takes over.