Nearly a billion euros are missing each year from private schools under contract with the State. Not a subsidy, but a legal obligation, established by the Debré law in 1959 and largely ignored. A bill has just been tabled in the National Assembly to restore, at a minimum, transparency on calculation methods. We call on parliamentarians of all persuasions to vote for it.
From one municipality to another, sometimes a few kilometers apart, the flat rate paid by the community for a child’s education can vary from 1 to 35. Thirty-five times. For students hosted in schools subject to the same obligations, following the same programs, employing teachers trained and paid by the State. Nobody, or almost no one, is today able to publicly explain how these amounts are calculated. Often, mayors themselves are unaware of this.
This situation is not a gray area of the law. It is, legally, irregular. The Debré law of December 31, 1959 established a simple principle: when a private school signs an association contract with the State, it undertakes to fulfill a public service mission.
It welcomes without discrimination, follows national programs, opens its doors to inspection bodies, and educates the children entrusted to it by the Republic. In return, the municipality in whose territory it is located must cover its operating expenses, under the same conditions as those it reserves for its own schools.
Degraded conditions in private contract education
This is not a favor, nor a subsidy, nor aid granted to a particular sector. This is compensation, due because of the mission carried out. The observation today is documented. Nearly 900 million euros are missing each year from Catholic establishments under contract because this legal obligation is not honored.
Relative to a student, the average gap reaches €450 per year. When a municipality does not pay what it owes, it is the families who bear the consequences, most often in the form of increased school fees. Behind every euro not paid, it is families who compensate.
And it is, in the long term, the educational conditions of their children that are degraded. Two million students today complete their education in establishments participating in the public education service. Transparency on their financing should be a democratic matter.
However, today there is no obligation for a municipality to make public the method by which it calculates what it owes. Each community decides alone, without a common format, without independent control, without systematic publication.
Apply transparency
The result is before our eyes: opaque amounts, discrepancies that defy understanding, a dispute that thrives before the administrative courts and pits, throughout France, management associations against municipalities which should be their partners.
On the school side, however, transparency already exists. The management bodies of Catholic establishments, like all associations covered by the 1901 law, transmit their accounts to the tax services each year. The controls confirm this unambiguously: their educational expenditure systematically exceeds the public funding they receive.
The transparency we are calling for today is therefore nothing other than equality. A bill has just been tabled in the National Assembly to correct this state of affairs.
It simply asks for two things: that the methods for calculating day school packages be made public, and that these calculations be certified by the public accountant. That’s all. No new expenditure imposed on municipalities, no upheaval of territorial balances. Only transparency, on sums that the law has required for sixty-five years and that taxpayers already finance.
For equal treatment of students
At the head of the three networks which structure Catholic education, establishment managers, families of students, ecclesial and strategic responsibility, we speak with one voice on this issue.
Transparency on public money is neither right nor left. Taxpayers have the right to know how their taxes fund their children’s school. And local elected officials, the vast majority of them in good faith, also need this clear framework to carry out their mission without exposing themselves to disputes that they did not want.
We call on the deputies, from the majority as well as from the opposition, to examine this text for what it is: not the Trojan horse of an ideological fight, but the minimal tool of a republican demand. The question is not that of establishments, but of equal treatment of students. Enforcing the law should never be an option.
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