Appendix. The level of this volume and the French-speaking school systems

No chapter of this book names a class or a school level, and this appendix is the only page where such names appear. This is not editorial affectation. A class name designates neither the same age nor the same syllabus from one French-speaking country to another: the pages that follow demonstrate it, official text in hand, and the gap reaches four years on one and the same label.

This house therefore uses a vocabulary of its own, made of four LEVELS. A level does not say the age of the reader: it says what the volume assumes about its subject and what it leaves the reader able to do. That description stays true everywhere and is not subject to reform.

This appendix does three things. It places this volume on the scale of levels. It gives, for four school systems of the French-speaking world, the structure that their own official texts establish. Then it shows why these structures do not convert into one another. It is not a table of equivalences, and the last section says why no such table can exist.

The four systems that follow publish their structure in regulatory texts open to everyone. The sentences quoted here are taken from those texts and translated by ODERSA, and their addresses appear at the end of the appendix.

In FRANCE, the code de l'éducation organises schooling in cycles. It states that cycle 3, the consolidation cycle, corresponds to the two years of elementary school following the cycle of fundamental learning and to the first year of collège, called respectively cours moyen première année, cours moyen deuxième année and classe de sixième. The ministry states that elementary school takes children in school from 6 to 11 years old, and that at the end of elementary school the collège marks the entry of pupils into secondary education.

In BELGIUM, in the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, the code de l'enseignement states that primary education is organised in six years and that it is addressed to children from the first day of the school year of the calendar year in which they reach the age of six. The administration adds that compulsory schooling applies to a child from the age of five.

In FRENCH-SPEAKING SWITZERLAND, the study plan shared by the cantons states that compulsory schooling covers eleven years, divided into three multi-year cycles. An official brochure gives the detail: cycle 1, years 1 to 4 (ages 4 to 8), cycle 2, years 5 to 8 (ages 8 to 12), and a cycle of three years, cycle 3, years 9 to 11 (ages 12 to 15). The intercantonal agreement on which this structure rests sets schooling from the age of 4 completed, and says that the primary level, including the infant school or elementary cycle, lasts eight years.

In QUEBEC, the régime pédagogique states that primary education is organised in 3 cycles of 2 years each, and that a pupil who has reached the age of 6 before 1 October of the current school year must be admitted to primary education. The government states that primary education runs over six years.

The first is the age at which school becomes compulsory. The French code states that instruction is compulsory for every child from the age of three until the age of sixteen. The Swiss agreement puts children into school from the age of 4 completed. The Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles applies the obligation from the age of five. Quebec admits to primary school at six. Four ages for four systems, on something that nonetheless looks elementary.

The second is the reference date that decides which school year a child enters. The Swiss agreement keeps 31 July as the reference day. The Quebec régime keeps 1 October. The Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles keeps the calendar year of the sixth birthday. Two children born a few weeks apart are therefore not in the same year depending on the country they live in.

The third is the vocabulary itself. The Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles no longer organises its schooling in cycles on the French model: its code speaks of a tronc commun, a common core, and of a continuum pédagogique running from the first year of nursery school to the third year of secondary. Looking for a Belgian cycle corresponding to a French cycle therefore amounts to looking for something that does not exist in the other's text.

ODERSA did not find, in what it was able to open in open access, any French text setting a reference date comparable to those of Switzerland and Quebec. That box stays empty, and it is named as such rather than filled in by deduction.

A teacher, a parent or an educator preparing a session does not need an equivalence: they need to know what the volume assumes and what it installs. The table of levels answers that, and it is enough.

The tables of systems serve only one purpose: to show that structures differ, and by how much. They are not to be read as a conversion table, and this appendix supplies none, because none would be correct. A reader who wants to place this volume in their own system will start from the column "what it leaves you able to do" and compare it with their own syllabus, which they know better than this book does.

A word about this English edition, finally. The class names on this page are not transposed into the names of another country's system. This volume describes the periodisation taught in France, and this appendix describes the French-speaking school systems that the French edition documented, with the sources it opened and the date on which it opened them. Naming the systems of English-speaking countries here would mean opening their official texts and dating them, which this edition has not done; an appendix of correspondences moved from one country to another without its own sources would be exactly the mistake this whole page is trying to avoid.