Belgium's New Anti-Dropout Decree: What FWB Schools Must Change by August 2026

This is not a story about a new problem. It’s a story about a two-year-old law getting its first real rewrite, and about what that rewrite reveals about the gap between policy intent and system capacity. For administrators anywhere managing attendance, exclusions, or re-enrollment processes, the FWB reform is a useful case study in how quickly “temporary” compliance tooling can become permanent infrastructure — and how process changes that look purely administrative can become politically contested overnight.

On July 6, 2026, the Education Commission of the French Community Parliament in Belgium (Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, or FWB) approved amendments to a decree that has only existed since May 2024 — the law governing school exclusions, dropout monitoring, and re-enrollment refusals. Primary schools must comply from August 2026; secondary schools follow in 2027.

What the amendment actually changes

The original May 16, 2024 decree set the baseline: exclusion requires conduct that “compromises the integrity or organization of the school” or causes “serious material or moral damage,” families get 10 working days to appeal, and four inter-network appeal chambers must decide within 20 school working days. Schools that refuse to reintegrate a student after an annulled exclusion lose funding for the year. Those appeal chambers’ jurisdiction only began on August 24, 2026 — largely concurrent with the new amendment’s rollout for primary schools (RefLI legal database).

The July 2026 amendment layers three changes on top of that baseline, according to Minister of Education Valérie Glatigny (MR):

• Attendance monitoring is automated. The DAccE student support file — the central tool for tracking at-risk students — will now be auto-filled from a unified attendance system instead of requiring duplicate manual entry (La Libre).
• The absence-justification window doubles, from 5 to 10 days, giving families more time to document an absence before it counts against a student’s record (La Libre).
• Exclusion and re-enrollment procedures move faster. File transmission for exclusion appeals is cut from 10 to 5 working days, and the administration’s power to mandate re-enrollment for an excluded student is extended to all educational networks, not just the Wallonia-Brussels Federation’s own schools (MR press release; DH.net).

The government’s framing is consistent across every source: the decree “clarifies stakeholder roles and strengthens classroom attendance verification tools” (RTBF), and the goal, in Glatigny’s words, is to “simplify the daily work of educational teams” so they “can devote more time to accompanying students” rather than duplicate paperwork (MR press release).

The scale of the problem the decree targets

The numbers behind this reform are worth sitting with. During the 2024-2025 school year, the French Community recorded 2,362 definitive exclusion measures and 1,609 re-enrollment refusals issued at year’s end (DH.net). PS deputy Ersel Kaynak cited a steeper trend on the dropout side: cases rose from roughly 50,000 in 2020-2021 to 93,000 in 2023-2024 — a figure he used to argue the government is dismantling, rather than reinforcing, “the anti-dropout device adopted two years ago” (La Libre).

Minister Glatigny’s stated rationale for speeding up exclusion and re-enrollment procedures is the same logic that drives dropout-prevention policy generally: “the earlier the intervention, the greater [the student retention likelihood]” (RTBF), and the aim is “to avoid an excluded student remaining without a solution for too long, which increases dropout risk” (DH.net). That’s a stated policy objective, not a measured outcome — the amendment hasn’t taken effect anywhere yet, so everything here describes what the reform changes on paper, not what it produces in practice.

The decree also sits inside a longer-running commitment. The decade-old Pact for Educational Excellence set a goal of halving the region’s dropout rate (RTBF) — a goal this amendment appears intended, at least in part, to serve.

Why the opposition is calling it a “two-speed school”

The amendment passed the Education Commission with majority (MR-Engagés) support, while every opposition party — PS, Ecolo, and PTB — voted against it or publicly condemned it (BX1; RTBF). PTB’s Bruno Bauwens framed the changes as creating “an école à deux vitesses” — a two-speed school system that disproportionately affects disadvantaged students — a concern Ecolo also raised, while PS deputy Ersel Kaynak separately argued the government is “dismantling” rather than reinforcing the anti-dropout device it adopted two years ago (La Libre).

The specific worry is that extending the absence-justification window and speeding up exclusion appeals are procedural fixes layered onto a system that opposition members say is still under-resourced. All opposition parties agree the government has not addressed underlying funding and staffing shortfalls, even as it tightens the administrative machinery around attendance and exclusions (La Libre).

That criticism is landing at a moment of broader unrest. Teachers demonstrated in front of the FWB Parliament on July 8, 2026, chanting “Glatigny démission” and objecting to tuition increases, two additional weekly teaching hours for upper-secondary instructors, stricter illness provisions, and position eliminations — measures separate from the dropout decree itself (L’Avenir). The protests weren’t primarily about the dropout decree, but they establish that this reform is arriving into a system already strained on the funding and staffing side.

Administrative reform is not the only factor

It would be a mistake to read the FWB story as purely a debate over paperwork and deadlines. OECD data shows bachelor’s-programme dropout among first-time entrants in the French Community running at 21%, well above the OECD average of 13% (versus 12% in Flanders) (OECD, Education at a Glance 2025). The same report finds French Community primary-teacher salaries running 22% below comparable tertiary-educated workers’ earnings, versus a 17% OECD average gap. None of this proves administrative streamlining is misguided, but it does mean faster attendance tracking and exclusion appeals are, at best, one lever among several — funding, staffing, and compensation appear to correlate with the disengagement risk this decree is trying to address.

What this means if you administer a school

Even outside Belgium, the FWB reform is a useful reference point: it replaces duplicate manual data entry with an automated, unified attendance system, shortens notification and appeal windows, and gives families slightly more room to document absences before they harden into a disciplinary record. Schools that want to close a similar gap between policy intent and system capacity — whether or not their own jurisdiction mandates it — would need broadly the same operational foundation: one attendance record, entered once, visible to every stakeholder who needs it, with fast and traceable notification when a student crosses a risk threshold.

In practice, this looks like three concrete habits worth building now, regardless of what your local regulator requires:

• A single absence entry point. When a teacher marks a student absent, that record should populate the student’s file automatically — no second manual entry into a separate monitoring system, and no reconciliation step where two records can drift apart.
• A standing notification trigger. When a student crosses a defined threshold (for example, three unexplained absences in a rolling 30-day window), an automatic message goes to the family and the designated support staff the same day — by app notification or SMS, not a note home in a backpack — giving them the full justification window to respond rather than losing days to internal routing. In practice: a student hits their third unexplained absence in a rolling month on a Tuesday afternoon; by Tuesday evening, both a parent and the designated support counselor have received a same-day alert, not a note that goes home in a backpack and surfaces a week later.
• A documented, time-stamped exclusion/re-enrollment trail. If a school ever needs to demonstrate it notified a family within a required window, or that an appeal file was transmitted on time, that record needs to exist automatically, not be reconstructed from email threads after the fact.

The compliance clock is already running

Belgian primary schools have a hard date: August 2026. Secondary schools have until 2027. The underlying shift the FWB is mandating — from manual, duplicated attendance paperwork toward automated, unified tracking with faster family notification — addresses an operational gap that is not unique to Belgium. Schools elsewhere that wait for their own jurisdiction’s version of this decree to arrive before building the underlying infrastructure would be doing in weeks what could have been done gradually.

BeeNet is one implementation path for the operational core this reform describes: a single attendance and messaging system where absence entries, family notifications, and administrative records live in one place instead of three. It won’t rewrite your local decree, but it removes the excuse that “we didn’t have a system for that” the next time a regulator asks. If your school is still tracking attendance in one tool and notifying families in another, the question worth asking isn’t whether to unify them — it’s when. You can see how BeeNet’s attendance and communication tools fit a school’s daily workflow, or book a demo to walk through it directly.

References

1. Vandenabeele, C. (2026, July 7). Valérie Glatigny prend des mesures contre le décrochage scolaire, l’opposition dénonce la création “d’une école à deux vitesses.” La Libre. https://www.lalibre.be/belgique/enseignement/2026/07/07/valerie-glatigny-prend-des-mesures-contre-le-decrochage-scolaire-lopposition-denonce-la-creation-dune-ecole-a-deux-vitesses-U3TIITDDB5FQJE7FK5XJ4FRCEM/
2. Belga News Agency. (2026, July 6). La FWB adapte son décret sur les exclusions scolaires et refus de réinscription. DH.net. https://www.dhnet.be/dernieres-depeches/2026/07/06/la-fwb-adapte-son-decret-sur-les-exclusions-scolaires-et-refus-de-reinscription-JNDWNIM7Q5DUNGDNXDX6OYWS3E/
3. Belga News Agency. (2026). Enseignement : la FWB adapte son cadre contre le décrochage scolaire. BX1. https://bx1.be/categories/news/enseignement-la-fwb-adapte-son-cadre-contre-le-decrochage-scolaire/
4. RTBF Editorial with Belga. (2026). Enseignement : la FWB veut adapter les mesures de lutte contre le décrochage scolaire. RTBF Actus. https://www.rtbf.be/article/enseignement-la-fwb-veut-adapter-les-mesures-de-lutte-contre-le-decrochage-scolaire-11753732
5. Dupont, M. (2026). Décrochage scolaire et exclusions : le Gouvernement renforce l’accompagnement des élèves et soutient les équipes éducatives. Mouvement Réformateur (MR). https://www.mr.be/decrochage-scolaire-et-exclusions-le-gouvernement-renforce-laccompagnement-des-eleves-et-soutient-les-equipes-educatives/
6. Belga. (2026, July 8). Nouvelle mobilisation des enseignants devant le Parlement de la FWB: “Glatigny démission.” L’Avenir. https://www.lavenir.net/actu/belgique/2026/07/08/nouvelle-mobilisation-des-enseignants-devant-le-parlement-de-la-fwb-glatigny-demission-74DSAV2IU5B4XJOJC2XU4YZVDQ/
7. Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles. (2024, May 16). Décret portant sur les exclusions définitives et instituant des chambres inter-réseaux compétentes pour connaitre des recours à l’égard des décisions d’exclusion définitive. RefLI legal database. https://refli.be/fr/lex/2024006226
8. OECD. (2025). Education at a Glance 2025: Belgium (country note). https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2025/09/education-at-a-glance-2025-country-notes_9749f4ff/belgium_3d277682/0fbd3865-en.pdf