France vs. Europe in 2026: What the DEPP Benchmark Note Reveals About Persistent Equity Gaps

In 2015, 20.8% of disadvantaged French students demonstrated adequate performance across PISA domains. By 2022 the figure had fallen to 14.4% — and France’s decline is steeper than the EU average. The DEPP’s 2026 European benchmark note makes this regression, and what it means for la rentrée, difficult to ignore.

Reassuring because France has clearly improved on several fronts. Troubling because the gaps that remain are exactly the ones where more than four decades of classroom-focused reform have demonstrably not moved the dial.

Here is what the note says, translated into September priorities — and what school leaders can realistically do before la rentrée.

Where France Now Stands Against the EU 2030 Targets

The DEPP’s 2026 benchmark note offers a rare cross-country view. On two of the headline targets, France is performing well above average.

Early school leaving — the share of 18–24-year-olds with no qualification beyond lower secondary — stands at 7.6% in France, well below the EU target of under 9%. The European Commission’s Education and Training Monitor 2025 confirms the figure at 7.7% for 2024. Tertiary attainment has reached 53.4%, comfortably above the 45% EU target. On gender equity in STEM, a randomised controlled trial involving 19,450 French secondary students demonstrated that one-hour interventions by female scientists significantly increased selective university STEM programme enrollment among high-achieving girls in final year — the kind of precisely targeted intervention that stands out in a field dominated by observational studies.

These are real achievements. They matter. But they are not what the benchmark note is primarily about.

The Gaps That Persist

The harder reading in the DEPP note concerns disadvantaged students, and here the data is not ambiguous.

France has 29% of 15-year-olds lacking basic mathematics skills. Among disadvantaged students, that figure is 49%. France produces only 3% of top mathematics performers in TIMSS 2023, against an EU-22 average of 10%. Most concerning in the long run: only 14.4% of disadvantaged students demonstrate adequate performance across PISA domains — lower than the EU average of 16.3%, and declining from 20.8% in 2015. Since 2015 (measuring through PISA 2022), France has moved backwards on this metric.

The EU comparative report confirms this is not just a French phenomenon — the EU average for this indicator has also fallen, from 21.1% in 2015 to 16.3% today — but the French decline is steeper, and France starts from a lower base than comparable Western European economies.

The gaps manifest earlier than most administrators might expect. The DEPP’s own L’état de l’École 2025 shows that satisfactory oral comprehension at primary school entry is 74% in non-priority schools but only 42% in REP+ schools. The gap is not a secondary-school problem that secondary schools can solve. It is already in place before primary school entry.

Early leaving tells a more nuanced story. France’s national figure of 7.6% looks strong, but Eurostat’s April 2026 data shows the EU-wide rate is 9.1%, above its own target, with men at 10.6% versus women at 7.5%. Within France, the distribution across socioeconomic groups and school types is considerably less even than the headline number suggests — France’s long-term absenteeism rate of 10.2% is among the highest in the EU, sitting alongside Malta (13.4%), Bulgaria (11.7%), and Slovakia (11.2%).

Why Classroom Reform Has Not Closed These Gaps

The standard response to equity gaps in France has been priority education policy — priority school networks, additional resources, smaller class sizes. It has been the country’s primary educational equity instrument since 1981.

In 2025, the Cour des comptes — France’s supreme audit institution — published an evaluation that is hard to read as anything other than a verdict: “L’éducation prioritaire n’a pas permis de réduire les écarts de résultats des élèves.” Priority education has not reduced achievement gaps. The budget multiplied 2.5 times, from €1.1 billion in 2014 to an estimated €2.6 billion in 2023, with no measurable reduction in the equity gap. Class-splitting (dédoublement) in CP/CE1 produced learning gains that the Court found faded by middle school entry. The level of students from disadvantaged backgrounds has declined over twenty years.

This is not an argument against investment in schools. It is an argument that classroom-facing investment alone — more teachers, smaller classes, more curriculum hours — has reached the limit of what it can deliver on the specific outcomes that remain furthest from target. The EU’s comparative report notes that 20 EU systems now list family and community engagement among their documented policy responses to absenteeism — a category that includes, for example, the Portuguese TEIP programme’s dedicated parent liaison worker model and the Dutch mandatory ouderbetrokkenheid school plan requirement. France is among the 8 countries with early warning systems for school leaving, but the INJEP evaluation of the Cités éducatives programme — covering 240 labeled cities across 600 QPV with a 69.2 million euro budget — found that institutional coordination improved and new actions were generated (averaging 33 per city), but that “fundamental practices haven’t shifted significantly — particularly parent relations.” The programme label was poorly recognised by the families it was designed to reach.

Why Engagement Alone Is Not Enough — And What the Data Says It Can Do

The Cour des comptes evaluation and the Café Pédagogique analysis of DEPP data both point to structural forces that sit beyond any school’s direct control. School segregation in France is among the highest in the EU: the migration-related segregation index stands at 0.23, with 22% of students in REP+ zones choosing to enroll in different schools — double the rate seen elsewhere. The socioeconomic access gap to early childhood education and care is 40.9 percentage points in France, compared to an EU average of 17.6 percentage points. France had 3,000 vacant teaching posts after the 2024 recruitment process. These are system-level constraints, and no communication platform, parent workshop, or engagement initiative resolves them. The evidence for family-school partnership as a lever is correlational — these associations appear consistently in the research literature, but caution is warranted about treating engagement as a causal fix for gaps that have deep socioeconomic roots.

What School Leaders Can Do Before September

Within these honest limits, the evidence does point to specific practices that correlate with better outcomes for the students the 2026 DEPP note flags as most at risk. The operational question is not “does family engagement matter?” but “which practices are low-friction enough to be sustained, and high-signal enough to reach the families currently least connected?”

Shift from reactive to proactive contact with at-risk families. The research on absenteeism and early leaving consistently shows that families of students most at risk receive the least proactive outreach. Schools that contact families before problems escalate — rather than after absences or failing grades have accumulated — are associated with better attendance outcomes, though causality is difficult to establish in observational data. The EU’s own comparative report lists early warning systems as a documented absenteeism response in 8 European systems. If your school has the data to identify high-risk students in September, the question is whether you have a communication rhythm that acts on it.

In practice, this looks like: a structured weekly SMS or in-app message to the parents of students who missed two or more days in the previous week — sent by the form tutor, not the administration — with a brief, non-accusatory prompt (“Karim was absent on Tuesday and Wednesday — is everything okay?”). Channel: SMS or in-app push. Length: 2–3 sentences. Trigger: automated flag from attendance record at end of each week. No reply required; the message itself is the signal.

Address the ECEC access gap with active outreach, not availability. The 40.9-percentage-point ECEC participation gap between advantaged and disadvantaged families in France is not primarily an availability problem — it is an information and institutional trust problem. Schools and crèches in priority areas that want to close this gap would need to invest in outreach to families who are not yet enrolled, since the barrier is often not cost or logistics but unfamiliarity with what early childhood education actually offers and how to access it. Active outreach to the families of future pupils before they reach school age is a documented practice in higher-performing EU systems.

In practice, this looks like: a short multilingual information packet (one page, translated into the dominant home languages of the catchment area) sent to all families on the local birth registry six months before their child is eligible to enroll, with a single named contact person and a phone number rather than a web form. Channel: physical mail plus SMS. Trigger: school enrollment calendar, 6 months prior. Sample content: “Votre enfant aura bientôt 3 ans. Voici comment l’inscrire à l’école — et ce que l’équipe fait pour les aider à bien démarrer.”

Build in structured family communication at each school transition point. The DEPP data shows that only 53% of REP+ ninth-graders enter general or technical secondary programmes, against 66% in non-priority schools. This gap in secondary orientation outcomes is not resolved by secondary schools alone — the trajectory is shaped much earlier. School transitions are consistently identified in EU research as moments when parent-school communication either supports or fails students from disadvantaged backgrounds. A structured communication sequence around the CM2-to-sixième transition and the troisième-to-lycée transition — one that gives families interpretive context, not just administrative information — is one of the few practices supported by the available evidence as associated with better orientation outcomes.

In practice, this looks like: a termly 10-minute parent briefing (available in person or via recorded video) that explains, in plain language, what the orientation conseil process actually means for their child’s trajectory, what questions to ask the teacher, and what the realistic pathways look like. Scheduled in the January term of CM2 and troisième. Distributed via in-app notification and SMS to maximise reach to the families who are least likely to read a letter sent home in a school bag. Trigger: sent within 48 hours of the orientation conseil date being communicated to parents.

What September Requires: Infrastructure, Not Just Intent

The 2026 DEPP note makes one thing clear: the equity challenge in French schools is concentrated in a specific population (disadvantaged students in priority networks), it starts earlier than most secondary intervention programmes reach, and it has persisted through 44 years and €2.6 billion of classroom-focused reform without closing.

The Cour des comptes, the European Commission, and the INJEP evaluation each find, from their respective vantage points, that classroom-facing reform alone has not been sufficient — and that the relationship between schools and the families who are currently least connected remains under-deployed as a lever. Structural constraints are real and documented. But schools that want to act on the benchmark data before September would need infrastructure that makes proactive, multilingual, high-frequency contact with specific at-risk households possible — not broadcasting to the parent body as a whole, but reaching the specific families where the DEPP’s 49% maths underperformance is concentrated.

BeeNet is one implementation path for that infrastructure: structured, multilingual, channel-appropriate communication between school teams and families in the communities the benchmark data is about. Schools in REP+ networks have 12 weeks before la rentrée. See how BeeNet supports family communication in priority schools →

References

Farrugia A., Rakocevic R. — DEPP, Ministère de l’Éducation nationale. La France face aux repères européens en éducation en 2026 : des acquis solides, des défis persistants. 2026. https://www.education.gouv.fr/sites/default/files/document/education-nationaledepp-ni-2026-15pdf-516101.pdf
European Commission, DG Education, Youth, Sport and Culture. France — Education and Training Monitor 2025. 2025. https://op.europa.eu/webpub/eac/education-and-training-monitor/en/country-reports/france.html
European Commission. Education and Training Monitor 2025 — Comparative Report, Chapter 4: School Education. 2025. https://op.europa.eu/webpub/eac/education-and-training-monitor/en/comparative-report/chapter-4.html
Cour des comptes. L’éducation prioritaire, une politique publique à repenser. 2025. https://www.ccomptes.fr/fr/publications/leducation-prioritaire-une-politique-publique-a-repenser
INJEP / Agence nationale de cohésion des territoires. Rapport d’évaluation des Cités éducatives — les 10 points clés à retenir. 2024. https://pqn-a.fr/fr/ressources/analyses/rapport-d-evaluation-des-cites-educatives-injep-les-10-points-cles-a-retenir
Eurostat. Early leavers from education and training — Statistics Explained. April 2026. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Early_leavers_from_education_and_training
Café Pédagogique (analysis of DEPP September 2025 synthesis). Éducation prioritaire : un miroir des inégalités et de la ségrégation. 2025. https://www.cafepedagogique.net/2025/10/01/education-prioritaire-un-miroir-des-inegalites-et-de-la-segregation/
DEPP, Ministère de l’Éducation nationale (summary by Observatoire des Zones Prioritaires). L’état de l’École 2025. 2025. https://www.ozp.fr/spip.php?article34531=