Tronc Commun Première Secondaire 2026: New Belgian Rules

Tronc commun première secondaire 2026 is no longer a proposal. The Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles Parliament voted the governing decree into law on 27 May 2026, and it now binds every secondary school in Wallonia and Brussels for the school year that started this month. First-year students follow a single common programme instead of splitting into separate tracks, and schools had roughly three months between the vote and the September rentrée to put the new hour grid, the new subjects, and the disappearance of the old 1D track into place. If your school is still describing this to parents as a draft awaiting a vote, that description is now more than three months out of date — the numbers below are enacted, not proposed.

Tronc commun première secondaire 2026: what’s now law

The vote itself was not quiet. L’Avenir’s vote-day coverage reports an expedited procedure that the opposition ultimately accepted, following committee review the day before the vote. L’Avenir’s companion report, published the same day, lays out what schools now had three months to implement before the September 2026 start.

That is the operational fact school administrators need first: the decree is enacted, the implementation clock already ran out over the summer, and 1re secondaire students are in classrooms under this programme right now. Per RTBF’s year-by-year breakdown of the whole reform, the government first presented this specific first-year plan back in December 2025, so the broad shape had roughly nine months of visibility before the September rentrée — it was only the final legal text, and the exact hour counts, that stayed unsettled until three months out. The genuinely open questions in this reform sit one and two years further out — more on that below — but nothing about first-year secondary is still pending a vote.

Programme 1ère secondaire 2026-2027: the weekly hour table

Here is the weekly period count schools are now working from, per L’Avenir’s reporting on the enacted decree:

Subject	Weekly periods
French – Classical Languages (FRALA)	6
Mathematics	5
Modern languages	4
Sciences	3
History-Geography	4
Manual, Technical, Technological & Digital Training (FMTTN)	3
Personalized Accompaniment	2

That mathematics allocation is one period higher than the original Pacte pour un Enseignement d’Excellence design called for — a change worth flagging to parents who may remember an earlier hour count from news coverage before the vote.

Horaire tronc commun secondaire, subject by subject

One subject-level shift is worth naming plainly rather than leaving parents to piece together from a hallway conversation: the FMTTN block folds together what used to be described separately — manual and technical training, plus a newer digital-competencies strand covering tools, logic, and digital culture.

Is this a cut? The government’s defense and the pushback

The 1D differentiated track — the pathway that previously separated students judged not ready for the standard first-year programme — is gone. Its roughly €25 million budget has been redirected into Reinforced Support and Personalized Accompaniment instead, meaning the support is now built into the common programme rather than routed through a separate track.

Education minister Valérie Glatigny (MR) has pushed back directly on the claim that this amounts to a quiet cut: “no field of knowledge in manuals, technical and technological training referenced materials has been removed,” she told Parliament, per L’Avenir’s vote-day report. That is a specific, checkable claim about course content, not a judgment on whether the new support structure will work as well as the track it replaced — schools should be ready for parents to ask that second question even though the decree itself doesn’t answer it.

The vote passed, but not without recorded dissent worth relaying honestly. Socialist MP Martin Casier called the text one containing “elements essential to organizing the school year, even if we condemn certain aspects,” while Lib·res MP Fabien Maingain argued the consultation process itself was the problem: “If you had consulted this well, we wouldn’t have unanimous opposition from all school actors.” Ecolo’s Bénédicte Linard, who had already filed a formal oral question on the reform in January, separately criticized sending “12-13 year-olds into businesses” during the programme’s work-exposure days. Separately, an education-sector advocacy organization has noted “training measures and resources for teachers” tied to the reform, without independently assessing whether that support is sufficient for a rollout this fast.

That same budget squeeze sits inside the wider Wallonia-Brussels spending picture our earlier coverage of the region’s 20-to-22 periods decree tied to added teacher workload without a matching increase in communication capacity.

Pacte pour un Enseignement d’Excellence: what’s still a draft for 2e and 3e secondaire

This is where the caution schools were applying to 1re secondaire back in February still genuinely belongs. La Libre reported in February 2026 that, at the time, “it is therefore still difficult for school administrations to present their programmes to parents with certainty” — true then for every year of the reform, and still true today specifically for years two and three. Per RTBF’s reporting, 2e and 3e secondaire are not due for implementation until September 2027 and September 2028 respectively — and neither has cleared a final vote yet. Nothing schools tell parents about those years should be presented as final; specifics could still shift before either vote actually happens.

Minister Glatigny has previewed the reasoning for those later years without committing to final numbers: the aim, she said, is that the old system “didn’t take into account students who already had a personal project” (RTBF), and that “the idea is not to lock a student into a track” too early. The official Pacte pour un Enseignement d’Excellence page confirms the same framing for parents directly: implementation begins in 1re secondaire this September, “with progressive rollout,” while “subsequent years remain under study with details to be defined later.” That page also names what the government is putting toward teacher transition — professional development, career-transition assistance, and priority placement — the piece of the reform most tied to whether years two and three land smoothly.

How to brief parents this month

For 1re secondaire: communicate what’s settled, concretely

The hour table above is no longer provisional, so there’s no reason to hedge it in a parent-facing message. In practice, this looks like a single FR/EN announcement pushed to the 1re secondaire parent channel this week: the subject names, their weekly period counts from the table above, and one line each on what disappeared (the 1D track) and where that budget went (Reinforced Support and Personalized Accompaniment). Send it as a push notification through the app and repeat the same message as an SMS for households that haven’t set up the app yet — a first-week policy update is exactly the kind of message that shouldn’t depend on which app a family happened to install. A workable SMS version: “1re secondaire update: new hour grid now in effect (Math 5h, FRALA 6h/week). The old 1D track is gone; support is now built into every class. Full details: [link].” Queuing that message is the same job covered week-by-week in our FWB week-one message plan; this is simply what goes in the tronc commun line of it.

For 2e and 3e secondaire: flag the draft status, don’t hide it

Institut Sainte-Thérèse d’Avila / Collège Saint-Joseph in Chênée offers a workable model here: instead of publishing an hour table, the school describes the tronc commun to parents through seven plain-language learning domains — French/arts/culture, modern languages, mathematics/sciences/technology, human sciences and citizenship, physical education and wellness, creativity and entrepreneurial spirit, and learning-to-learn skills — and explicitly defers period-by-period detail to a separate “grilles horaires” document, directing parents who need it to consult that document or contact the school directly. In practice, this looks like a short update posted to the same channel every time the 2e/3e file actually moves, instead of one large announcement parents have to go searching for later.

Acknowledging the parts that aren’t settled is not the same as sounding unsure about the parts that are. Keep those two registers visibly separate in whatever you send.

Getting both registers right at scale means the same update reaching every household in the language they actually read, through a channel they check, and reissued without rebuilding a phone tree each time the file moves. That’s the specific operational problem purpose-built school communication platforms are built to solve, rather than a general-purpose messaging app or a paper note home. BeeNet is one platform built around that pattern — per-family language preference between French and English so a bilingual household doesn’t get the same notice twice, group-level announcements scoped to a single year group, and a native SMS module for the households who haven’t opened the app yet.

Parents in Wallonia and Brussels are already hearing about tronc commun this month, from other parents, from group chats, from the news coverage cited above. The open question for your school isn’t whether that conversation happens — it’s whether your version of it reaches families first.

References

1. L’Avenir. “Tronc commun : ce qui attend les élèves qui entreront en première secondaire en août 2026.” May 27, 2026. https://www.lavenir.net/actu/belgique/politique/2026/05/27/tronc-commun-ce-qui-attend-les-eleves-qui-entreront-en-premiere-secondaire-en-aout-2026-CUDFWFNK6VAYHKUOPRU5HOQQMI/
2. L’Avenir. “Entrée de la première année de l’enseignement secondaire dans le tronc commun : ce sera voté aujourd’hui au Parlement de la FWB.” May 27, 2026. https://www.lavenir.net/actu/belgique/politique/2026/05/27/entree-de-la-premiere-annee-de-lenseignement-secondaire-dans-le-tronc-commun-ce-sera-vote-aujourdhui-au-parlement-de-la-fwb-MIEQI6JMRRBQVM4FVIWTBIAEFA/
3. La Libre. “Quels changements pour la première secondaire à la rentrée prochaine, avec l’arrivée du tronc commun ?” February 2, 2026. https://www.lalibre.be/belgique/enseignement/2026/02/02/quels-changements-pour-la-premiere-secondaire-a-la-rentree-prochaine-avec-larrivee-du-tronc-commun-A6TCPPYRQVFHXHJHNGVMVJXDIE/
4. Pacte pour un Enseignement d’Excellence, Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles. “Le tronc commun dans le secondaire.” 2026. https://pactepourunenseignementdexcellence.cfwb.be/mesures/le-tronc-commun-secondaire/
5. Parlement de la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles. Question orale de Bénédicte Linard, “Arrivée du tronc commun dans l’enseignement secondaire.” Filed January 12, 2026. https://www.pfwb.be/documents-parlementaires/document-qo-001838635
6. RTBF. “Enseignement secondaire : voici comment la majorité MR-Engagés va organiser le tronc commun.” 2026. https://www.rtbf.be/article/enseignement-la-majorite-mr-engages-s-accorde-sur-le-tronc-commun-dans-le-secondaire-11612188
7. Institut Sainte-Thérèse d’Avila / Collège Saint-Joseph, Chênée. “Tronc commun.” 2026. https://www.sta-chenee.be/offre-denseignement/tronc-commun/
8. La Ligue de l’Enseignement et de l’Éducation permanente. “Réforme du tronc commun en Belgique : ce qui change dans le secondaire.” 2026. https://ligue-enseignement.be/education-enseignement/articles/breves/reforme-du-tronc-commun-en-belgique-ce-qui-change-dans-le-secondaire