At the start of 2022, the Paris Education Authority ended the special arrangement that allowed the capital’s two most prestigious state secondary schools, Henri-IV and Louis-le-Grand, to select their Year 10 pupils on the basis of their academic records without using the automated allocation platform, Affelnet. To bring greater transparency to the admissions process at these schools and accelerate their efforts to broaden access, a new semi-automated procedure has been introduced for Parisian Year 9 pupils wishing to enrol at these schools for the following academic year. From now on, applications will be processed via the Affelnet platform, and candidates will be ranked according to a scoring system based on their academic results (mastery of core competencies and subject-specific évaluations). The places available at each school are then allocated according to a quota system: a minimum proportion of pupils receiving financial assistance is set for each school, and places are distributed according to the socio-economic background of the pupil’s previous middle school / lower secondary school (advantaged, intermediate or disadvantaged). An analysis of data from the Paris education authority shows that this new procedure has significantly diversified the social and geographical profile of the pupils who enrolled at the Henri-IV and Louis-le-Grand secondary schools at the start of the 2022 academic year, without leading to any decline in the academic standard of those admitted.
Can social inclusivity be reconciled with academic excellence? An initial assessment of the integration of the Henri-IV and Louis-le-Grand sixth-form colleges into the Affelnet admissions process
This paper aims to evaluate the first implementation of the new selection procedure for pupils at Henri-IV and Louis-le-Grand, which is no longer based on academic records, by analysing changes in the social and academic profiles of the pupils who have been admitted to these two prestigious Parisian secondary schools.
Reference IPP Policy Brief No. 89
Presentation
Key Results
- Since the start of the 2022 academic year, the Henri-IV and Louis-le-Grand secondary schools have stopped admitting their Parisian Year 10 pupils on the basis of their academic records. A new procedure has been introduced which allocates places based on three criteria: academic results in Year 9, eligibility for a means-tested grant, and the socio-economic composition of the candidates’ former middle school / lower secondary school.
- Following the first year of this reform’s implementation, social diversity has increased significantly at both schools: the proportion of scholarship recipients has doubled compared with the start of the 2021 academic year, and, amongst admitted Parisian pupils, the proportion from very affluent social backgrounds has fallen from 84 per cent to 70 per cent.
- The new procedure has also helped to rebalance the geographical distribution of students admitted from Paris: between 2021 and 2022, the proportion of pupils from socially advantaged middle schools / lower secondary schools (social position index above 124) fell from 54 per cent to 44 per cent.
- This greater social and geographical diversity has not come at the expense of a decline in the average academic standard of those admitted: performance in the written Brevet exams among pupils starting in the 2022 academic year was even slightly higher than that of the previous cohort.
Partners
This paper was supported by the Ministry of National Education and Youth. The authors would like to thank the teams at the Paris Regional Education Authority and the DEPP for providing the data used.
The analyses presented in this paper are the sole responsibility of the authors and cannot be attributed to either the Paris Academy or the Ministry of National Education and Youth.