For more than three years, researchers carried out a trial, funded by the Youth Experimentation Fund, to assess the impact of the Sourdun Internat d’excellence for high-achieving pupils on the pupils themselves. They demonstrate that an ambitious educational policy can yield significant results, but they also highlight that, to date, this policy has not reached the weakest pupils.
The Sourdun internat d’excellence opened its doors at the start of the 2009 academic year. The first 258 boarders were selected by random draw from among 395 eligible candidates. We followed the boarders and the 137 candidates who were not selected for two years. The latter group served as our ‘control’ group. The random selection process ensures that these two groups were initially identical, enabling us to reliably isolate the effects of Sourdun by comparing the boarders with the control group.
Selected primarily for their motivation, the pupils at Sourdun come from modest backgrounds and have an intermediate level of academic achievement. Boarding school requires a period of adjustment, meaning that few effects are noticeable in the first year. It is after two years that a marked improvement in the maths results of the Sourdun pupils becomes apparent compared with the other pupils, accompanied by greater academic ambition and a stronger desire to learn. In French, however, the boarders do not achieve better results than the control group. Several studies examining other educational policies also find effects in mathematics but not in language: the development of verbal skills may perhaps be a longer-term process.
Numerous factors may explain Sourdun’s significant impact. Two are likely to be interrelated: the boarding school’s environment conducive to study (low absenteeism, a reduction in violent incidents within the school), and the strong commitment of teachers and pupils to personal work, study and individual support.
By its very nature, Sourdun remains an exception. But its effectiveness is a strong incentive to trial other schemes to tackle educational inequalities on a larger scale.
