The Court of Auditors tries to identify the EAC

France. The Court of Auditors, still invested in cultural policy, has launched itself to attack the evaluation of a flagship program of the State: artistic and cultural education (EAC). A “mammoth” would have said the former Minister of Education recently disappeared, Claude Allègre, which concerns 13 million students and 58,000 establishments. The perimeter is much wider and more complex than that of museums whose court aligns the relationships with greed. This report, moreover, followed by little that on the individual culture pass.

This eagerness to assess cultural programs has the faults of its qualities. It allows us to better understand what is happening and encourage the actors to improve but at the same time it can contradict good intentions when the program has just structured, as the Jda described it in May 2022.

How to assess this “mammoth”? The court begins by doing what it knows how to do it best: counting how much it costs. Yes but count what? This is the whole problem of the EAC which concerns both compulsory artistic lessons and “EAC courses”, school time and also extracurricular and extracurricular. It estimates overall expenses at 3.5 billion euros in 2023, roughly the budget of the culture mission. It is considerable. However, more than 76 % of this amount concern the salaries of plastic art and music teachers in schools, colleges and high schools for two hours of weekly compulsory lessons for schoolchildren and college students and optional lessons for high school students. If the compulsory and optional lessons are removed, the more local community cost is around 885 million. For the record, the specifically EAC budget of the Ministry of Culture is 124 million euros.

The collective culture pass (that is to say the envelope allocated to college and high school students to carry out together an outing or a cultural program) is a formidable accelerator of the actions of EAC, as evidenced by the anger aroused by the cost of plane in January (see box). While before, the teacher wishing to set up an EAC project had to seek funding, today it is the opposite: there is a “right of draw” as the rapporteurs and an offer (plethoric) call it. The teachers have only to make their choice, a bit like the personal training account (CPF) of employees. It cost 51 million euros in 2023.

A difficult impact to assess

So much for expenses, but what about the effectiveness of the EAC? The Court focuses on two objectives assigned to the EAC: reaching the greatest number of students and reducing cultural inequalities. She cannot of course evaluate whether an outing in theater or cinema, participation in a choir or a dialogue with an artist in residence was able to trigger “something” with the students concerned. This “something”, a long -term psychic process, is absolutely impossible to measure and it is so much the better. We must be satisfied with the principle according to which the more a child is exposed to culture, the better their chances of fulfillment.

57 % of students benefited from an EAC action during the 2023-2024 school year. We know this figure thanks to the recent implementation of the adage application which – in particular – records EAC’s “actions” for each student. But as this has often been noted in these columns and also underline the magistrates of rue Cambon, Adage puts in the same bag a projection of film and an EAC “course”, that is to say a project for several weeks which associates, for example exit or encounter with artists, creation and restitution of this work. Even taking into account that all EAC actions are not entered in the application (it is far from being a reflex for teachers), this rate of 57 % seems very low for actions, it seems, as banal in school or college. We are far from the universality objectives.

We are also far from the objectives of reducing cultural inequalities. The Court notes that if 79 % of students in general high schools benefited from an EAC action, only 64 % of students in vocational high schools took advantage of it. However, there are many more high school students with disadvantaged social origin in the professional path than in the general and technological path. The Court also notes an observation that everyone can make: the more rural areas poor in cultural equipment, the less students have cultural opportunities in school. Several local authorities then try to bring culture in schools and the report describes with kindness a number of these programs. But it remains insufficient. Local communities spend nearly 600 million euros in EAC shares.

Many dysfunctions

The Court is finally in many dysfunctions which are due to complexity and the masses involved in the EAC. First, a governance problem, between the ministries of national education and culture, between the State and the local authorities, between actors in the field. The High Council for Artistic and Cultural Education (HCEAC) has not met for several years, to the point that the Senate has requested its abolition. There are many territorial steering committees which must meet annually, but this is not the case everywhere.

More unexpected is the variable investment of schools in the implementation of EAC actions. You might think that this level, it is easier for a director to order actions in all classes, but this is not the case. The Court notes that very often projects are carried out by more motivated teachers than the others, which leads it to recommend that teachers better train in these programs. At no time, however, it puts into perspective in the EAC compared to other more fundamental issues that are basic learning and well-known difficulties in national education.

As for the CPF, the collective culture pass has aroused massive referencing of offers: almost 13,000! All, and far from it, are the level of well -established national devices that are “my class in the cinema” or the “demos” musical education programs. And as for the individual culture pass, many organizations have been referenced (in adage) wanting to take advantage of the financial windfall. Suffice to say that the administration is overwhelmed and that either it allocates time -to -control resources to control requests, or it validates without looking at too much. Many teachers then tend to “buy” a package from a well -known operator. The Théâtre du Héron is the first beneficiary of this effect with a turnover of 1.5 million euros since the start of the system, followed by the Théâtre en English association (€ 1.40 million). The Caen Memorial points to fourth place with 850,000 euros.

Since the Tasca-Langs plan of the 2000s which began to organize cultural action in national education, the recent implementation of the adage system + collective culture pass, to which we can add the 100 % EAC label of local authorities, has given a skeleton to the EAC. The challenge is now to limit bureaucratization and inevitable dewl effects in such massive programs.