More than half of the students aged 10-11 struggle to perform addition and multiplication accurately, as reveals a recent report by the French education ministry.

Recent national assessments show that French fifth-grade students aged 10-11 have significant difficulties in mastering fundamental skills in mathematics and French.

The results mirror concerns raised last year by former prime minister and then-education minister, Gabriel Attal, who emphasized the worrying reading and math skills of 4th-grade students. He pointed out that more than half were unable to read proficiently, and the majority faced difficulties in problem-solving and geometry challenges. Speaking to France Info, Education Minister Anne Genetet expressed concern over recent assessment results revealing that

30 percent of fifth-grade students could still not read a basic text fluently.

The ministry’s report also highlighted that only around 53 percent of students could read a text aloud adequately, and 46.7 per cent show proficiency in „conjugated verb agreement”, and more than 50 percent struggle to „recognise the main components of a sentence”.

In mathematics, half of the students assessed struggled to perform addition, multiplication, and subtraction accurately.

„Problem-solving, a crucial part of their middle school curriculum, is a weak spot for half of our fifth-grade students,” the report says.

These deficiencies also – of course – have an impact on their further studies.

These challenges are compounded by the rising number of migrant students in Western European schools, including France, where educators are tasked with teaching increasingly diverse classrooms. Many students do not speak French or the primary language of their host country at home, making it difficult for them to acquire the foundational language skills essential for success in other subjects.

Recent statistics from Austria revealed that more than three-quarters of students in Vienna’s middle schools do not speak German at home, with just 8,479 of the city’s 26,816 middle school students using German as their primary language. In specific districts, the number of non-German speakers soared above 90 percent.

Similarly in Germany, the president of the German Teachers’ Association sounded the alarm in June that the country’s education system was facing a serious crisis as increasingly more and more students speak little or no German at all. Stefan Dull pointed out that the school system was overloaded due to excessive immigration and said the rise of non-German-speaking students had placed an enormous burden on teachers in recent times.

„After all, the teachers don’t speak Farsi or Ukrainian. How are they supposed to teach them?”

he said, noting that „the higher the percentage of immigrants, the more difficult it is to motivate the class”.