Just a few days before the start of the school year, some French-speaking schools are still looking to enrol more students, however, some schools have already reached their limit, resulting in them refusing new ones.
The situation across the country varies wildly, according to reports from RTBF. At the Institut Notre Dame in Charleroi, there are almost no places left, but the school’s phones keep ringing with last-minute requests.
“Sometimes we have to refuse students because some places are full. We try to redirect them as well as possible to other schools in the region,” Laura Gusciglio, the person in charge of registrations at the school, said.
This influx of last-minute requests are making matters of organisation a nightmare for the school, as teachers must make plans without knowing exactly how many students they will have in each class.
“We will have to juggle the organisational constraints of class size because we cannot exceed a certain number of students per class,” said Willy Kerday, director of the Institute of Our Lady in Charleroi.
In need of more pupils
While some schools are turning away students, others are desperate for last-minute applications. Just down the road at the alternative education Waldorf-Steiner school, also in Charleroi, there are fears that they will not meet the minimum quota for students in order to receive subsidies from the Wallonia-Brussels Federation.
“We currently have 90 registered students. For 15 September, we must reach the figure of 110 registered students. If we do not reach this number, the school will simply close. This means that 90 families could be in hot water, needing to look for a school at the last minute,” Peggy Martin, treasurer of the school, told RTBF.
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Last year, at the start of the school year, 332 pupils in Brussels and Wallonia were left without a school, including 133 from Brussels. The shortage of school places is most chronic in Brussels, where students have regularly failed to find new schools for several years in a row.
The situation is even worse for Dutch speakers in the capital. Despite 500 new places being created in Brussels Dutch-language primary education, some 3,000 children still did not have a place in a school as of May this year.
