Policies for the management of contract teachers have given rise to a great deal of work in recent years, particularly in connection with questions about the many forms of privatisation of education (Ball & Youdell, 2008, Verger et al., 2016). However, with a few exceptions, such as the reflections on the restructuring of the European social dialogue in relation to the growing recourse to contractualisation (Stevenson et al., 2017),  the literature focuses largely on education systems, in Europe and elsewhere, in which, for major structural and political reasons, these teachers make up a significant proportion of the teaching force, as in liberal systems, especially the US (Harrison, 2017), or certain developing countries which make massive use of this type of teacher. In many articles, the aim is therefore to analyse the effects of the use of contract teachers on pupil performance (Chudgar, 2015) , or else to study decisive and sensitive stages in the contractualisation process (Srunk et al., 2018), such as the decision not to renew a contract by headteachers (Nixon et al., 2016). In this work, the very institutionalisation of the use of contract teachers, and its potential impact on the modes of regulation of the education system as a whole, is hardly ever questioned as such. What are the effects of contractualisation in education systems, such as several European ones, in which this standard of employment is not so obvious?

To answer this question, this paper analyses the current institutionalization of the management of contract teachers in France and its potential effects on the policy of management of all teachers by the Ministry of National Education. In the French school system, these contract teachers (which represent 7.9% of teachers in 2017-2018) are public service employees whose employment is based on a contract and not on a statutory law. Our purpose is to understand the ways in which such an institutional order can evolve in a context of the development of New Public Management in education and repeated calls for human resource management on the one hand, and the declining attractiveness of teaching professions, whether real or socially constructed, on the other hand, two issues that affect a large number of European countries. To do this, we mobilize a theoretical framework combining the political sociologies of institutions (Lagroye and Offerlé, 2010), policy instrumentation (Lascoumes and Le Galès, 2007) and public problems (Neveu, 2015) to consider the processes of institutionalization at work, and we choose to focus on the transformations taking place at the margins of this model of the teaching state, with the hypothesis that these can have significant knock-on effects on teacher management methods as a whole. We define margins as organized interfaces within which an institutional equilibrium is played out and replayed that can have more or less significant knock-on effects on a more general institutional order, in this case the teaching state. These effects depend on several factors, such as 1) the more or less important power of imagination and creation that these interfaces can leave to the actors, 2) the capacity of "marginalized secants" (Jamous, 1969) or "frontier entrepreneurs" (Bergeron, Castel and Nouguez, 2013) to draw influence from their position at the intersection of different systems of actors in order to redefine the constituent properties of the overall institutional order, 3) more or less important knock-on effects of the very instrumentation of public action, understood then as "a key variable in the degree and forms of institutionalisation of public policy" (Halpern, Lascoumes and Le Galès, 2014, p. 41) and the capacity of contractualization to change configurations of public action according to different political circumstances.

The interest in studying the French case lies mainly in the particular political model of the relationship between the State and the teaching profession that has been historically constructed since the beginning of the nineteenth century and that can be described as the teaching State. The latter designates both a State that educates its population and a State that is organized in such a way as to preserve the autonomy and professional interests of a teaching profession (van Zanten, 2014). In that perspective a survey was conducted between September 2017 and September 2019 as part of the European TeachersCareers project (2017-2022). Funded by the European Research Council and coordinated by Xavier Dumay (UCL, Girsef), this project aims to compare the ways in which teaching jobs are made more flexible and the ways in which teaching careers are managed in three European school systems: England, French-speaking Belgium and France. One of the axes is devoted more specifically to teacher management policies. Within this project, our contribution was to conduct a survey on the management of contract teachers at the national level and in two contrasting “académies” [1]: Créteil, an unattractive mass "académie" with regular growth in enrolments, and Dijon, which is smaller and which recruits a much smaller number of contract teachers. The survey consisted in cross-referencing individual interviews (20 at the national level, 12 on the Dijon "académie", 18 on the Créteil "académie") with occasional observations and an analysis of several bodies of documents: 23 official texts, 338 articles from the national and regional print media available on Europresse and published between May 1997 and September 2018, 250 dispatches from the education news agency AEF and documents available on the sites of the main teachers' unions representing contract teachers (120 digital documents). Interviews were conducted with contract teachers, actors responsible for their management at the central level and in the “académies” and key actors in the public action process concerning them: experts, parliamentarians, union representatives, administrators of the Ministry of the Civil Service, etc. The aim was to understand the position occupied by these policy actors in the existing institutional order and to question their representations of contractual teachers’ management and of the major policy problems that this management could pose. [1] In France, "académies" are administrative divisions of the national Ministry of Education. They designate both territories and the state administrative authorities which run them.

We show that while the French model of the teaching state has historically always functioned thanks to the contribution of non-titular teachers at its margins, the latter have been exposed for several years to pressure for major institutional changes. These pressures, which refer either to exogenous shocks (from the point of view of the French educational institution) or to new problematizations of public action, do not, however, seem strong enough to call into question the model of the teaching state as a whole, as the "recall forces of the instituted" (Lagroye and Offerlé, 2010, p. 149) remain significant. However, a new situation has emerged since 2017, with the current fabrication of a new public policy (Zittoun, 2014) combining the problem of contract teachers with that of other teachers and with the crisis of recruitment. This policy tends to confirm the use of contractualisation as a major recruitment channel in the French system. Although it does not yet call into question the national model, it already produces, at a more micro level, two types of potentially significant institutional changes: it very gradually modifies certain institutional balances between different professional groups (teachers, headteachers, inspectors), and it gives rise to a major ideological debate within the teachers' unions (and to a lesser extent headteachers' ones) which undermines their participation in the co-management of teaching careers.Although it does not yet call into question the national model, it is already producing, at a more micro level, two types of potentially significant institutional change: it is very gradually changing certain institutional balances between different professional groups (teachers, headteachers, inspectors), and it is giving rise to a major ideological debate within teachers' unions (and to a lesser extent headteachers) which is weakening their influence on the institutional regulation of the French education system.

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