The Council of the European Union has set a target for countries to limit school dropout to 9% by 2030. To this end, national contexts must promote strategies for educational success linked to a comprehensive whole-school approach with an inclusive vision of education, allowing institutions and staff to innovate. Each member state must transpose this resolution into its educational system. However, in France, the dominance of the principle of meritocracy over the education and training system’s organisation does not favour a move towards greater inclusion (Verdier, 2001). The guidance system in particular reinforces the primacy of this conception: it puts into practice the competition between secondary school pupils, distributing them between more or less elitist tracks according to their academic results. Thus, at the end of middle school, young people with learning difficulties, often from modest backgrounds, tend to be oriented by default into the least attractive training courses. This constitutes a motive for dropping out (Bernard & Michaut, 2016). However, a high school’s climate can retroactively diminish the sense of constraint in orientation, and promote the perseverance of these students, by fostering their sense of belonging and focusing on educational success (Bell, 2021).

This can be difficult to implement in training courses that are in low demand, in which pupils have entered essentially due to poor grades. Staff tends to be caught between injunctions stemming from European resolutions to make educational and pedagogical practices more inclusive; and a meritocratic principle that permeates the French education system, including courses whose students are usually unable to live up to demanding academic expectations. Nevertheless, said practices seem to favour the perseverance of pupils when staff find a compromise between two logics (Derouet & Dutercq, 1997): pursuing performance, based on an industrial logic, while promoting proximity and the personalisation of relationships within the institution, powered by a community logic (Bell, 2019).  

Whereas the industrial logic can be materialised by actors’ focus on the closeness or distance of their students’ behaviours and performances in relation to academic expectations, a community logic allows them to take into account the various difficulties faced by certain pupils. This observation is similar to that of Lantheaume & Urbanski (2023): some students in disadvantaged middle schools may ask for religious exemptions while they are in school, in spite of the principle of secularism applied to the French education system, which does not easily grant such exemptions (Levinson, 2002; Joppke, 2017).

In these situations, when staff compromise on the principle of justice to be applied, between absolute respect for the secular rule and maintenance of the bond of trust and closeness with the pupil, their attitude tends to favour behaviour evolution of said pupils towards a stronger suitability for the principle of secularism, therefore fostering their perseverance. This is related to religious but also cultural and ethnical differences which tend to be ignored for the sake of civic equality, but are recognized in specific contexts. Hence it is possible to say that multiculturalism is not as “un-French” as it might seem (Guérard de Latour, 2013). Certainly, in the current context of the 2004 law prohibiting the wearing of ostentatious signs of religious affiliation in schools, and the repeated terrorist attacks of the 2010’s, French society is experiencing tensions with regard to the respect of the principle of secularism in public institutions. Political discourse tends towards a perfectionist republicanism, advocating, in the interest of inclusion, a strict interpretation of this principle and an intransigence towards breaches. The question is whether or not, applied to the school environment, this inflexibility promotes the inclusion of all students and, by extension, their school perseverance.

In the case before us, that of young people in a constrained orientation, who often have little interest in their course, the challenge is to understand whether the school staff manages to justify official republican rules, beyond a top-down implementation of administrative princi-ples, for the sake of educational ideals such as inclusion, well-being and perseverance. This line of research stems from the previous collective research programmes coordinated by each of us (Bell, 2021; Lantheaume & Urbanski, 2023). While we never considered the topics of secularism and school perseverance as unrelated, we nevertheless think they need to be more tightly connected. To this end, a specific material has been gathered. It consists of a qualita-tive interview survey conducted with educational and pedagogical members of staff (n=25 one hour each) in a high school situated in a disadvantaged peripheral area. The interviewees were asked to describe professional situations that occurred in the school and that are under-stood, under their own criteria, as being linked with “social and cultural diversity”. Our aim was to make them explain as precisely as possible 1) how they interpreted the situa-tion; 2) what they did (or not) in the face of their perception of facts; 3) why they decided to act this way and not another; 4) with the help of what resources; 5) which expected result they wanted to achieve. Hence the situations at stake are very diverse. Many of them are related to perseverance, inequalities, or constrained orientation; others are rather related to secularism, racism, or discriminations. But most of them are a mixture of several of these aspects. Then, the crucial aim is to see how the interviewees try to find a balance among these, depending on their school subject, pedagogical approach, or perceived relations with other actors (pupils, parents, hierarchy, members of staff). The interviews are analysed in line with the methodological framework outlined by Boltanski and Thévenot (2006) accord-ing to which the political rules of justice are in constant re-elaboration and need to be justi-fied by actors themselves, notably in contemporary societies where criticism towards institu-tions is widely shared. In the case at stake, the republican philosophy is no longer given by the institution because it is under the fire of various critiques in the media, academia, and society in general. Our methodology sheds light on how educational actors justify their actions especially when they might be seen as controversial.

Our data shows that staff’s hybrid community and industrial logic of action is favourable to establishing a demanding educational climate and a sense of belonging, conducive to the acculturation of young people short of academic expectations, some of whom claim a religious or cultural affiliation within their establishment. In this context, the rules of republican secularism are regularly readapted. While many French commentators would see compromises as a transgression of the secular ethos to be imparted in teenagers, we understand them as a deepening of the modern conception of the sacredness of the individual (Durkheim, 1960). Certainly, members of the school staff do not share the same view on situations at stake, but in most cases they do not see the cultural or religious expressions of pupils as a problem for the republican model of schooling, because the latter is itself understood in light of its capacity to foster school perseverance. This result is in line with those shown in other studies: regardless of their religion, culture or ethnicity, pupils widely share the aim to be fully part of French society, and this is precisely why they are not satisfied with the constrained orientation which has, therefore, mixed effects on the school climate. For being a pupil requires to constantly move between various kinds of interactions within the classroom and ultimately it requires to become the autonomous subject of these moves (Bautier & Rochex 2004). Yet a constrained orientation does not favour this process, leading many pupils to express their individuality in the guise of culture, ethnicity, or religion. Therefore, the results of our study stress the necessity not to separate the need for “minimal secularism” in state schools (Laborde, 2017) from the stakes of justice, seen here through the lens of constrained orientation and the need for school perseverance.

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