In June 2010, the French High Council for Education (Haut Conseil de l’Education – HCE), which is a consultative organisation bringing advice to the President and the government, contacted Yves Reuter, professor at Charles de Gaulle – Lille 3 University and member of the CIREL research laboratory (Interuniversity Centre for the Research on Education) to survey the implementation of a specific dimension belonging to the 2005 Law (article 34) and relating to primary and secondary French schools innovations. Yves Reuter constituted a team of four researchers, also belonging to Lille 3 University and members of the CIREL. The survey was led from November 2010 to June 2011 and the final report was sent to the High Council for Education in June 2011 (Reuter et al., 2011) which has recently published some recommendations (HCE, 2011).

The law voted on the 23^rd April 2005 has deeply reformed the French school system by imposing a common base for knowledge and competences, referring to the European key competences framework. Indeed, pupils have to reach, at the end of compulsory education, a group of seven interdependent competences. The reform had – but has still today – a deep impact on the definition and content of the national curriculum. Moreover, the school staffs had to implement this new educational policy and adapt their professional practices. In order to help such an implementation, the 2005 law allows a special article (n°34) which offers the possibility to innovate in school practice, somewhat changing the traditional organisation. The main concerned fields are the followings: teaching methods, interdisciplinary approaches, class or school organisation, cooperation with external partners and increased relationships with foreign schools. The aim is to give school staffs and managers more freedom to take initiatives and experiment new or renewed education situations.

Our paper aims at developing our main research results, and will particularly insist on several major points: first of all, we notice different meanings for the term innovation and often we observe a semantic shift from innovation to experimentation. This confusion is largely fed both by authorities and school staffs which do not constantly share similar educational objectives. For example, we note that authorities tend to promote short-term innovations through experiments. As a consequence, we then propose to study the various experiments led in schools and analyse them on three different levels – local, regional, national – Finally, we will lay stress on the levers but also the limits of the innovative process such as it has been developed within a French school system that remains quite rigid, offering more control than adaptability and flexibility.

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