Mini-Publics in Educational Reform in Francophone Belgium
The school system in French-speaking Belgium is going through a large-scale reform, so-called "Le Pacte pour un Enseignement d'Excellence" (2015–2018). The idea of such a Pacte comes from the coalition agreement between socialists and Christian democrats following the 2014 elections. The two government partners agreed: "in order to identify the means to reach the objectives of improving the performances of our education system and of reducing the inequalities that influence the performances, the Government will propose "Le Pacte pour un Enseignement d'Excellence" that will be enacted for the next ten years". Hence, the full process is intended to last longer than the current legislature. To this end, it is deemed key that all stakeholders support this large-scale policy reform. In order to reach such large adhesion to the Pacte, the whole policy-making process rests on a collaborative governance scheme. This means the implication of organized stakeholders and citizens. The former are representatives from unions of teachers, parents' associations, experts, school directors, psychologists and representatives of the different schools' networks. Together with the administration and the cabinet of the Minister of Education, they have formed transversal groups throughout the whole policy-making as well as 12 working groups during the policy formulation stage. In the agenda-setting stage, an external consultancy group, McKinsey, was mandated to collect and analyse large amounts of data in order to identify the problems and challenges facing the education system in French-speaking Belgium. It is also during the policy formulation stage that citizens and stakeholders have been involved in three mini-publics. For each of them, participants received briefing material explaining both the process and the content of the issues at stake. The deliberations took place in small groups that were facilitated by trained moderators who ensured the quality of the deliberations and helped all the participants to contribute to the recommendations that were then presented and voted upon in plenary session. These recommendations were then sent to the transversal working groups. On the basis of the propositions from the working groups and the citizens, the Minister formulated the texts enacting the Pacte. First, from February to April 2016, 24 randomly selected citizens gathered in a Citizen panel that met for three weekends to discuss and decide on what they believe to be the priorities for a 21st century education system. Second, on 11 November 2016, 81 people gathered in a Citizen conference to discuss the specific – albeit fundamental – issue of redoublement, that is the fact of having to do again a school year. To deliberate on this issue, participants were made more or less equally of students, parents and actors of the education system (teachers, directors and other professionals). Participants could volunteer to participate but there was a random selection to choose among candidates with the same profile in order to reach a diverse mini-public. Third, on 20 January 2018, a Consensus conference was organized to reflect on several scenarios for the content of the curriculum and decide which of these scenarios they would like to see implemented with the reform. There was thus a clear agenda behind the process: participants had to first deliberate, weigh the advantages and disadvantages of each scenario, and second to vote for the one they preferred. Based on 356 people who registered after an open call, 156 were randomly drawn in order to have 2/3 of teachers and 1/3 of citizens. 116 of them showed up on the day and made propositions for the school curriculum. Compared to the two other events, the mini-public was thus composed of a majority of participants having direct stakes in education reform. Besides, the media attention was higher than for the two other events, before and after the mini-public took place. Three challenges 1) Gathering participants with different hats: not only are they citizens, but also students, parents, teachers, directors. 2) Dealing with polarization in the room, in the media and in the public sphere. 3) Integrating the results of the citizen panels into a larger policy-making process.