Corre (Patrice)

Henri-IV secondary school head teacher / Member of the Foundation’s executive committee

Patrice Corre is a modest rural family’s eldest child and the one who made his grandfather’s dream come true: he became a school teacher. He is now a geography associate professor and has been a school head teacher for 25. He was also his family’s first member to boast a Bac. He is also a child of the école de la république, where he studied on scholarships and which he has never stopped commending since.

Today, he is at the helm of Henri-IV, France’s most prestigious lycée (senior secondary school). He believes in merit and in the overriding need to give everyone – every one of his students, and indeed every youth – the best shot at success. He believes in that, practices what he preaches.

He is happy to blaze new trails to do that. In 2006, Lycée Henri-IV, which counts 2,600 students, opened a prep class. That class takes in 30 qualified Bac students a year based on merit, and they are all on scholarships. The syllabus blends general knowledge into the curriculum preparing them to sit for the most stringent Grande Ecole entrance exams, with one-to-one coaching by professors and a group of pro-bono tutors (alumni who have made it into a Grande Ecole over the past few years).

“If two kids have exactly the same qualifications, we will help the one from the least advantaged background,” he explains. But, he continues, “About a dozen schools are using the same model we used for this initiative, so the programme didn’t just stay at Lycée Henri-IV. We have devised a number of educational, cultural and practical approaches to support all our students preparing to sit Grande Ecole exams. And the number of students from underprivileged backgrounds, i.e. students on scholarships, has grown considerably and their results in the most selective exams have improved remarkably as a result.”

This drive to open up has also swept through the secondary school. In Patrice Corre’s words, “Our 270 seconde students (38/39 per class) come from 118 different colleges (junior secondary schools), and 15 to 17% of them are from priority education zones. The effects are positive. A youth from Seine-Saint-Denis can get in touch with other people he isn’t used to rubbing shoulders with. It’s a way of rewarding their achievements. We look at their attitude towards work, determination and passion.” Several of them “have been backed by foundations since they started secondary school.” He adds, “Private funding helps a lot. That’s what the learning tax does. And, over the past few years, legislation has helped a number of foundations to come about and develop, and that has been building a lot of support for public-interest initiatives, which is fairly new in the field of education. Of course, the State still has to be there to make sure wealth is distributed fairly and to regulate a society in order to consolidate harmony. But it can’t take care of everything and get tangled up in all the details, as it did in Napoleon’s day, when education was something for a minority. The goal back then was to build a knowledgeable aristocracy to serve the State. Things have changed a lot since but we still have to tackle a key challenge for our society as a developed country: to provide equal opportunities in education. Because we need all the intelligence we can get, regardless of where it comes from, geographically or socially speaking.”