At the initiative of Education Minister Valérie Glatigny and Administrative Simplification Minister Jacqueline Galant, the Wallonia-Brussels Federation government has approved a first set of measures aimed at concretely simplifying the administrative work of school management and education teams. This progress marks an important step in the broad simplification drive project, carried out jointly with the Walloon Region.
A well-known problem
The issue of administrative overload constantly comes up in discussions with education stakeholders. Teachers and school management: they all say the same thing. Their job, their primary mission, is to teach, to guide, to prepare lessons and to work with their pupils, not to spend hours filling out documents, entering data or complying with overly complex procedures.
This reality is heard everywhere, and after hearing it so often, action had to be taken: that is the purpose of this first set of measures. Giving teams more time for learning means allowing schools to focus on what truly matters.
Concretely, the steering plan, a central tool in school management, is being streamlined to be clearer and more sustainable for teams. The structure goes from fifteen themes to five major dimensions, significantly reducing the amount of information to be entered.
The deadline given to teams to draft their plan is being extended to 150 school working days, up from 110 previously, and assessments will now be carried out in the third and sixth years, allowing more drafting time. These changes were designed with the support of stakeholders on the ground and aim to provide a tool better suited to the actual pace of institutions.
To better identify the administrative burdens experienced by teams, a participatory tool, Simplifiez‑vous, was made available to them. Between its launch in autumn 2025 and February 2026, 417 proposals were submitted.
Some have already been incorporated into the adjustments of the steering plans, while others will feed into the ongoing reflection on simplifying the pupil support file (DAccE). Modernising this tool will be one of the next steps in the simplification process.
To make procedures faster and more accessible, several steps can now be carried out electronically: filing appeals, submitting exemption requests, or transmitting opinions and notifications.
In addition, an expanded delegation of powers within the administration will make it possible to speed up various decisions, particularly the appointment of members of bodies, the approval of study programmes, or the granting of subsidies.
This first set of measures marks a concrete step towards a clearer and more efficient administrative framework for schools. Work will continue over the coming months, particularly around the DAccE, to further streamline procedures and strengthen the coherence of the tools used by teachers and school management.