This Monday, the Education Committee of the Parliament of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation adopted two draft decrees aimed at facilitating the implementation of reforms adopted in 2024 to combat school dropout and permanent exclusions.
The first focus of these texts is to make the fight against school dropout more effective. When it comes to dropout, the earlier the intervention, the greater the chances of keeping a pupil on their educational path.
The reform adopted in 2024 had introduced individualised, progressive support for pupils, based on three levels of intervention depending on how their situation evolves, as well as better coordination between schools, PMS centres and various partners (for example, the youth welfare sector).
The reform will apply in primary education from the coming 2026/2027 school year. In secondary education, to take account of requests from those on the ground, the Government had decided to postpone the reform's entry into force by one year, to the 2027-2028 school year. After several months of consultation with stakeholders, a number of adjustments are now being proposed to make this system easier to implement in our schools, without changing its ambition.
The aim is to allow school management, teachers and PMS centres to devote more time to supporting pupils rather than to administrative tasks.
In practical terms, the draft simplifies the work of education teams by eliminating double recording of absences through a single school attendance management tool. The DAccE (pupil support file) will remain the central tracking tool, but it will now be updated automatically.
It also makes attendance recording more flexible and extends the deadline for justifying absences from 5 to 10 days. Finally, it strengthens the early detection of at-risk situations through clearer monitoring procedures, real-time data access, and better identification of repeated absences (for example, always missing the same class). Education teams will thus have more reliable information to support pupils, before absenteeism turns into school dropout.
The second draft decree concerns permanent exclusions. It builds on the reform adopted in 2024 and improves its implementation on the ground, based on feedback from stakeholders (FPO, unions). The text shortens several administrative deadlines to speed up the handling of appeals (notably by reducing the deadline for transmitting files from 10 to 5 working days) and to reduce periods of uncertainty for pupils and their families. It also strengthens re-enrolment options: when all usual steps have failed, Government services will now be able to seek a solution across all education networks, not just within Wallonie-Bruxelles Enseignement. The aim is to limit periods out of school as much as possible, while preserving schools' ability to immediately exclude a pupil when the seriousness of the acts committed justifies it.
“Since the start of this legislature, our goal has been to simplify the daily work of education teams, so they can devote more time to supporting pupils. These adjustments respond to requests from the ground. They give education teams simpler tools to prevent school dropout, and to avoid, as much as possible, a pupil who is absent today becoming a dropout tomorrow”, concludes Valérie Glatigny, Minister of Education.