French high school students have been protesting for more than two weeks over conditions in schools, including overcrowded classrooms and staff shortages, and they show no sign of stopping. The unrest began on September 21 when pupils blockaded a school in the Paris suburb of Creteil, and within a week, their protest had spread across the country with students and police clashing violently. On September 29, the demonstrations coincided with a nationwide public sector strike, in which teachers joined other state workers against a proposed pay freeze.
More than 6,100 people have since been arrested. With the government under pressure to rein in spending as its debt rises, Al Jazeera looks at how much France invests in education, how it compares with the rest of Europe and how it measures up against what the country spends on healthcare and defence. According to the latest data from Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics agency, France’s public spending on education amounts to 5.1 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP).
That figure does not include private spending, such as school fees paid by families. The French Ministry of National Education uses a broader measure, known as domestic expenditure on education, which counts all the money that goes into education, whether from the state, local authorities, businesses or households. As well as teaching, it covers adult and continuing training and related costs such as school meals, boarding and transport.
By this measure, France spent 199.2 billion euros ($223bn) on education in 2025, equivalent to 6.7 percent of its GDP and 2.4 billion euros more than in 2024, according to provisional ministry figures. Spending has more than doubled since 1980, even after accounting for inflation. But the economy has grown too, so education spending’s share of GDP is lower today than it was in the mid-1990s.
Secondary education accounted for the largest share of spending at 73.7 billion euros (37 percent), followed by primary education at 60 billion euros (30 percent), higher education at 45.6 billion euros (23 percent) and adult and continuing education at 19.7 billion euros (10 percent), according to the National Education Ministry. Among European countries, Sweden spends the largest share of its GDP on education at 7.3 percent in 2024, followed by Iceland (7 percent) and Belgium, Estonia and Finland (6.3 percent each), according to Eurostat. The lowest spenders are Ireland (2.7 percent), Greece (3.9 percent), Romania and Italy (4 percent each), and the United Kingdom and Spain (4.1 percent each).
At 5.1 percent, France is joint 13th, level with the Netherlands and Slovakia, and above the EU average of 4.8 percent. But above-average spending has not shielded France from a problem affecting much of the developed world. Teacher shortages are growing across countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, according to the OECD’s latest Education at a Glance report.
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