Viaud, Marie-Laure
Financially accessible independent schools? A typology of the economic and pedagogical logics of the founders of alternatives schools
- 2024.
12
For the past fifteen years, independent schools have been multiplying in France. At the same time, their founders want to allow access to a socially diverse public, and this leads to a diversification of economic strategies.On the basis of a study of a panel of alternative schools that have been created for the last twenty years, and the production of monographs of establishments allowing comparisons in time and space of the strategies of the innovators, this article proposes a typology of the different financial logics presiding over their opening and their operation during the first two years, and analyzes the consequences of these choices in terms of social composition and the sustainability of the project.Three models are distinguished: the classic model of business creation with recourse to loans and the hiring of one or more employees (a solid model, but one that leads to high tuition costs); the model of creation by enthusiastic people who carry out all the tasks themselves without remuneration in order to keep tuition costs low schools wishing to be affordable to all with very low tuition fees, but at the cost of complex “economic arrangements” that make the survival of these structures very fragile.