Can Liège’s renewed human chain shift the course of Glatigny’s school reforms?

Teachers in Liège formed another human chain on Monday, 7 September, to protest reforms led by Valérie Glatigny, First Vice-President of the Government of the French Community and Minister of Education and Adult Education. La DH reported the renewed action, which echoed an earlier chain involving staff from four schools on rue Hors-Château. The symbolic protest ended without an immediate policy change, but it kept pressure on the government before a French-speaking education demonstration scheduled in Liège for 10 September.

The dispute centres on measures adopted by the MR–Les Engagés government for the 2026-2027 school year, particularly the increase from 20 to 22 weekly classroom periods for teachers in the upper years of secondary education. The government presents that change as a harmonisation of teaching loads and part of a broader effort to control the French Community’s deficit. Its October 2025 budget communiqué said the package was designed to preserve classroom provision, teachers’ purchasing power and the education pathway while using limited resources more efficiently.

For the teachers taking part in Liège, however, the arithmetic looks different. Because schools receive a finite allocation of teaching periods, asking each affected teacher to spend two more periods in front of pupils can reduce the number of staff required to deliver the same timetable. Teachers and unions therefore fear lost hours, involuntary part-time work, longer journeys between schools and fewer openings for temporary or recently qualified staff. Earlier reporting by the Liège outlet Qu4tre recorded those concerns among teachers at the Institut Marie-Thérèse and Collège Saint-Barthélemy, two schools involved in repeated local actions.

The human chain also carries local history. In October 2025, about 400 demonstrators from four rue Hors-Château schools formed a similar line, according to Qu4tre. Every tenth participant wore a white mask to represent the jobs that organisers believed could be threatened by the workload change. Since then, Liège teachers have used several deliberately visual forms of protest: correcting papers in public, carrying CVs between schools, lying on the ground during an “Operation Doormat”, striking and disrupting the distribution of external examinations. Monday’s action was therefore less a new tactic than a reminder that the conflict survived both the parliamentary vote and the summer break.

The political argument now concerns implementation as much as principle. The Parliament of the French Community adopted the principal decree-programme on 4 June, with the formal decree dated 5 June. The parliamentary dossier shows that its provisions cover teaching conditions, education financing and several other French Community policy areas. Most measures were intended to take effect by the beginning of the 2026-2027 school year. This places the confrontation firmly within the 2024-2029 legislature: the MR–Les Engagés majority can implement the reform, while unions and opposition parties are trying to raise its political and operational cost.

Glatigny’s position is that the budget has not improved enough to reverse the savings. After an unsuccessful meeting on 1 September, her cabinet told Belga, as published by La Libre, that the CSC, CGSP and SETCa-SEL unions had focused on federal refinancing or withdrawal of the economies and then left the talks. The minister nevertheless said she had heard the sector’s discontent and would propose no additional education savings before the end of the legislature. Her cabinet scheduled another invitation to the unions for 13 October. An official July communiqué also highlighted corrective measures, including an option intended to protect the pay of roughly 1,800 appointed teachers who had already been voluntarily teaching above their standard load.

The common trade-union front offers the opposing frame. CSC-Enseignement, CGSP-Enseignement and SETCa-SEL argue that the adopted economies are already translating into lost periods and weaker working conditions, and that technical adjustments do not resolve the underlying shortage of resources. Following the 1 September meeting, representatives of the Christian and socialist unions said that talks without concrete proposals no longer amounted to meaningful consultation. CSC-Enseignement is calling for genuine refinancing and has announced strike cover for the 10 September march, which is due to begin at Liège-Guillemins station and finish at Place Saint-Lambert.

The PTB opposition adds a sharper parliamentary critique. Amandine Pavet, the party’s group leader in the Parliament of the French Community, disputes Glatigny’s assurance that the reform need not cause job losses. The PTB argues that reports of teachers losing all or part of their timetables show that the staffing consequences are already visible. That remains a partisan claim rather than a consolidated official employment count: no independently verified, system-wide total of net job losses for the new school year was available in the sources reviewed.

Institutionally, this is not primarily a federal education dispute. Compulsory education for French-speaking schools is governed and financed by the French Community, commonly branded the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles. The federal government still matters because taxation, social security, pensions and the broader financing architecture cross levels of power, but it does not set these teachers’ classroom-period rules. Demands for federal refinancing therefore require negotiation beyond Glatigny’s portfolio and cannot be delivered by the education minister alone.

For families and pupils, the immediate consequence is uncertainty rather than a confirmed system-wide closure. Individual schools may face strikes, timetable changes or staff reassignments, while temporary teachers are particularly exposed to reduced hours. The next clear test comes on 10 September, when unions hope to turn dispersed school-level anger into a large city-centre mobilisation. After that, attention will shift to evidence from the first weeks of the academic year: how many teachers have lost periods, whether schools can fill specialist posts, and whether the planned 13 October meeting restores negotiations. Until those figures and talks arrive, the Liège chain is best read as a visible warning from the classroom, not proof that the government is preparing to retreat.