Why did 1,300 people in Liège protest Valérie Glatigny’s school reforms?

Francophone Belgian education has been in a long reform cycle since the Pacte pour un Enseignement d’excellence, a structural programme intended to improve quality, equity and governance. That background helps explain the current tension: successive governments have promised to modernise a system criticised for unequal outcomes and complex administration, while teachers’ organisations argue that reforms often arrive without enough staffing, time or resources. The Glatigny dispute therefore sits inside a longer institutional pattern: broad consensus that schools need improvement, recurring conflict over who carries the cost of change.