In France, nursery school (l'école maternelle) accommodates children aged 3 to 5, and some schools will accept students as young as 2 years old.
The école maternelle is an integral part of the broader French educational system. It precedes the elementary school and is fully integrated with it — its students feed directly into the elementary school programme. In 2014, it educated 11.8% of two-year-old children and almost all three- to five-year-old children. Nursery school was optional until the start of the 2019 school year, but is now compulsory from the age of three.
There are currently 14,283 public nursery schools in France, as well as 135 private establishments. The nursery school cycle is an important element of the French education system and aims to ensure the awakening and socialisation of young children.
History
18th century origins
Before the development of more formal institutions of early childhood care, there were only haphazard shelters for young children. They functioned as a babysitting services and had no educational mission. For poorer families, young children who could not work in the fields or elsewhere were often simply left on their own while their parents worked. Centres for caring for such children opened at the end of the 18th century, including with the so-called “knitting schools” in Alsace.
The first knitting school started in the spring of 1767, when Sara Banzet, a young woman from the Alsatian mountain town of Belmont, gathered very young children in her house and gave them an education adapted to their age. The older children learned to knit next to her wood burning stove. This school is credited in France as being the first ancestor of today's école maternelle. Jean-Frédéric Oberlin, a Protestant pastor and philanthropist, having observed Sara Banzet's school, hired other women to duplicate the knitting school model elsewhere in Alsace.
Schools such as these developed at the beginning of the 19th century in parallel with the industrial revolution. The schools’ vocation was mainly social protection: they offered a secure place to the children of workers in order to protect them from the dangers of the street. For that reason, the precursors of the nursery school in France were called “rooms of asylum” or “rooms of hospitality”.
Early 19th century developments
The idea that children of the working class needed protection carried into the 19th century, but with an influx of new ideas. The creation of “rooms of asylum” in France was influenced by developments in Scotland and England. In 1810, the Welsh philanthropist, Robert Owen, founded a school for small children in his cotton mills at New Lanark, Scotland. He entrusted the direction of the school to a simple weaver, James Buchanan, a man without education, but possessing remarkable aptitudes for education. Buchanan's successes in the New Lanark school attracted notice: in 1819 he was called to London by Henri Brougham and tasked with organising infant schools in the capital. He succeeded at this new task and created a whole set of processes forming a method of education and teaching.
In 1825, accounts describing with admiration the English infant schools began to circulate in Parisian salons. Mme de Pastoret - a wealthy philanthropist who had already started a kind of crèche for the care of very young, working class children in Paris - heard these accounts and resolved to put these ideas into practice in France. She then formed a Women's Committee, which obtained a subsidy of 3000 francs and a concession of premises. An asylum receiving 80 children was opened in April 1826.
It was at this time that Jean-Denis Cochin, mayor of the second arrondissement of Paris, who was devoted to the cause of protecting and developing children, contacted the Women's Committee. He feared a setback for Mme de Pastoret's work (she had earlier created a crèche that had to be closed because it had insufficient personnel to take care of the number of children it enrolled).
A further closure might have compromised their project of providing early childhood care and education. He shared his apprehensions with the Women's Committee and persuaded a colleague, Mme Millet, to go and study Buchanan's infant schools in London. Wanting to learn Buchanan's method himself, Cochin also went to London. After a year of study, he returned to France with a translation of Buchanan's manuals, which he published in 1833. He, Mme Millet and Mme de Pastoret then created various schools modeled on the London schools. In 1833, despite these efforts, asylum rooms were still extremely rare and few cities had them (9 in Paris and Strasbourg, 4 in Lyon, 1 in Chartres).