What do you want to be when you grow up? This simple question is easy for the youngest kids to answer, and is always responded to in good fun and devastating sincerity.

But then the teenage years roll around, the child becomes more aware of societal pressures and realities, and doubts surface. Girls can’t become mathematicians. Ballet dancing is not for boys. You can’t become a theoretical physicist, theoretical physicists don’t earn money. Why don’t you become an engineer instead?

Children internalise these messages, that may be transmitted to them with the most pure of intentions, and adjust their dreams to be more socially acceptable, or change themselves altogether. But the truth is that all career fields are valuable, and those with enough talent and perseverance will always find their place if they are given the right opportunities.

That is where France’s new educational orientation program comes in. Starting in collège (ages 11-12), and launching in September 2025, this project aims to inform and encourage students to pursue their dream futures regardless of their current circumstances.

It is founded on the following principles:

✅ equality and equity: helping students construct a plan for their future that is not determined by their gender or social or geographic backgrounds;

✅ emancipation and responsibility: the field of possibility has to be vast, and the decisions that are made by the students and their families have to be informed and based on proactivity;

✅ guidance and assistance in the long-term and the right to a mistake: at each stage of the educational track, pathways must allow for changes in the trajectory.

The main measures proposed to implement the plan are:

✔ 30 000 professors will follow specialised training on student orientation

✔️ A practical guide to orientation will be provided to students and their families

✔️ Meetings between parents, professors and students will be systematically organised on the subject, for all students ages 14-16

✔️ 4 half-days per school year dedicated to professional orientation will be made obligatory for children starting from age 12. During these specialised days, the children will discover professions and educational programs: they will visit companies, forums, meet with professionals etc.

✔️ Gap years will be valorised for high school (lycée) graduates who wish to take that time to better understand their projects for their future

✔️ A new one year educational program called PaRéO (Parcours pour Réussir et s’orienter, translated as a Track to Succeed and Orient oneself) for high school graduates will be launched in universities and other higher educational establishments for students who are hesitating between different tracks

✔️ The sciences and mathematics, especially for girls, will be promoted. Specialised classes with accommodated schedules will be instituted with at least 50% of girls. Systematic meetings with female role models from scientific fields will be held for young women starting at age 14.

✔️ A digital platform Avenir(s) will be made available for students. It will help the student find information on how to orient themselves, adapting that information to their needs, and will offer activities and educational resources.

The Avenir(s) digital platform will give students tools that will accompany them at every stage of their thinking, helping them transform uncertainty into opportunity:

💻 It will help them discover and understand themselves by offering an agenda filled with events, interactive activities such as quizzes on their centres of interest and values, with the goal of helping them discover their aspirations. These activities will work as a starting point to help students imagine an educational track that ressembles them.

💻 It will help them find out more about various professions and educational programs, by offering a base of resources about different sectors, with videos and testimonies from professionals, and explanatory documents.

💻 It will help them organise their ideas by allowing them to save and structure all of their discoveries by giving them access to a personalised digital space where they will be able to note professions and educational programs that they are interested in, evaluate their skills and advance in their project.

💻 It will help them be accompanied - at any moment they will be able to contact educators or psychologists through the platform to talk about any issues they may be encountering.

All of these measures will be adapted to municipalities and educational institutions, to truly tailor the educational experience to the needs and wants of every student.

What do you think? Will these measures help students achieve their dreams?💬