--- title: "Algerian eight-year-olds will learn English before French from this school year" description: "English becomes the only foreign language in the third year of primary school, and French moves to the fourth. About 15 million Algerians speak French, close to a third of the population, and no newspaper in the country is published in English." category: "Culture" category_url: https://newsparlor.com/category/culture author: "Megan Chen" published: 2026-08-24T16:36:44.000Z updated: 2026-08-24T16:36:44.000Z canonical: https://newsparlor.com/article/algerian-eight-year-olds-will-learn-english-before-french-from-this-school-year tags: ["algeria", "france", "education", "language", "north-africa"] --- # Algerian eight-year-olds will learn English before French from this school year English becomes the only foreign language in the third year of primary school, and French moves to the fourth. About 15 million Algerians speak French, close to a third of the population, and no newspaper in the country is published in English. From the 2026-2027 academic year, English will be the only foreign language taught in the third year of Algerian primary school, with French pushed back to the fourth year, [Al Jazeera reports](https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/8/24/algerias-schools-put-shakespeare-before-molire-in-break-from-france). The change was announced on July 25 by the education minister, Mohamed Seghir Saadaoui. This year's eight-year-olds are the first cohort in independent Algeria to meet English before French. ## The scale of what is being changed The International Organisation of La Francophonie counts roughly 15 million French speakers in Algeria, close to a third of the population. No newspaper in the country is published in English. Those two facts define the difficulty. French in Algeria is not a school subject that can be reordered on a timetable; it is the working language of a great deal of professional and administrative life, and it arrived through 132 years of colonial rule. Displacing it in the classroom does not displace it outside. ## Why now The policy belongs to a linguistic overhaul President Abdelmadjid Tebboune announced in 2022, and it has accelerated alongside a diplomatic rupture. Algeria expelled French diplomats after President Emmanuel Macron backed Morocco's claim to Western Sahara in July 2024. Medicine and science faculties have already switched to teaching in English. French has been removed from utility bills and Air Algerie tickets, and road signs now carry English alongside Arabic. Read together, this is a state changing the language of its own official surfaces, of which the primary curriculum is the one with the longest time horizon. A child who learns English at eight will be working in it at thirty. ## Whether it can be delivered The education ministry recruited about 15,000 English teachers for primary schools in February. That is a substantial mobilization and also a fast one. Ahmed Krim, a retired English teacher, gave the response that most captures the position: "It is a very good decision. But it requires thinking, planning and resources." He argued for specialist training institutes and for curricula designed by a qualified body combining linguistic and pedagogical expertise. The risk in a change of this speed is not political but practical. A language taught by teachers recruited in a hurry, without settled materials, is learned poorly, and the pupils carry that rather than the policymakers. ## What we could not establish We could not establish whether France has responded, how many hours of each language pupils will receive, what happens to French teachers displaced from the third year, or whether the 15,000 recruits are fully trained. We verified this account from a single publication. ## Sources - [Algeria's schools put Shakespeare before Moliere in break from France](https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/8/24/algerias-schools-put-shakespeare-before-molire-in-break-from-france)