This year's return to school is being shaped above all by two major reforms: a package of measures aimed at improving inclusion and the wider rollout of the Alpha project.
At a press conference on Wednesday, the Education and Science Union of the Independent Luxembourg Trade Union Confederation (SEW-OGBL) welcomed some of the changes, but said major shortcomings remained. It called for more staff, less bureaucracy, and clearer guidance for dealing with children who display serious behavioural problems.
SEW-OGBL president Joëlle Damé said teachers often feel powerless when problems arise at school and need something resembling a practical handbook setting out how they should respond.
The union also wants every incident of violence in schools to be recorded. Damé said the current approach would only register cases involving severely disruptive behaviour where a regional crisis team intervenes and the matter is passed on to school management.
That, she warned, means "a great deal falls through the cracks", including incidents where parents fail to follow school rules.
Without reliable figures, the union argues, it is difficult to know where additional support is needed or what resources should be provided.
SEW-OGBL is also calling for a second adult in every cycle 1 classroom. The current plan is to launch a pilot project from 2028 with one additional staff member per school, with the scheme only due to be evaluated after three years. The union says that does not go far enough.
The Alpha project, which will allow pupils to begin learning to read and write in either French or German, has also drawn criticism from SEW-OGBL. The reform is intended to improve educational equality, but the union said it is still unclear whether it will actually lead to better academic outcomes.
Damé said the government had made a political decision to roll the project out more widely before knowing what its long-term effects would be.
"We simply do not know where this is heading", she said, arguing that promises of greater educational equality are, at this stage, "pure speculation".
The union is therefore calling for greater transparency.
According to Damé, the report on the pilot project shows that pupils' level in their second language is not as high as under the current system. She said this also needed to be communicated clearly to the public.
Another major topic at Wednesday's press conference was Luxembourg's weak PISA performance.
Reading skills in particular remain a concern, although SEW-OGBL representative Vera Dockendorf said the results were not unexpected. The union had repeatedly warned that reading ability was declining and had also criticised reforms to the lower cycle of general secondary education as ineffective.
Dockendorf said there were several reasons behind the poor results, but highlighted smartphone use as one contributing factor.
She argued that phones were helping to erode reading habits and reading comprehension, while also criticising the widespread introduction of tablets in lower secondary classes without a clear educational strategy.
In many cases, she said, tablets simply replace exercise books or textbooks. Research suggests that reading from screens can encourage more superficial reading, she added, making it harder for pupils to find passages again, absorb information, and engage deeply with a text.
The SEW-OGBL is therefore calling for stricter and nationally consistent rules on mobile phone use, rather than leaving each lycée to develop its own policy.
For teaching staff, however, the broader question is how many reforms schools can realistically implement when resources on the ground remain limited.
Dockendorf said more and more responsibilities were being shifted onto schools, with teachers expected to solve a growing range of social problems "without being given the necessary tools".
When staff are confronted with violent behaviour, she said, they often lack the means to respond properly and are instead simply told they must "put up with it" or try to understand it.
She also criticised contradictory policy priorities. Schools are expected to improve reading skills, she said, while at the same time teaching hours are being reshuffled in ways that can reduce time available for languages.
Teachers repeatedly warn about what they need, Dockendorf said, but "too little attention has been paid to us".
The SEW-OGBL is now proposing that one existing sports lesson be turned into a compulsory hour for extracurricular activities, ranging from sport and chess to cooking.
The union argues that many children today have no real hobby beyond screens. Encouraging activities without phones, it says, could improve both wellbeing and social interaction between pupils.
