Algeria has taken a landmark step in its decades-long push to decolonize and indigenize its national education system, with a sweeping new regulation that ends all foreign curriculum instruction at privately operated educational institutions across the country.
Officially labeled Decree 26-310, the new policy enforces far stricter regulatory frameworks for the accreditation, daily operation, and government oversight of all private schools operating within Algerian borders. Its most transformative provision is a complete ban on the delivery of foreign-developed curricula, a move that directly targets the French education programs that have operated informally at dozens of Algerian private establishments for decades.
Under the updated rules, Arabic is now mandatory as the language of instruction for every core subject, with the only exception being dedicated foreign language classes. All private schools are required to use only state-endorsed Algerian textbooks, and their students must exclusively prepare for national Algerian government examinations, rather than international or foreign credentialing tests. The decree also adds a new requirement that any partnership or cooperation agreement between a local private institution and a foreign educational entity must receive explicit, prior written approval from Algeria’s minister of education to move forward.
Private schools have been granted a three-year transition period to bring their operations into full compliance with the new regulation. Institutions that fail to meet the requirements by the end of this window will face escalating penalties, up to and including permanent closure.
This tightening of state oversight over private education forms part of a broader national strategy to reassert Algeria’s linguistic sovereignty and roll back the lingering cultural and educational influence of France, a legacy of 132 years of French colonial rule. France occupied Algeria from 1830 until 1962, when the North African nation gained independence following a brutal eight-year war of independence that claimed an estimated 1 million Algerian lives. During the colonial era, native Algerian Muslims faced systemic discriminatory policies under French administration, which framed Algeria as an official extension of metropolitan France and encouraged large-scale European settlement.
Algerian authorities have been gradually tightening rules around foreign curricula since 2021, when education inspectors began conducting unannounced spot checks at private schools to crack down on institutions that prioritized or even taught exclusively the French curriculum. In 2023, all Algerian schools connected to the French Agency for French Education Abroad (AEFE) were ordered to cut ties with the AEFE labeling network, under threat of immediate closure and legal action.
The new curriculum ban also aligns with a broader national linguistic shift underway in Algeria. Just one month before the decree was announced, the government formalized a policy that makes English the primary foreign language taught to all public and private school students starting in third grade, a change implemented three years after it was first rolled out to primary school classrooms.
Debate over the role of French in Algeria’s education system has grown increasingly heated in recent years, amplified by escalating diplomatic tensions between the Algiers and Paris governments. Critics of the ban have raised urgent concerns about the disruption it will cause for students and families. Thousands of middle-class Algerian households have long relied on French curriculum programs as a pathway to access higher education at French universities, a route that is now thrown into uncertainty. Many educators report that students who have completed nearly all of their schooling through French instruction are already struggling to adapt to the Arabic-language Algerian national syllabus.
Other opponents of the policy argue that the government has moved too quickly to implement the ban, arguing that the national education system lacks the infrastructure and resources to support a full transition away from foreign programs. They claim the policy is driven more by political goals to formally break with colonial-era influence than by a carefully planned, coherent education strategy designed to support student success.