Les enseignants contractuels de l’Éducation nationale : vers l’institutionnalisation d’une gestion coutumière de la pénurie ?

This paper looks at the institutionalization of the management of contract teachers in France, and the way it responds to the emergence of a teacher ?shortage? as a public policy issue. Based on a qualitative study conducted at the national level and within three regional education authorities (Créteil, Dijon, and Lyon), the paper shows how contractualization has increasingly been conceived as a policy solution to the teacher shortage, being largely implemented in regional administrations and depending on the configurations of each regional education authority. The article then examine the connections between contract teacher management and permanent teacher management, showing that the former is mainly indexed on the latter. However, contract teacher management is also, at some point, defined by the innovations of managers of regional education authorities, especially in critical situations. These institutional innovations often imply substantial divergences from the dominant model of teacher administration, with localized but uncertain effects on the management of teachers? careers as a whole.