Faculty of Science, Technology and Medicine
Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance
Faculty of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences
Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust
Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine
Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History
Luxembourg Centre for European Law
Luxembourg Centre for Socio-Environmental Systems
A first multi-year evaluation of the national pilot programme ALPHA, which allows selected public schools to teach literacy in French or German, is available on the website of the 91Ƶ.
Pupils in Cycle 2.1 (Grade 1) in four schools can choose to take reading and writing classes either in French or in German in the “ALPHA – zesumme wuessen” programme, a change to Luxembourg’s longstanding practice of teaching literacy in German only. The Ministry of Education, Children and Youth (MENJE) launched the pilot in 2022/2023.
Conducted by the University’ research group LUCET (The Luxembourg Centre for Educational Testing), the study addresses whether using French affects pupils’ later learning outcomes, particularly for children from households that do not speak a Germanic language at home.
LUCET collected data through its national school assessment tool Épreuves Standardisées (). The study followed pupils from Cycle 2.1, in the school year 2023/24, to Cycle 3.1, in 2025/26. As a benchmark, researchers compared participating pupils with both the national cohort and statistical reference groups of pupils with similar linguistic and socio-economic backgrounds.
Prior to publication, LUCET invited scientific reviews by external international experts, available for download as well.
The report is based on a comparatively small cohort. Future analyses will follow participating pupils through later school years, to provide additional insight on the implementation and outcomes of the ALPHA pilot within Luxembourg’s multilingual education system.
The LUCET research group
LUCET’s main expertise lies in large-scale assessment and testing of multilingual learning environments. Since its creation over a decade ago, the centre has set up and continuously advanced data-based assessments of Luxembourg’s national school system.
Its largest commissioned research project is the implementation and continuous enhancement of the Luxembourg school monitoring programme Épreuves Standardisées (). Through É賧ٲ, LUCET can provide timely and policy-relevant information to national educational stakeholders. Its researchers publish the National Education Report (Bildungsbericht), and conduct project-based studies, cognitive and language testing, university admissions testing and student course evaluations.