Abstract
This paper deals with the comprehensive lower secondary school - Collège in France. It describes its origin in the 70s of the 20th century, its objectives, the current configuration, development and present problems.
In this context, the author highlights the importance of this school level in terms of school system characteristics as well as in terms of different ways of addressing the kind of currently important problems such as grade retention, social and performance homogeneity or heterogeneity of class collectives as well as social and performance diversity of educational institutions of this level.