Chess, which has long suffered from a dusty image in society, is now in vogue among young people thanks to series, such as The Queen’s Game (The Queen’s Gambit2020), thanks to the development of e-sport or even thanks to the initiatives of French NBA star Victor Wembanyama. In July 2025, the French basketball player proposed mixing basketball and chess in the same competition, emphasizing: “We need a variety of things to be able to grow.”
Thus, since the 1970s, initiatives, initially isolated, have multiplied to bring chess into classes, with the conviction that the practice of this game would develop numerous skills in students and promote academic learning. Do the first field reports confirm this? What approach to knowledge does the use of chess allow?
Local experiments before generalization
The interest in chess for school learning is not new. From the 19th centurye century, we find traces of it, such as this letter from a reader to a specialized magazine proposing to occupy the students during recess times with a “noble distraction”. But it was not until the 1970s and 1980s that concrete initiatives emerged, often in the form of school clubs.
In some “pilot establishments”, failures are sometimes integrated into the students’ timetable with compulsory hours. That said, a thesis defended in 1988 shows that chess still often remains an extracurricular or extracurricular activity.
When teachers take it up in class, with the agreement of their superiors, some emphasize that they have the feeling that chess develops skills such as intuition and spatial reasoning, but that they are not certain that students’ progress in these areas is attributable solely to learning chess.
In 2007, when an American study showed the benefits of chess for students struggling in mathematics and solving complex problems, the French Chess Federation, which has become a sports federation, signed a framework agreement with the National Education to supervise and officially authorize the practice of chess in class.
These projects, however, remain the prerogative of teachers keen on chess, often club players, who educationally convert their chess experience into the classroom.
In France, the Class’Échecs program
Throughout the 2000s, internationally, numerous studies showed the benefits of playing chess for students. Some countries integrate the practice into their school programs or put in place significant measures.
In France, in 2022, the French Chess Federation (FFE) launched the Class’Échecs program and signed an amendment to the convention to promote its development in primary schools. Four principles were thus put forward:
- The program is aimed at all teachers, regardless of their chess level;
- Chess becomes a means of developing academic skills and is not an end in itself;
- The program is cooperative, to promote the development of social and relational skills;
- The contents are designed from an educational angle, for the class and all the materials are made available to teachers free of charge. The FFE also offers a sale of game kits at reduced prices, so that schools can equip themselves at a lower cost.
The success of the operation was rapid, around 2,000 teachers participated in the first year and there will now be more than 8,000 in 2025, which represents 160,000 students introduced to chess each year.
The survey conducted in 2022-2023 (PDF) among teachers who offer Class’Échecs allows us to better understand their interest in the project. They see it as a way to work mathematics differently. They note strong involvement and great interest from students and also consider that these sessions develop skills in moral and civic teaching. However, 87% of these teachers know very little about chess or not at all and therefore offer this teaching without mastering the content, even though chess is often considered a complicated game.
The keys to success: a form of integral education
Why do school teachers who are not trained in teaching chess and who do not master the fundamentals embark on this adventure? Some possible answers are mentioned in the 2022-2023 survey and refer to a form of integral education whose roots go back to the 19th century.e century.
First of all, the project approach goes beyond the compartmentalization of school disciplines, which resonates all the more in primary education where teachers are versatile. It is of undeniable interest for teachers because it gives meaning to learning, bringing greater commitment from students who associate school more with the pleasure of learning.
It is a more global vision of the student that is advocated, where different skills linking the body and the mind are worked on at the same educational time. The game of chess as an educational tool appears particularly well suited: the playful dimension stimulates interest and engagement and the manipulation of the pieces facilitates the transition from experimentation to abstraction.
Language knowledge is not a prerequisite for success, because the visuo-spatial nature of the situations directly addresses cognitive functions, without requiring mastery of the linguistic code, a real obstacle for some students. The possibility of creating open problems also allows failures to be anchored in mathematics, a real institutional necessity, while questioning the disciplinary awareness of students.
Finally, at a time when artificial intelligence (AI) and the internet make knowledge accessible to all, the project invites teachers to change their posture to encourage exchanges and argumentation, encouraging students to collectively construct learning.
