What this competition is
Senegal recruits new primary and preschool teachers, and a smaller intake of middle and secondary teachers, through a competitive written exam for entry into the country’s teacher-training schools, not through a CV review or an interview alone. The exam is the Concours de Recrutement d’Eleves-Maitres, universally known by its acronym, CREM, opened each year by the Ministere de l’Education Nationale through its Direction des Examens et Concours (DEXCO). Candidates admitted after the written stages train as eleves-maitres (trainee teachers) before taking up a classroom post. Registration runs through DEXCO’s own national candidate platform, crem.education.sn, and the competition is held in four separate options, or filieres: Francais, Arabe, Daara and Anglais, each with its own preselection quota and its own ranked list. That filiere structure is a design choice about which subject track a seat is won in, not a sign of the fragmented, separately-scheduled-campaign shape that disqualifies some mechanisms this site has researched elsewhere: the preselection test itself is held on one date, nationwide, under one ministry, with one combined national candidate count reported every year by the Senegalese press.
How the competition actually runs
CREM runs in two written stages. The first, the preselection test, is sat on the same day and hour nationwide; for the 2026 session, it tests French and Mathematics in a single combined paper, after the dictation component that earlier sessions included was provisionally dropped. The 2025 preselection test ran across 171 exam centres grouped into 17 poles-centres covering the whole country. DEXCO then publishes a preselection list for each filiere separately, built from each filiere’s own quota, and only preselected candidates sit the second written stage, the admission exam, held later in the year. Filing the physical application dossier at the candidate’s IEF (Inspection de l’Education et de la Formation) before the published deadline is itself an eliminatory step, independent of either written test’s result.
Who is eligible
Candidates must hold Senegalese nationality and the Baccalaureat or a diploma admitted in equivalence, and must be aged at least 18 and at most 33 at 31 December of the session’s year, per the conditions published for the 2025 and 2026 sessions. The physical dossier carries document requirements with their own validity windows: a birth certificate extract issued less than six months before filing (or a certified copy of a valid national ID card), a certified copy of the Senegalese nationality certificate, a certified copy of the Baccalaureat diploma or its attestation, a medical fitness certificate, and a judicial record extract (the bulletin no.3) issued less than three months before filing. The 2026 session set a non-refundable online registration fee of 10,000 FCFA.
Scale
Senegalese press coverage gives a real, sourced scale for the most recent session. DEXCO’s official launch of the 2025 session, reported 29 October 2025, put the national candidate count at 72,690: 60,235 for the French option and 7,018 for the Arabic option, with the remainder split between the Daara and English options. Preselection results published around 1 December 2025 then set each filiere’s own admission-phase quota: 7,300 candidates retained for French, 1,000 for Arabic, 300 for English and 100 for Daara, a combined 8,700 candidates advancing to the written admission exam held 10 December 2025. Earlier sessions show the same shape at a different scale: the 2022 session opened 1,500 posts (1,200 French, 250 Arabic, 50 Daara), and the 2021 session admitted only 350 candidates directly, against 5,000 candidates “repeched” (admitted from a reserve list) the year before, in 2020.
What this page does not yet cover
This page covers the CREM mechanism as reported for its 2021, 2022, 2025 and 2026 sessions; a single, final, sourced vacancy count for the 2025 session specifically, separate from the admission-phase quota figures above, was not found in the research behind this page and is not assumed here. Senegal’s other written-competitive entry routes were also researched but are not covered by this page. The general concours de la fonction publique is a genuine set of written exams but is organised as many separately scheduled campaigns across different ministries and grades, not one coordinated session, the Cameroon-style fragmented shape that has kept several other countries’ general civil-service competitions off this site. The concours d’entree a l’Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA) is likewise a genuine written competition, run in four separate tracks (Direct A, Direct B, Professionnel A, Professionnel B) with their own fees and candidate pools (2,277 candidates sat the Cycle A psychotechnical test and 5,881 were preselected for Cycle B in the 2024 session), but its scale is an order of magnitude smaller than CREM’s and it recruits a narrower set of administrative cadres rather than the teaching profession this page covers. A separate, non-competitive 2025 teacher hiring drive, the recrutement special of 2,000 teachers that drew over 147,000 applications on the Mirador platform in January 2025, is not covered here either: Senegalese press coverage describes it as a selection-and-vetting process based on the application file rather than a written exam, run alongside CREM rather than as part of it.