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In France, the "school project" (le projet d'établissement) was instituted by the 1989 orientation law (loi d'orientation de 1989). It aims, among other things, at increasing the autonomy of schools so that they can be best suited to local features. We will make the assumption that this process which tries to emphasize the original and specific characteristics or each school, is likely to contribute to inequalities in the functioning of the education system. In order to test this assumption, a monographic study carried out on the scale of a french metropolitan département has made it possible to analyse the main lines of the "school projects" of all the state-owned schools (N=101). This survey reveals that in the socially favoured schools, the characteristics of the school public allow the stress to be made on the relatively "noble" objectives (wider opening onto culture, interdisciplinary work, life inside school). On the contrary, in the schools attended by pupils coming from modest or underprivileged sections of the population, the orientations shown in the "school projects" tend to reveal a constrained adaptation to the everyday difficulties of the pupils (difficulties at school, precarious social conditions, urban violence, etc.).
