The film covers an academic year, beginning with the teachers gathering for the autumn term, introducing themselves to each other and being welcomed by the principal, an unsmiling figure wearing rimless glasses. It ends with an informal game of football between staff and pupils and a long hand-held shot of an empty classroom.
The camera never leaves the school. The film is set in the staff room, the playground, the dining room, the principal's office, a conference room, and the classroom where François Marin (François Bégaudeau) is a form tutor who teaches the French language to a mixed group of 14- and 15-year-olds. Nothing is shown of the homes of staff and pupils.
The film concentrates on Marin as he tries to keep order in the class, mediating between conflicting ethnic groups, quieting the rowdy, bringing out the reticent, and trying to educate them. The class is difficult, and in some ways the brightest are the most disruptive. When he teaches them the complexities of French verbs, they challenge the need to know such things, stating its limited use in modern speech. He gives them The Diary of Anne Frank to study, but none of them bothers to read it. One of the smartest pupils, the near-nihilistic Tunisian teenager Esmerelda, says she can't be bothered to read books. Marin tries to get an insight into the inner workings of the pupils; they write self-portraits which describe their aspirations, hobbies and dislikes. These are eventually collated by Marin who creates an end-of-year book with them. Marin manages to win over the sparsely driven Souleymayne, from Mali, by allowing him to develop his gift for photography and make his self portrait a pictorial biography. However, Souleymayne's insolence and disobedience are his downfall as a confrontation with Marin and the class ends in an act of violence
