At the start of the 1999 academic year, a very few “under contract” private schools were incorporated into France’s priority education programme. A few more followed in 2006, when the scheme was “relaunched”. All these schools left the programme between 2015 and 2018, with no change having taken place in their profiles. A look at the decision-making processes used by the General Secretariat of Catholic Education (SGEC) and the Ministry of Education, and the methods adopted to classify schools, highlights the tensions between the two departments, which persist today, as well as the SGEC’s desire to obtain recognition and legitimacy to take in the most impoverished pupils. It has sought this recognition in a prudent manner, while at the same time regularly highlighting its educational initiatives with challenging student populations, notably in high schools classified as “high-priority” in Marseille. The sources available, even if incomplete, encourage further analysis of schools of this type, which are minority but highly symbolic establishments, as well as the wider study of schools under “association” contracts with the French state.