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A website that allows pupils to rate their teachers is likely to be closed down after an outcry from France’s centralist education establishment.

The site, which opened last month, has been denounced by teachers’ unions, Cabinet ministers and parents. Judges are expected to agree to a call by the unions and teachers to close the site as an “incitement to public disorder” and a breach of privacy.

The idea of pupils marking teachers is regarded by the teaching establishment as an “Anglo-Saxon” ploy to impose brutal capitalist methods on a noble profession. The unions were already choking on a proposal to President Sarkozy that teachers be subject to performance reviews and that their students might contribute. Words such as “horror”, “provocation” and “public lynching” have greeted the privately owned site, on which 50,000 teachers have so far been named and rated between 1 and 20. The average is a relatively good 14.

Their anonymous critics range from primary schoolchildren to sixthformers. Claudie Martens, 48, a natural sciences teacher at a lycée in Palaiseau in the southern outskirts of Paris who was given a respectable mark, told Le Parisien: “I got the impression that I was being exposed to the public gaze. It was an attack on me as a person.”

Other teachers are upset at being named with bad marks, apparently by lone pupils with a grudge. An arts teacher at Aulnay-sous-Bois, in the troubled northeast Paris suburbs, appears with zero for fairness, three for respect and an average of just over five — awarded by only one student. Teachers are rated under six criteria: the degree to which they are interesting, clear, available and fair; and how much they command respect and are motivated.

The teachers also object to pupils being given a platform to air discontent anonymously. In one discussion thread this week, “Dilix66” writes that teachers need more assessment in France because “some are unworthy of their profession”. Another lycée pupil called “Private” agrees that “teachers work few hours, are well paid and have so many holidays they do not know what to do”. About 150,000 pupils a day are visiting the site, called note2be.com, a pun that reads as “mark to be” in franglais. It was founded by two Paris entrepreneurs, Stéphane Cola and Anne-François de Lastic, along the lines of sites in the US, Britain and Germany.

In court, lawyers for the unions and individual teachers said that the site broke the privacy law by publishing teachers’ names and ratings and that it breached their right to be assessed only by their superiors. “This is not a rating, it is an opinion poll often based on a single vote,” said Frédéric Weyl, lawyer for the unions. “It makes teachers’ jobs more difficult.”

Lawyers for the site said that it was a matter of freedom of expression and that “it is up to the persons concerned to show in what way their private life is infringed upon”. This argument prevailed in courts in Germany, where unions failed to close the rating site.

Mr Cola, who has just withdrawn as a candidate for a Paris council seat for Mr Sarkozy’s UMP party, said that he had been taken aback by the virulence of the unions’ attack but remained confident that the court would rule in his favour. He said that the site was serious and monitored its content.

Xavier Darcos, the Education Minister, condemned the opening of such sites, saying “the evaluation of teachers is the exclusive domain of the Ministry of Education and the civil servants who are appointed to carry it out”.

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