On a normal school day, Mohammed, 17, wakes at 6am, cares for his younger siblings to help his single mother who works as a security guard, then takes two crowded buses and a local train to get to his high school in Sevran, a low-income banlieue town in the suburbs north-east of Paris. In this year’s heatwaves, it felt like 40 degrees in overcrowded classrooms with no shade or curtains. It was so hot my brain couldn’t function.” The 17-year-old in his last year of high school wants to study management and digital communication at a Paris university.
But he said conditions were so poor, he felt all odds were stacked against him and his classmates. Recently we needed a teacher for a subject taught through English, but when that teacher arrived they didn’t speak English.” The biggest youth protest movement in the country in decades brought hundreds of thousands on to the streets across France this week demonstrating against inequality in the French education system, decrepit schools, a lack of teachers and large class sizes. Hundreds of schools were blockaded, thousands of teenagers were arrested, and rights groups warned of alleged police brutality, with one child losing the use of eye and another losing a hand.
Mohammed and his classmates, often supported by their parents and teachers, have been at the frontline, barricading their school, the Lycée Blaise-Cendrars, which is in one of mainland France’s poorest départements, Seine-Saint-Denis. They have voted to continue their protests next week, taking their grievances to the local mayor, elected officials and education representatives. Many local politicians have supported their demands.
Even the French prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, conceded that teenagers had “legitimate” concerns. Photos on the Sevran students’ phones showed broken classroom chairs, holes in walls, holes in ceilings, mould, buckets to catch leaks, faulty lights. They said basic needs weren’t met, with some toilets broken, others with no doors and often no toilet paper or soap.
Video projectors and science equipment were lacking. It’s so dangerous to be charged by a horse, it could kill you. I just ran, I was trying to help my classmates.” The high schools of Seine-Saint-Denis, a suburban area nudging against northern Paris, have been a driving force in the protests.
The area has the youngest population in mainland France, one of the highest birthrates and the among the lowest average income. Local high schools have a high turnover of young teachers. Despite co-hosting the 2024 Paris Olympics, and numerous government plans to try to combat long-running problems of inequality and poverty, the area north-east of Paris is still disadvantaged compared with the capital.
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