Mass protests across France’s high schools roiled the country again on Tuesday, with hundreds of thousands joining the biggest day of the movement so far. Demonstrations began in late September, with the first protest traced back to Saint-Exupéry high school in Créteil, a southern Parisian suburb. A handful of teachers at Saint-Exupéry went on strike September 17 to lament staff shortages.
The school nurse was on sick leave,” Laurent Bessiere, a maths teacher,told French radio station _France Inter__._ That same evening, students gathered to join the fight and planned a protest for the next morning. Stacking a few bins in front of the school entrance and holding placards, they rose up to make demands alongside their teachers. Their demands struck a chord with other high schools across the nation, which are suffering from a lack of funding and understaffing.
In response to the protests, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has ordered his ministers to tackle their demands and send in proposals by the end of the month. But finding spare funds to implement educational reforms will be complicated, given heated debates over France’s already strained 2027 budget. Read more'We're fed up': Paris students rise up in a movement that shows no sign of slowing A union of high school and university students on Monday published a list of 10 “emergency measures” they say could serve as a basis for working with the government, whose response so far has been “repression”, they write.
High on the list is the issue of staff shortages. Students are demanding a large-scale recruitment drive to create additional teaching posts so that each classroom has a person to lead it. They also want to ensure that every establishment has at least one nurse, a psychologist and a career adviser for every 500 students.
More than half of France’s middle and high schools lack at least one teacher, a major trade union representing public school staff found. And 69 percent of schools are short of at least one member of their teaching and support staff. Understaffing means classrooms are overcrowded, regularly packing in 35 students at a time.
The numbers do not reflect the optimism that French Education Minister Édouard Geffray expressed before the September start of the new academic year. Speaking on France Inter at the end of August, he insisted that teacher shortages would be “minimal” and that “all indicators” were that things were on track to be “much better” than in previous years. To meet the demand for teacher replacements, Lecornu referred to a scheme from 2023 encouraging teachers to cover for the short absences of colleagues in a statement published Sunday.
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