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Students, teachers, and parents have taken to the street to protest France’s crippling education infrastructure. However, as the movement started to gain nationwide traction, so did violence, driven by clashes with the riot police.
These past few weeks have seen intense waves of violence associated with student-led protests in France. What started as a local walkout by teachers at a high school in Créteil quickly turned into a nationwide movement.
Now teenagers across the country are barricading school gates with wheelie bins and taking to the streets, fed up with the cracks that are now being exposed in the nation’s education system.
The ongoing protests reflect a growing frustration with the system’s chronic staff shortages, deteriorating school infrastructure, and the inequalities that come with its Parcoursup system.
Difficulties in recruiting teachers have left an annual deficit of 4,000 teaching positions being unfilled. This is all while the proportion of students attending schools with staff shortages rose by 50% in four years.
This shortage is significant enough that 88% of short-notice class cancellations cannot be covered by other teachers. Additionally, 11% of secondary, and 3% of primary teachers are deemed inexperienced for teaching.
Meanwhile, with many school buildings constructed in the mid-to-late 20th century, they are ill-equipped to handle the rising climate demands. Some of these classrooms have reached 35°C to 40°C during periods of intense heatwaves without centralised air conditioning, while unforgiving winters are supported by a lack of modern thermal insulation.
Vermin sightings and burst pipes also happen to be frequent occurrences in many of these poorly maintained schools.
Compounding these issues is severe underfunding. While France spends heavily on education, with an estimated €64 billion allocated to it, these funds are unevenly distributed across the sector.
For instance, while it spends 24% more per student for upper secondary – higher than the OECD average – this spending is much lower in primary schools. Working-class suburbs receive fewer experienced, permanent teachers and less municipal infrastructure investment than affluent city centres.
Then there’s Parcoursup, which is the nation’s centralized online application portal used by final-year high school students to apply for undergraduate university programs and higher education courses. Although universities’ application evaluation criteria remain unknown, Parcoursup has been repeatedly accused of favouring applicants from elite urban schools over those from working-class suburbs.
With admission results released on a rolling basis over several months during the final baccalauréat exam preparation, many high-achieving students are chucked into long waiting lists without any idea if they are attending higher education.
