OhOn a normal school day, 17-year-old Mohammed wakes up at 6 a.m., looks after his younger siblings to help his single mother who works as a security guard, then takes two crowded buses and a local train to his high school in Sevran, a low-income town. suburb town in the north-eastern suburbs of Paris.
“There aren’t enough chairs or desks for everyone, so some students have to stand up,” Mohammed said. “Classes can be so packed that you can’t interact with the teacher. During this year’s heat waves, it was like 40 degrees in overcrowded classrooms with no shade or curtains. It was so hot that my brain couldn’t function.”
The 17-year-old, in his final year of high school, wants to study management and digital communication at a Parisian university. But he said conditions were so bad he felt the odds were stacked against him and his classmates.
“Some of us have to go months without teachers when absent staff are not replaced,” he said. “One class didn’t have a French teacher for several months just before the French baccalaureate, so they couldn’t even study all the texts planned for their exam. Recently, we needed a teacher for a subject taught in English, but when that teacher arrived, he didn’t speak English.”
The largest youth protest movement in the country in decades brought hundreds of thousands of people to the streets of France this week to protest against inequalities in the French education system, decrepit schools, a lack of teachers and overcrowded classrooms. Hundreds of schools were blocked, thousands of teenagers were arrested and rights groups warned of alleged police brutality, with one child losing the use of an eye and another a hand.
Mohammed and his classmates, often supported by their parents and teachers, have been on the front line, barricading their school, the Lycée Blaise-Cendrars, located in one of the poorest neighborhoods in mainland France. departmentsSeine-Saint-Denis. They voted to continue their protests next week, taking their grievances to the local mayor, elected officials and education representatives. Many local politicians supported their demands. Even French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu acknowledged that teenagers had “legitimate” concerns.
Photos on Sevran students’ phones showed broken classroom chairs, holes in the walls, holes in the ceilings, mold, buckets to catch leaks, faulty lights. They said basic needs were not being met, with some toilets broken, others without doors and often without toilet paper or soap. Video projectors and scientific equipment were lacking.
“We are not asking for luxury, just the basics to learn in decent conditions,” Mohammed said. “And yet, police on horseback charged us as we gathered to protest outside our school, shooting tear gas at us and making arrests. It’s so dangerous to be charged by a horse, it could kill you. I just ran, trying to help my classmates.”
The high schools of Seine-Saint-Denis, a suburb opposite the north of Paris, were a driving force behind the protests. The territory has the youngest population in mainland France, one of the highest birth rates and one of the lowest average incomes. Local high schools experience a high turnover rate of young teachers.
Despite the joint hosting of the 2024 Paris Olympics and numerous government plans to tackle long-standing problems of inequality and poverty, the area northeast of Paris remains at a disadvantage compared to the capital.
In 2005, Seine-Saint-Denis was the starting point for weeks of unrest in cities across France, leading to the declaration of a state of national emergency, after the deaths of two young boys hidden by police in an electricity substation. This week’s protests have shown that inequalities and discrimination have not been tackled in the Paris suburbs and that mistrust between young people and the police persists.
The Blaise-Cendrars high school in Sevran, which has more than 1,000 students, has already been at the heart of protests against school conditions. In 2024, students and teachers made a viral video about the state of classrooms, toilets and equipment. The Île de France region has announced that it has implemented a major project to renovate high school buildings. But the teens said key issues had not been resolved.
“We start with an unfair advantage because our parents are not as rich as others, they can’t buy us books, they can’t take us to the movies,” said Ilian, 17, whose family has Moroccan roots and whose father is a traffic policeman. “We miss school during these protests, we risk falling behind on a year of exams, we are desperate to return to class to study, but the conditions we face are so bad that we cannot stop until the government promises to act.
The Education Ministry this week promised 3,000 teachers to urgently fill the gaps, but teaching unions expressed doubts and said longer-term plans and more funding were needed, even though the government says there is little money available.
The mental health of children is also an issue in Seine-Saint-Denis. Ilian has been waiting to see a child psychiatrist for months. At the high school, there was no school nurse and a lack of support staff for children with disabilities, he lamented.
“The police look down on us as if we were animals,” Ilian said. “They speak to us with such cruelty.” He told local politicians that some teenagers alleged that police shouted racial slurs at them during the protests.
Stéphane Troussel, the socialist president of Seine-Saint-Denis department The city council which met with the students this week said: “It is intolerable that the police are causing some of the difficulties. » He called on police to stop using a type of rubber bullet launcher, after suspending the use of stun grenades following injuries. French Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez defended the police tactics.
Stéphane Blanchet, the mayor of Sevran, said he supported the school protesters’ demands. He said many people in his town of 52,000, with a higher-than-average poverty rate, felt “relegated” and forgotten by the state.
Sarah, 17, who wanted to study at an elite Parisian engineering college and whose father, a storekeeper, was proud of her protesting and meeting the mayor, local teenagers said. suburb “I really feel abandoned.”
She said: “We were surprised and very grateful to see other teenagers from more affluent parts of France marching in the streets in support of us this week. We know we are disadvantaged and have to work 10 times harder than others to escape discrimination against our postcode. But we cannot learn properly in these conditions when we are not even guaranteed a chair to sit on at school.”
Student names have been changed
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