SCHOOL and university students marched in cities across France yesterday in the fifth national day of action of their movement against understaffed, crumbling schools.
Six education unions called teachers out on strike alongside them.
In Paris, the march set off from Place d’Italie towards Les Invalides, near the prime minister’s office and the Education Ministry.
‘They’re not listening to us, so we’re going to get them,’ the Union Etudiante declared, saying 90 per cent of France’s roughly 70 universities were blockaded or closed.
CGT union federation general secretary Sophie Binet, in the Paris procession, said: ‘Every day the mobilisation grows wider.’
In Marseille, Luc, a federal delegate of the Mouvement National Lycéen, said: ‘Today we are still here, ready to fight. We’re out in force.’
Students in Montpellier held peaceful blockades before marching, lycées in Toulouse were shut, and protests were called in Rennes, Nancy and Poitiers.
In Perpignan, pupils vowed: ‘We won’t let go until we get announcements.’
The movement began in mid-September, when teachers at Saint-Exupéry high school in Créteil walked out over staff shortages. A Snes-FSU survey found at least one teacher missing in 53 per cent of secondary schools at the start of term.
The USL school students’ union is demanding a 10bn euros plan for lycées and the abolition of Parcoursup, the university admissions platform students call ‘opaque’.
Pupils want missing teachers replaced, decaying classrooms that cannot cope with rising temperatures repaired, and lighter timetables, and are demanding a meeting with Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu.
School students say the government has offered them nothing but ‘crumbs’, including Education Minister Édouard Geffray’s pledge of 3,000 substitute teachers for the worst-hit lycées.
‘As long as there isn’t 10 billion on the table, we will keep mobilising,’ Union Etudiante spokesperson Sabrine Kharbach said last week.
Outside the Paul-Éluard lycée in Saint-Denis, climate campaigner Greta Thunberg told about 100 young people: ‘Our future is being stolen from us,’ adding that schools ‘are not getting the investment they need’.
Students now plan to join a cost-of-living protest on Saturday 17 October.
‘We are continuing to step up the intensity ahead of 17 October,’ Luc said.