Nursery professionals demonstrate in Paris

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The diaper is full": a few hundred early childhood professionals demonstrated Tuesday in Paris to demand a revision of the standards of reception in nurseries, a week after government announcements that left the sector skeptical. At the call of the collective "No baby to the locker", the demonstrators, overwhelmingly women - gathered in front of the Ministry of Solidarity with placards proclaiming "we want nurseries, not factories", or "reception, not daycare for our little ones".

In particular, the collective is calling for a stricter standard of supervision in nurseries, with one adult for every five children in total (instead of one for every five babies who do not walk and one for every eight who walk). He also wants more demanding rules concerning the qualification of professionals in contact with children, and an overhaul of the methods of financing establishments, currently calculated by hour and by place, which leads to "a logic of filling", or even to "overbooking".

Last week, Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne presented a plan for early childhood that plans to create 200,000 places in nurseries by 2030, despite the glaring shortage of staff in this sector.

'A big disappointment'

For the members of the collective, these "surprising" announcements were a "big disappointment", explained to AFP Emilie Philippe, one of the spokespersons of the movement. "It seems quite unrealistic, especially since in parallel there is no quantified objective for professional training," she said. In April, a report by the General Inspectorate of Social Affairs (IGAS) had stressed that the "quality of care" was not always at the rendezvous in some crèches, and that children could even be exposed to risks of neglect.

After this report, "we were waiting for announcements on the rate of supervision or the ratio of qualified professionals, but this was not the case," commented Emilie Philippe. For angry professionals, "the priority is not the creation of places, but the reception we offer to children," she insisted.