It is a black day in French schools which ended with a meeting at the Ministry of National Education. On January 13, following the mobilization of teachers protesting against the health protocol, Prime Minister Jean Castex himself received the teachers' unions, accompanied by the Minister of Education, Jean-Michel Blanquer, and Olivier Véran, the Minister of Health, by videoconference after being tested positive for Covid. At the end of these discussions, Jean-Michel Blanquer announced that five million FFP2 masks will be made available for kindergarten teachers on request.
“Several thousand”
contractual replacements will be recruited
“to deal with the crisis”,
he added.
CP assessments, scheduled for January, are postponed.
LiveTeacher strike: Blanquer announces “5 million FFP2 masks” for the school
Before this meeting rue de Grenelle, the Parisian demonstration had started around 2 p.m., near the Luxembourg garden, with a lot of slogans like
“Blanquer, you are the virus!”, “No vaccines against the lack means”
or
“Lightened protocol, sacrificed school”.
Teachers, directors, principals, nurses, supervisors, but also national education inspectors and all the trade unions... In the capital as everywhere in France, all the actors of the school were in the street to protest against the management of the health crisis by Jean-Michel Blanquer and the
“unachievable and changing protocols from day to day”,
specifies the union of teachers Unsa. According to the Ministry of National Education, 38.5% of teachers were on strike in nursery and elementary schools. The SNUipp-FSU claims 75% of strikers. In colleges and high schools, 23.7% of teachers are mobilized according to the ministry, while the Snes-FSU, the first secondary school union, puts forward the figure of 62% of strikers.
“For us, the cut and full,
blow Pauline and Isabelle, teachers in a high school in Essonne.
The management of the health crisis is the tree that hides the forest.
It lays bare all our problems at school.”
Géraldine, National Education psychologist at the Créteil Academy, is indignant:
“We are on the front line and receive no consideration.
We are the last link in the chain but we receive the equipment after everyone else.”
Exasperated, she concludes:
“The government does not seem to take the measure of our usefulness.”
Communication error
Among the demonstrators, an episode particularly made people cringe: the announcement of a new health protocol in schools by Jean-Michel Blanquer, the day before the start of the school year on January 3, in a paying article from Le
Parisien
at the same time as on the National Education website.
A communication error that National Education staff interpret as a sign of contempt.
“It is unbearable that the minister speaks to the media before speaking to us,
regrets Sandrine, teacher at Saint-Germain-en-Laye.
Sometimes it is the parents of students who teach us the new measures.
Read alsoJean-Michel Blanquer, a minister under fire from critics
“Students have been weakened over the past two years with dotted schooling, largely affected by confinement and half-gauges”,
explains Claire Guéville, national secretary responsible for the high school at Snes-FSU. Consequence, according to her: the teachers have recovered high school students who have accumulated delays. Programs not completed, impossibility of organizing a white baccalaureate… According to the unions, the final year students will not be ready. Colin Champion, president of the high school student union La Voix lycéenne, explains:
“We are demanding a postponement of the national tests in June and a reduction in the programs.”
Before continuing:
“Curfew, confinements, distance learning courses, the absence of teachers who fall ill… We are part of a generation that has been suffering from the health crisis since our second.”
The union claims a hundred blocked high schools.