Teachers in France are in the midst of a series of strikes in protest against jobs and school budget cuts. Their action has received strong support from teenage pupils who have joined in, dominating two big demonstrations in Paris in April that led to many school closures.
French teachers’ unions gave notice of “large-scale mobilisation” last year and have so far staged strikes and demonstrations in November, January and March. They began campaigning shortly after the general election in June, which gave a comfortable majority to President Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservative UMP party.
Teachers are angered by a government decision to replace only one in two retiring civil servants in a category that includes teachers and other school staff (who are state employees), which they say will cost 11,200 educational jobs. In a joint statement, the five principal teaching union federations condemned “this new stage in decline of the public education service on a scale never previously attained”, which means “unacceptable deterioration for pupils and young people as well as for staff”. In recent weeks students from lycées, France’s upper secondary schools, have joined the protests.
The lycées’ grievances include size of classes, which will become even larger from September, when the policy of staff non-replacement comes into effect, and because of plans to cut vocational baccalauréat courses from four years to three. Pupils say they are worried for their futures, fearing devalued qualifications, job insecurity and unemployment. The education ministry has justified the cuts in posts by saying the number of lycée students has been declining over the past four years.
According to Xavier Darcos, the education minister, the teachers’ action is “disproportionate”. Only about 8,500 teaching jobs would be cut and about half the hours lost will be made up by voluntary overtime. “So there will only be (the equivalent of) 3,500 posts not renewed, out of nearly a million teachers,” he says.