Police are standing by to force open the doors to dozens of French schools today as the Socialist government tries to face down a revolt by councils opposed to plans to make children attend primary classes on five days a week.
A number of conservative mayors in the western Paris region, the Loire and the Marseilles area have opposed the measure, imposed on all 24,000 nursery and primary schools, on the grounds that it imposes excessive costs, disrupts parents’ lives and risks exhausting the children.
For traditionalists, the idea of forcing children to attend school five days in a row is unnatural, and French primary pupils have been free of classes on Wednesdays since the late 19th century. They used to attend on Saturday mornings, but Nicolas Sarkozy scrapped that tradition in 2008.
The reform, promised in President Hollande’s 2012 election campaign and introduced in some schools last year, was initially supported by teachers and parents because it also shortens the six-hour school day by 45 minutes. However, 60 per cent of parents now oppose the Wednesday sessions, recent polls suggest.
“We do not want children going to school on Wednesday morning. They are going to be exhausted,” said René Raimondi, the mayor of Fos-sur-Mer, near Marseilles.
Advertisement
Many schools will bar their entrances today with padlocks and chains. One, in the village of Saint-Medard-en-Forez, in the Loire region, has vowed to remove the knobs on the front doors to the school, and not put them back until Thursday morning.
Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, 36, who was appointed education minister last week, warned the mutinous mayors that the government would ask local police chiefs to enforce the law, and that they could be suspended from their posts by state prefects. “We will make sure that the schools are open. School is compulsory. When you break the law, punishment follows,” she said.
The row over the timetable reflects larger concerns about the nation’s education system. For decades, successive reforms have been resisted, while taxpayers pay ever more for a system under which standards have declined to barely average levels in international comparisons. One recent arithmetic survey found that 85 per cent of 15-year-old children could not calculate three quarters of 44.
Pupils at junior and senior secondary schools will still have classes on Saturday mornings; the primary and nursery reform was intended to ease the density of the French school week.
Although the children attend about the same number of class hours as others in the European Union, the lessons had been crammed into four-day weeks, in what is one of Europe’s shortest school years.