The Budget Went Up. The Teacher Didn't Show.
France's teenagers have shut hundreds of schools over a gap Australians should recognise: the number in the budget and the person at the front of the room.
France's teenagers have shut hundreds of schools over a gap Australians should recognise: the number in the budget and the person at the front of the room.
France isn't erupting over pensions this time. It's erupting over a maths teacher who never turned up.
It started on 17 September at a high school in Créteil, south-east of Paris. Teachers walked out over missing staff. Students blockaded the gate in support. Somebody filmed it, TikTok did the rest, and by 1 October the Interior Ministry was counting 1,027 high schools hit in a single day.
On Tuesday, 266,000 people marched, according to the Interior Ministry. Organisers said 450,000. Since late September police have made nearly 6,900 arrests, most of them minors. Government figures put the injured at 215 students, 88 school staff and 761 police and gendarmes. Two dozen schools have been burned or wrecked. On Monday a 15-year-old in Lens lost a hand when a police stun grenade went off; accounts of how differ, and police investigators are looking at it. Two days later the grenades were suspended at school protests.
That's the noise. Here's the mechanism.
On 1 October, in the middle of all this, Paris published its 2027 budget. The schools line goes up by about €1.2 billion. The education minister says the government "doesn't economise on youth". The same budget cuts 1,588 tenured teaching posts, and the increase is smaller than the government's own 1.8 per cent inflation forecast.
Both things are true. That's the trick. A budget can rise while the classroom empties. The ministry points at the national total. The student points at the empty desk at the front.
Why can't Paris just pay? Because the bond market is holding the purse. France's 10-year borrowing cost is around 4.9 per cent, the highest since 2002. The government has promised to cut the deficit to 5 per cent of GDP next year, from a projected 5.4 per cent this year. It has no majority to pass a budget anyway, and a presidential election is due in April.
So watch what it reached for first. Riot police, available tonight. Ten million barrels of diesel reserves, released on Wednesday to take 12 to 18 euro cents off a litre. On Thursday the education minister promised about 3,000 supply teachers already on the payroll, reassigned to the worst-hit schools in the coming days. All quick. Permanent teaching posts are slow and expensive, so those still got a date: Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has promised "concrete, quick and fully funded" answers by the end of October.
Cheap things happen this week. Expensive things get a deadline.
Here's why it should matter from Sydney. We run the same trick, just slower and politer.
The Gonski review told Canberra in 2011 that schools should be funded on need. The current deal, signed by every state and territory, puts public schools on a "pathway" to that full standard by the end of 2034. That's 23 years from diagnosis to treatment. A whole generation has gone through school on the pathway.
France has had six prime ministers in five years. We've had six since Gonski.
Nobody blockades a pathway. It's too long to film. The gap between the announcement and the classroom gets spread across enough elections that nobody is ever left holding it.
French teenagers worked out that the headline number isn't the teacher. They found the gap and put it on their phones.
In Paris they call it Act IV. In Canberra we call it a ten-year agreement.
If this was useful, leave a tip.
New essays by email: ricoholt.com/list
Rico Holt · ricoholt.com
If this was worth your time, you can leave a tip. Rico Holt runs on readers, not big tech or big media money, and the essays stay free.
Leave a tip · A$5Get the next essay and the book launch price first.
Privacy: your email gets used for one thing, sending you Rico Holt essays and book news. It's stored with Netlify, our form host. Never sold, never shared. Want off? Reply to any email and you're gone.