When there aren’t enough chairs, ceilings are collapsing, there are rats, and there aren’t enough teachers or staff, we’ve hit rock bottom. And secondary school pupils, who are also under pressure from the selection process and Parcoursup [the procedure for higher education applications], know this all too well. That is why they are taking action and blockading their schools: to demand decent conditions for education!

A government that responds with repression

Unsurprisingly, the government refuses to understand. As for Geffray and the Ministry of National Education, their only response has been to set up a consultation platform, before handing the central role over to Nuñez, his colleague at the Ministry of the Interior, whose only response was to send in the police to crack down on the mobilised secondary school pupils. He’d already had a taste of this during the last pension protests when he was Prefect of Police of Paris

Multiple shots of tear gas and plastic bullets to the head, tear gas, beatings, hundreds of people taken into police custody: this chilling level of violence against children and teenagers must not go unpunished. One child had their mouth smashed in, another had an eye gouged out: how far will this go?

Fortunately, the crackdown has not intimidated the secondary school students, who are continuing and even stepping up their movement, supported by elected representatives, school staff and parents who are organising to defend them. Even today, hundreds of secondary schools are blockaded, and the movement is taking root and is already spreading to some universities.
Let’s all stand together in support of the secondary school pupils

Calls to expand the movement amongst university students are growing

We offer our full support to the movement that our young comrades are building. We call on all social and political forces to jointly support the secondary school pupils’ mobilisation and to take to the streets very soon to protest against repression and police violence. An inter-union day of action has been proposed for 6 October, and the mobilisation must be massive! For we consider both their demands and their actions to be legitimate. What is illegitimate is this government’s brutal response.

Lecornu’s draft budget heralds a continued dismantling of public services, including the national education system. He has even just announced the introduction of tuition fees for certain courses that were previously free (BTS, preparatory classes, etc.), as well as a reduction in the number of civil servants and a freeze on housing benefit (APL)… This is a genuine provocation.

Nuñez and Geffray must therefore step down, and with them the rest of the government, which is just as responsible for the social destruction and repression.