The protests began on September seventeenth, when teachers at Antoine de Saint-Exupéry High School in Créteil went on strike to highlight staff shortages. Inspired by these protests, other high schools in Lyon, Marseille, Paris, and other major French cities began barricading their schools to protest crumbling facilities, overcrowded classrooms, overpacked schedules, and schools falling apart.
In France, the average class size is thirty students. Many classrooms reportedly have 30 to 39 students per class, without the space or resources to support them. It’s reported that since the beginning of the 2026-2027 school year, more than half of middle and high schools have lacked at least one teacher, with no substitute or replacement hired. This is not new, though. About nineteen million hours of secondary school classes were not taught in the 2023-2024 school year, largely due to a lack of teachers. Recruitment of school teachers in France has become difficult because of low pay and rising physical threats against teachers.
In the last decade, less than fifteen percent of school buildings in France have been renovated. This is becoming an issue because of rising temperatures and more frequent heat waves. Most buildings lack air conditioning, thermal insulation, and other tools to prevent overheating. These issues tend to be shown in poorer, immigrant-heavy neighborhoods, such as Crétei.
Although France spends more money than other high-income countries on secondary education, France’s standardized test scores have dropped to their lowest point since they began being tracked in 2000. This can be directly linked to the reasons the protests started.
The French government has acknowledged the protests and the students' concerns as ‘legitimate’, though protesters have been met with a heavy police force; the protest being violent on both sides. Videos of police assaulting teenage protesters have gone viral on social media, and mass arrests have occurred. Between September twenty-eighth and October fifth, more than six thousand people were arrested and five thousand detained; close to 90 percent of those detained were minors. On October fourteenth, Lecornu stated that 937 police officers, 149 educational personnel, and 248 students had been injured, including a fifteen-year-old who was maimed by a sting ball grenade fired by the police and a fourteen-year-old who suffered a jaw fracture in a similar incident.
The protests in France are unlikely to die down soon and will likely intensify over time. These protests will shape multiple things in France’s future, such as the upcoming presidential elections.
