Teachers, nurses, school life staff or inspectors and heads of establishments. Several thousand people marched this Thursday in the streets of the capital. This evening the union representatives are received by Prime Minister Jean Castex.
Teachers and other National Education staff, exasperated by the waltz of health protocols linked to Covid-19, took part in a large strike and demonstrated this Thursday to demand answers from the government.
“You can see the anger being expressed. There is a fed up, the government must realize it. We’re at a breaking point“said Guislaine David, general secretary of Snuipp-FSU, the first primary school union.
“It’s exhaustion, exasperation after 22 months of health crisis, constant changes that we can sometimes understand, but we need better communication“, explains in the Parisian procession Bruno Bobkiewicz, secretary general of the main union of school heads (SNPDEN).
“Three protocols in ten days, that’s nonsense. We lie to parents, because it is a daycare that is currently open“, testifies for her part Anne Gau Segonzac, 59, director of an elementary school in Montrouge (Hauts-de Seine), while Grégory, director of a school classified Rep + in Aubervilliers (Seine-Saint-Denis), says to have “the impression of being a nightclub bouncer, ‘you, if you don’t have a test, you don’t come in’“.
For Maxime, 20, educational assistant (AED) for two years at Joliot Curie high school in Nanterre (Hauts-de-Seine), “with all that we are asked to do for the management of the health crisis (…), we can no longer carry out our missions”.
A school nurse, in post for 18 years, says that the working conditions have become so difficult since Christmas that she made the decision to leave the National Education: “JI go back to the hospital where, even in the middle of the Covid crisis, it was less painful“.
Nearly 38.5% of teachers went on strike in nursery and elementary schools, according to the Ministry of Education, and 75% according to the SNUipp-FSU, the first primary union, which announces one in two schools closed and mentions ” a historic mobilization”.
In colleges and high schools, 23.7% of teachers are mobilized, according to the ministry, while the Snes-FSU, the leading secondary school union, puts forward the figure of 62% of strikers.
In the Academy of Versailles, more than 42% of primary school teachers were on strike and 21.88% of secondary schools, according to figures provided by the Academy.
The representatives are received at the end of the afternoon, at their request, by Prime Minister Jean Castex at the Ministry of Education, in the presence of Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer. “It is not a symbolic appointment that we are asking Matignon today, but the beginning of a real negotiation for quick and concrete answers on the health aspect, with additional replacements in particular, but also the salary increase“, warned the secretary general of the FO federation of education (FNEC FP-FO) Clément Poullet.
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