Less than a month after she was appointed, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra has been removed from her position at the head of one of France's major government departments, the Ministry of Education. After a string of controversies it became unthinkable that she could continue and she has duly been replaced as education minister by former justice minister Nicole Belloubet, while keeping her old job of sports minister.
Defeated politically, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra was mocked and jeered during all her ministerial visits. She faced a similar reaction in Parliament, too, as for example on Tuesday during ministerial questions when a number of Members of Parliament questioned her about impending class closures. The minister responded in a curious fashion, suggesting that the closure of small classes would be helpful to pupils because of “competition”. She had managed to spark yet another controversy in the world of education.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
But what Amélie Oudéa-Castéra leaves behind is not so much a field of ruins as a wasteland on which a fertile public debate can grow – if there is an appetite for it. For Mediapart's revelations about the minister, and the controversies that she has triggered in the past few weeks, have allowed a number of major issues to be put back on the political agenda. These include a debate over how private schools make educational segregation worse, the lack of equality between girls and boys, and also the unequal treatment of students by Parcoursup, the national online platform through which French students apply for places in higher education.
The private school sector under the spotlight and – finally - debated
When on January 12th Mediapart revealed - after her appointment - that Amélie Oudéa-Castéra educated her children in the private Parisian Catholic school Stanislas, it was because this was an establishment that was under investigation. We didn't yet know it, but the findings of that administrative investigation had been lying on the education minister's desk since last August.
Having tried without success to obtain this report from the office of Amélie Oudéa-Castéra's two immediate predecessors, we eventually got hold of a copy and published it on January 16th. Its contents concerning the private school are damning, revealing homophobic comments, sexism and humiliation. The education inspectors who wrote it expressly called for the education group behind the school to comply with the law.
But the minister kept quiet, even before the Haute Autorité pour la Transparence de la Vie Publique (HATVP) – the body that oversees financial probity in public life – asked her to step aside from the case, and despite the repeated lies from the director of the establishment where her children are educated. This stance never varied: all of Mediapart's questions were met with silence.
Yet sometimes silence is more eloquent than speech. It suggested a form of indulgence, even blindness, towards the prestigious establishments that educate the Parisian smart set. It also showed a culpable lack of state oversight. The Stanislas affair, which became the Oudéa-Castéra affair, helped highlight the role of private schools that have signed educational contracts with our state education system, their role in educational segregation, and the teaching and financial checks to which they are subjected. These are issues which have barely been discussed for forty years.
When on January 31st there were further revelations about the minister's attempts to help the elite private school Diagonales – which does not have a contract with the state - to get public subsidies, the anger went up another notch. This story highlighted even more the nagging issue of the social and educational differences that exist between the public and the private sectors, a subject that the minister wanted to dodge but which in the end accelerated her downfall.
The whole affair thus had “one virtue”, that of “taking the issue of private [schools] outside of a circle of insiders”, said economist Julien Grenet, when asked by Mediapart on Wednesday about the major educational segregation that exists in the capital.
Many are now convinced that the educational status quo can no longer be allowed to continue, especially as the state school system itself is faltering. Several voices on the Left and in the unions as well as activists are now calling for changes to the 'loi Debré', the legislation which since 1959 has governed the terms under which private schools contract with the state education system. Members of Parliament Paul Vannier from the radical left La France Insoumise party and Christopher Weissberg from the ruling Renaissance party will soon present a report based on a Parliamentary taskforce that looked at the funding of private schools. On January 30th leftwing groups in the French Senate called for a Parliamentary investigation to measure the effectiveness of state control in determining how private schools under contract to the state system respect their obligations.
In an unexpected development the head of the Paris education authority, Christophe Kerrero, rammed home this social issue with his surprise resignation. On February 2nd he abruptly quit his post, attacking Amélie Oudéa-Castéra's decision to place a moratorium on a reorganization of preparatory classes – aimed at students wanting to get into the country's elite higher education institutes – that he introduced some weeks before and which he portrayed as a measure to help “diversity”.
Teaching substitutes, university entrance, diversity... thorny issues
When Amélie Oudéa-Castéra sought to justify sending her children to private school she highlighted the issue of absent teachers not being replaced during lessons in state schools. Wounding for the teachers involved, and a downright lie in her case, this became a big issue, forcing Emmanuel Macron to speak about it at length in his January press conference and then obliging new prime minister Gabriel Attal to address it in his speech setting out the new government's political priorities.
The current solutions on the table – extra income for extra hours worked and a reform of the provisions concerning lifelong learning – are not acceptable. But the argument about a lack of substitute staff remains a strong one; and if even a minister comes out and says so, then it shows how serious things have become.
The thunderbolt concerning Parcoursup once against stoked up anger. Mediapart revealed on January 20th that Amélie Oudéa-Castéra's son benefited from a system implemented by Stanislas to circumvent this online platform for students finding places in higher education. Our readers and commentators in general have been very vocal about the anguish caused to thousands of families by this platform – introduced in 2018 - and its algorithm's many malfunctions.
Here, once again, apart from various op-ed articles by academics worried about a new selection system in higher education, and articles highlighting the opaque and even discriminatory way the Parcoursup system operates, the debate about it had to an extent dropped off in recent years. The Stanislas method, which pushes to their limits the various methods of getting around it, has reopened Pandora's Box. Do all high school students have the same choices? Can we knowingly accept a loss of opportunity that benefits some people? And do the elite establishments really play the game?
Mediapart's article on January 23rd about Amélie Oudéa-Castéra's choice of single-sex classes at middle school for her three sons – when mixed classes were available - in an establishment with a “sexist climate” and where homophobia has been fostered, had the same effect. The minister subsequently spent time having to publicly defend otherness, equality between boys and girls, and the right to be different. She was also forced to put back on the table a major dossier concerning lessons about sexuality which, if one believes conservative commentators, is a political hot potato, one which the minister's predecessors Jean-Michel Blanquer, Pap Ndiaye and Gabriel Attal brushed to one side amid almost complete indifference.
Amélie Oudéa-Castéra stated that she had referred this issue to the education advisory body the Conseil Supérieur des Programmes (CSP) to come up with a plan to ensure that the three mandatory information sessions a year on the subject for each pupil during their schooling were being implemented.
But the torment continued for the minister. When she appeared before members of the education committee at the National Assembly on Tuesday the socialist MP Fatiha Keloua-Hachi, herself a member of the CSP, accused the minister of “lies”. The MP said: “You have already been handed, on December 14th, a plan voted for unanimously by the Conseil Supérieur des Programmes, the result of six months of hearings, of a colossal huge amount of work, there are no plans to go back over it, and we haven't had this referred to us. If you want to bury this report, do it openly.” The matter stopped there. Two days later the minister was packing her boxes.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter