President Emmanuel Macron's new education minister has been embroiled in controversy after she defended her decision to send her own three children to an elite private school. On Friday, the day after Amélie Oudéa-Castéra was appointed to the government under new prime minister Gabriel Attal, Mediapart revealed that her three children attended Stanilas school in Paris. In the summer of 2022 a Mediapart investigation had revealed claims of a sexist, homophobic and authoritarian ethos within the Catholic school.
During her first visit as education minister on Friday, accompanied by prime minister Gabriel Attal, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra was asked by Mediapart why she had decided to send her children to the private school. Her response was that the local state school where she had initially sent her eldest son had not adequately replaced absent teachers with substitute staff. “After a while we'd had enough and, like thousands of families, we went and found a different solution,” said the minister, referring to her and her husband Frédéric Oudéa, chair of the multinational pharmaceutical company Sanofi.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The minister also said that Stanislas school - which is today the subject of an administrative inspection about which the Ministry of Education has refused to divulge any details, thus placing the minister in a delicate situation – was also close to her home. Since then, added Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, she and her husband “make sure that our children are being correctly taught, with a requirement they have a command of basic knowledge, and that they are happy, fulfilled and that they feel confident and well”.
After her comments about the state system sparked controversy, the minister told RTL radio on Saturday she “regretted” upsetting “certain teachers” the day before, and insisted that she would always stand “alongside … state schools and their teachers”. Speaking to the news agency AFP Amélie Oudéa-Castéra also said: “The French people expect us to be clear about the difficulties. And they expect us to take action to tackle them.” The minister, who had been sports minister before seeing her portfolio extended to include education last week, said around 15 million teaching hours were lost every year in France, describing these hours as “lost opportunities for our youth and their education”.
Gabriel Attal, who stepped down as education minister to become prime minister, realised that the political row had not been extinguished by his successor's comments and was quick to come to her support as the pair continued Friday's ministerial visit. Amélie Oudéa-Castéra had “expressed herself openly about her and her family's choices”, he said. Concerning the issue of staffing levels to replace absent teachers, the new prime minister said the government would have to “roll up its sleeves”.
But the new education minister's defence of her actions was seriously undermined when Libération newspaper published an interview with a teacher who taught at the Littré state school in the VIth arrondissement or neighbourhood where Amélie Oudéa-Castéra briefly sent her eldest son in 2009. This unnamed teacher rejected the minister's claims that there had been a problem at the school with absent teachers not being replaced. “I feel attacked personally,” the teacher told Libération. “I was not absent and even had I been we were always replaced. There was never a problem with substitute teachers at Littré, which is a very popular little school.”
Instead, the teacher said Amélie Oudéa-Castéra had moved the child because the school had refused to move him up to the next stage at nursery school, on the grounds that he was still too little. She said the minister's child, Vincent, had attended the 'petite' section at school's nursery for just six months, from January to June 2009, at the age of three, and had only gone in the mornings. The school felt he needed to repeat that year rather than move up to the 'moyenne' section in the new academic year. “She [editor's note, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra] didn't want him to be with younger ones, so they sent him to Stanislas who accepted him,” said the teacher.
In response to the teacher's claims the minister initially said that she could not recall the dates when her son had attended the state school. She later told France Info public radio that her child had indeed attended the school in the first half of 2009, as the teacher had stated. The minister insisted, though, that the rest of the teacher's story was wrong and that she had indeed removed her son because of issues over absent teachers not being replaced.
However, the intervention by the primary school teacher now means that on top of claims that she has denigrated the state education service, the education minister now faces suspicions of telling lies, putting her in even greater political difficulty. “This lie disqualifies her,” said Manuel Bombard from the radical left La France Insoumise (LFI). Fabien Roussel, the national secretary of the French Communist Party (PCF), wrote on X (formerly Twitter): “The days pass and the lies pile up.”
Guislaine David, secretary of the SNUipp-FSI union, which represents primary school teachers, said there was a “real issue of trust” between the teaching profession and a “minister who has openly lied”.
I don't know if she has lied.
There are already calls for the minister to quit. “Can one be minister for the most important Republican institution and thousands of staff, while at the same time disdaining their work publicly and spreading rumours and lies against them in the media?” asked the LFI Member of Parliament Alexis Corbière in Libération. “The combat against this school separatism cannot be handed to a separatist minister.”
From the government's point of view the Amélie Oudéa-Castéra affair has tarnished the first days of the new government, which Emmanuel Macron hopes will reinvigorate his second term. The prime minister's office noted that Gabriel Attal's visit to Andrésy with Amélie Oudéa-Castéra was completely overshadowed by the minister's gaffe.
“Implying on her first day that she prefers a private school to the state sector, it doesn't get any worse,” said one ministerial adviser cited by France Info. “She's started with a major handicap and I don't know if she will be able to put it right.”
And while the government's new official spokesperson Prisca Thévenot sought on Monday to defend her colleague on France Info, she also stated: “I don't know if she has lied.”
Enlargement : Illustration 2
Amélie Oudéa-Castéra herself tried to defuse the row while on a visit to Saint-Denis in the northern suburbs of Paris on Monday, calling for an end to the “personal attacks”. On Friday the minister accused Mediapart of making unfounded accusations against her.
Equalities minister Aurore Bergé, once touted as a potential education minister herself, also sprang to Amélie Oudéa-Castéra's defence. Speaking on France 5 television before the primary school teacher's intervention she said the issue was a personal and family matter and that “many parents make a choice by default to educate their children in the private sector because they take the view that there isn't enough in state schools to keep them there”.
However, writing on X her former colleague, the ex-health minister and ex-teacher Aurélien Rousseau – who quit over his opposition to the new immigration law - said that while everyone had “legitimate reasons” for how they chose to educate their children, he was personally “proud” to have taught in the state sector and that “even if everything isn't perfect, my children have some marvellous experiences” in a state school.
It was back in 2022 that a Mediapart investigation revealed the sexist, homophobic and authoritarian outlook of the teaching at the private Catholic school Stanislas. Our story revealed how booklets were handed out to pupils in year 11 (tenth grade in the United States) to teach them about “chastity”, other literature likened abortion to “murder”, while teachers condemned homosexuality. The school advocates unmixed classes, recruits staff who are close to the Manif Pour Tous – the protest movement which opposes single-sex marriage - and invites members of the Catholic Church to extol conversion therapy which is now banned by law. Around 15 former pupils told Mediapart of the “suffering and “humiliation” they had suffered, with many attacking the school's “reactionary” and “authoritarian” values.
A political affair
In February 2023, following press revelations, including those from Mediapart, the education minister at the time, Pap Ndiaye, ordered an administrative investigation into the school. The education service inspectorate, the L’Inspection Générale de l’Éducation, du Sport et de la Recherche (IGESR), produced a report in the summer of 2023 which went to Pap Ndiaye's successor, Gabriel Attal.
The authorities have declined to make this report public. Asked several times since December 14th 2023, the Paris education authority categorically refuses to reveal the report's conclusions or detail any measures that may have been taken since Mediapart's revelations. Mediapart has now launched an action with the freedom of information body the Commission d’Accès aux Documents Administratifs (CADA).
Mediapart also understand that last November, when he was still education minister, Gabriel Attal was himself directly alerted and contacted by the father of one pupil at Stanislas. In a letter to the minister, seen by Mediapart, the parent explained that he and his daughter had given evidence to the investigation on May 16th 2023, and were dismayed not to have had any news since then. He said that his daughter had been unfairly and arbitrarily excluded from Stanislas because she had attacked the homophobia and racism of members of staff.
“Our daughter, who was at Stanislas for nine years from 2013 to 2022, was in recent years subjected to discriminatory treatment at the establishment,” the father wrote to the minister. “The climax was our summons on June 20th 2022 to see Mr Gautier, the establishment's director, Mr Jubert, the head of discipline at the secondary school, and Mr Cucuel, head of year 12, without any prior warning at all. Our daughter had, however, just received a prize for excellence at the secondary school (handed over by Mr Gautier!) with her teachers all raving about both her work and her attitude.”
The 'spirit of Stanislas'
“Our daughter's 'fault', which was described in particular by Mr Gautier as 'toxic', was to not have accepted the homophobia, the sexism, the racism disseminated by staff running the establishment and to have chosen not to stay silent … According to them she didn't have the 'Stan spirit'.”
Documents seen by Mediapart show that the pupil did indeed achieve excellent results at the school and was removed from the establishment by the director with no disciplinary hearing and without the views of the teachers being heard, because she “didn't respect the spirit of Stanislas”.
“Since then [my daughter] has not been the same, and has been crushed by what she went through and by the absence of sanctions for her tormentors,” her father wrote to Gabriel Attal. In the letter he accuses a senior figure at the school of “bullying” behaviour towards his daughter “in particular when [she] did not accept the constant homophobic, racist and sexists remarks by him [editor's note, the head of year 12].”
The father added: “Minister, I beg you to consult this report and to take the required administrative sancions against these three people.”
Did Gabriel Attal react to this letter while education minister? His office refused to respond to Mediapart on this. The father of the pupil involved says he was never informed of any follow-up and simply received an acknowledgement of his letter on December 14th 2023 from the minister's office saying that his letter would be sent to the “director of financial affairs”. The father said: “Since then, there's been nothing.”
The report concerning the school has now been left in the in-tray of Gabriel Attal's successor Amélie Oudéa-Castéra. According to one ministerial source, while she was sports minister Amélie Oudéa-Castéra argued strongly in defence of Stanilas, even though at the time the issue was well outside her ministerial remit.
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- This article has been compiled from a number of different articles on the subject by Mathilde Goanec, David Perrotin, Ilyes Ramdani and Lorraine Poupon; see here, here, here, here and here.
English version and additional reporting by Michael Streeter