Education minister Gabriel Attal described it as “shameful”. The recently-appointed minister was speaking on Saturday about a letter sent by an education authority west of Paris to the family of a 15-year-old boy called Nicolas, the victim of bullying at a school there last year. The teenager, who in September 2023 moved to a new school in Paris, took his own life a day after the new academic year started.
In the letter, whose contents were revealed by BFMTV news channel, the Versailles education authority threatened the parents with legal action for “defamation” after they had complained about the lack of reaction from the headteacher at their son's old school. The authority claimed that statements made by the parents had been “unacceptable” and it urged them to adopt a more “constructive” attitude.
Gabriel Attal has now launched an internal investigation, begun an audit of all the country's education authorities whose findings will be known in four weeks, and promised tough sanctions. “My role, your role, is not to protect an institution at all cost but to protect our pupils, our children, at all costs,” the minister also told a gathering of local education authority chiefs on Monday.
For many parents this case has brought back deeply unhappy memories of sometimes impossible attempts to have a proper dialogue with school authorities. Two years ago, in the same education authority where Nicolas first attended school, 'Corinne' – not her real name – alerted the authority on numerous occasions about the humiliations inflicted on her daughter, a pupil in the fifth year at a middle school (7th grade in the United States, Year 8 in the UK).
“At the time we asked for mediation with the family of the pupil who was bullying our daughter as well as another classmate. We got no response apart from the suggestion that we make an official legal complaint,” she recalls. “But I don't think this kind of affair should be resolved at the police station. At the end of the year I asked the school management if my daughter's safety could be assured for the following year. They told me that, given her profile, they couldn't guarantee it.”
Disgusted, Corinne then sent a letter by recorded delivery to the Versailles education authority, but got no response. “The only solution was to put our daughter in a private school,” she says with regret.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The concept of a school that one can “trust” touted by former education minister Jean-Michel Blanquer seems something of a misnomer when it comes to relations between the institution and parents, whether their child is a victim or the alleged bully. “To have trust you still have to be acknowledged and respected. That's not always the case,” says Sandrine Claude, president of the parents' association the Fédération des Conseils de Parents d’Élèves (FCPE) for the Belfort region of eastern France. “I've spent many years on school councils: we often come up against schools that judge families without knowing them, and who can be condescending. And that approach starts at the top of the institution,” she says.
Parents seen as a 'nuisance'
Patrick Furé, who represents the FCPE in the Hauts-de-Seine département or county to the west of Paris, bitterly recalls the “disdain” shown by Charline Avenel, the former head of the Versailles education authority who was in that post when the letter was sent to Nicolas's family. Representatives of the parents' group, who were invited twice by her to informal meetings in 2022, felt they were being put in their place after they issued a press statement criticising the problem of pupils who had not been allocated places for the new academic year in 2023. “Charline Avenel was upset, she treated us like Youtubers at a meeting in front of her staff and has not spoken to us since,” Patrick Furé says.
“Parents are often considered to be the nuisance in the system, those who bring problems to the table,” he says. “We do know that the authority is too understaffed to respond to all requests, to all problems. Nonetheless, that response to a family who were raising the alarm about their child's situation is unacceptable, it's intimidation.”
“That letter sent to the family of young Nicolas is, I hope, an exception,” says Nicole Sacagiu, president of the anti-bullying help group 'Parle, je t'écoute'. “But all the parents that we help talk about feedback that's very often cold, even lacking in humanity, when they raise the alarm about their child. Managements may react well but if it's not followed up and the problem doesn't stop, then the parents insist on something being done, and then they become troublesome parents.”
Max Ttchung-Ming, headteacher of a middle-school in the Loire-Atlantique département in west France and co-author of a book on violence and restorative justice in schools, recalls the recent case of a pupil's mother who was threatening to sue the education department, whom she said had not reacted to her concerns that her child was being bullied. “When we, as heads of the establishment, don't punish it immediately comes across as dodgy,” he says. “Parents become very aggressive and we have to deal with that. In this particular case what defused the situation was her being in a communal group with teachers, pupil witnesses, reception staff, the secretary, the headteacher … but for that to happen you need to train pupils and adults to understand the scapegoat phenomenon. Several schools are doing that but they rarely make the press headlines.”
The phone number 3020 is a dedicated helpline for victims of school bullying and their families that was set up by the government and is run by the association École des Parents et des Éducateurs (EPE). “Parents who call are angry, quite distraught, they've reached the end of the road and are usually in conflict with the institution,” confirms the person in charge of the line in the Paris region, Murielle Cortot-Magal. “We advise them to resume contact at a local level, on top of informing them what we can do with the point of contact for bullying issues for their département, but often they have already tried everything.”
According to Beatrice Bayo, director of the national federation of EPE associations, there is a dangerous lack of cooperation on the part of the education authorities. She notes that her association works with the parents of both the bullied and the bullies. “It's not about bad parents who didn't see the problem coming, the bully isn't a bad child who must be punished at all cost, the school isn't simply wanting the problem to go away at any cost,” she says. “Rather than pointing the finger at others, these parties should work together more. Yet at the moment parents' voices are still not being heard enough.”
'Co-education' – a pious hope?
Sociologist Pierre Périer, professor of education sciences at Rennes 2 University in western France, sees the recent case involving Nicolas's suicide as “quite a dramatic example of the everyday dysfunctionality in relations between parents, schools and the responsible authority”. Despite the desire for “co-education” that is stated in the idea of an “educational community”, the relationship between parents and schools appears to remain top-down and closely supervised in France, with the former not being given equal footing with the latter.
“You still have headteachers today who hold meetings about the new school year and who don't invite parent federations,” says Sandrine Claude from Belfort. “It's okay for us to write letters when there's a shortage of teachers but often our role stops there!”
And the worse the school performs, the more the shutters tend to come down. “The teachers become defensive with the parents who can be seen as a threat, they are seen as disruptive elements by a school that's in quite a bad position,” says Pierre Périer. “We're seeing more and more filtering, and in practical terms it's even becoming difficult to go into schools.”
While everything points to the need for parents to become partners – especially in the fight against and the prevention of bullying – in reality the gap between words and practice can turn out to be enormous. “Relations with parents must be part of the school's plan, this has to be driven by the head and the team, teachers have to be trained in this issue and helped,” says the sociologist. “But it's not easy going in front of parents, who are sometimes angry, when you yourself don't feel supported in your work by your management.”
Those under attack always end up counter-attacking, says one headteacher from the west of France, speaking anonymously. “What will happen after this case involving Nicolas and the Versailles education authority? The ministry will haul the education authority chiefs over the coals, the education authority chiefs will admonish the headteachers and it'll stop there,” he predicts. “Yet how many teachers are abused by their pupils? How many families are mistreated by the institutions? It goes around in a circle.” The headteacher concludes: “Speaking about bullying among pupils is very limiting: adults at all levels are a very important part of the problem but also of the solution when it comes to the fight against bullying.”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter