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70% of teachers on strike – maires resist child minding scheme. |
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Thursday, 20 November 2008 |
The teachers are on strike in protest at the plan to “sedentarise” 3,000 of France’s 11,000 itinerant special needs teachers who operate Réseau d'Aide Spécialisée aux Élèves en Difficulté (RASED). Instead of moving from child to child, they will be based where there is a concentration of children with problems. Their pay will remain the same.
Teachers and parents concerned claim that the change is to save money and will damage the system of help for children with problems. The government replies that the change should been seen in conjunction with the new two hour period providing special help to all children. At the same time there is a battle over the implementation of the law compelling communes to provide day care facilities for families affected where more than 25% of the staff at a school are on strike, which is attracting most of the media attention. Behind the apparently obscure motive for the strike is a feeling amongst teachers that the government is gradually manoeuvring them into major changes without their consent. France’s 1,3 million teachers have traditionally baffled most attempts to change the way the education system works that they do not like. They are particularly worried that the government scheme whereby maires are obliged by law to provide child care during strikes will render meaningless the strike weapon with which they have successfully defied Ministers for Education of both left and right for decades. If no one is inconvenienced by their action what is the point? This in turn has lead to a movement amongst maires, particularly Socialists, to refuse to use their staff to look after children with working parents. However there has been resistance from right wing maires as well on the grounds that the government has not given them the resources or the time to put the childcare scheme in place. In Paris the staff due to look after the children have gone on strike in sympathy. However in Bordeaux, Nice, Toulon and Marseille the service minimum will operate. In a number of areas the préfets are taking legal action against maires that fail to cooperate. The scheme concerns primary schools as colleges and lycees can organise minimum services internally.
If the government can get its child care scheme to work they will have gravely reduced the teaching profession’s ability to resist government policy. In addition the child care scheme brings the teachers directly into conflict with working parents who do not appreciate having to take holidays or payout for babysitting every time there is a strike.
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