Minister's hard line angers unions

Moves by education minister Luc Chatel to impose heavier sanctions on disruptive pupils, and especially those who are violent, have been attacked by teaching unions as an authoritarian attempt to impose control with no regard for the pupils, the teachers or the schools.

Teachers have complained that pupils’ behaviour is getting worse and that they are left with few means to get them to stop disrupting classes, but they do not see heavy-handed security measures as being the answer.

Mr Chatel said he was turning the screw on disruptive pupils and there would be a “graded response” of punishments, although they would no longer use week-long suspensions, which just “moved the problem elsewhere” and had been judged counter-productive.

“Any insults towards staff will result in a disciplinary procedure and any act of violence will lead to the pupil being called before the school’s disciplinary council,” he said.

Mr Chatel, who wants pupils to stand as a mark of respect when a teacher enters the room, plans to up 10 réinsertion scolaire establishments to deal with the most disruptive pupils and get them back into school. Pupils would be sent away for at least a year.

He also wants alternative sanctions, so pupils would be involved in social activities or in repairing damaged buildings, to bring home to them the gravity of their actions.

Coming as 16,000 teaching jobs are being cut across France and 15,000 new teachers take control of classes despite having had no teacher training, the moves were denounced by teaching unions.

Christian Chevalier, of the Syndicat des enseignants (SE-UNSA), said Mr Chatel was using education as part of the toughening up of security policies across the country and forgetting about the pupils.

He said: “Each year, a core of about 10-12 per cent of pupils leave primary school with learning problems. The minister should ask himself how to do something about that. Does he think that increasing the number of pupils in each class will fix the problem?”

Le Figaro reported complaints from teachers saying they were “confronted with young people who have no respect for anything or anyone, and make sure the teachers know it”.

They said there were serious incidents, as well as a daily tide of minor problems, such as being cheeky, which built up into a climate where teaching was impossible.

Philippe Tournier, of school principals’ union SNPDEN, said they knew how to handle the most serious incidents, but the petty day-to-day transgressions were much harder – and they were by far the majority: “Repeating a punishment for a minor incident just made it less effective at the end of the day.”

One teacher complained that, when she spoke to the Instituts universitaires de formation des maîtres (IUFM) teacher training body about problem pupils, she was told that the problem was with her teaching.

She added: “That doesn’t help me find a way to deal with a pupil who tells me, ‘I’m not going to do your punishment and you have no right to speak to me like that’.”

Claire Mazeron, vice-president of the Syndicat national des lycées et collèges (Snalc), said education authorities told them that sanctions had to be educational and that old punishments such as “lines” were forbidden. But, she said, “punishments did not have to be intelligent to be effective”.