Tell us, first of all, where is this new autoroute exactly?

Well, the new 62-kilometre two-lane autoroute, or highway motorway, known as the A69, connects the city of Toulouse in southwest France to the town of Castres, which, incidentally, will lose its status as the largest town in the country without a direct motorway connection when the A69 finally opens.

Until now, anyone wanting to drive between the two areas has had to use the mostly one-lane Route Nationale, ARN 126.

But from the 6th of November, they'll have the option to use the new road, the A69, which pretty much runs parallel with the ARN 126.

So if you're familiar with the north of England, it's a bit like the M62, which was built parallel to the A62, a mostly single-lane road connecting Manchester and Leeds.

Now, unlike a lot of motorways in France, people using the A69 won't have to stop at toll booths because it'll be one of just a handful of the country's so-called free-flow toll-paying motorways.

That means no toll booths and therefore no queues to get on or off the motorway.

Now, it's all centred around the cost now.

Are there plans for more, especially given how quickly AI use is increasing?

Oh yes, the grid operator, RTE, has reserved grid capacity for around 80 data centre projects.

But they're only reservations, so this doesn't necessarily mean every project that reserves capacity will be built.

And it's also worth pointing out that although some of these projects do involve building giant AI campuses, many of them are smaller sites, renting space to lots of different companies.

And these are the centres de colocation I mentioned earlier.

And of course, they're all at different planning stages.

The biggest ones being planned or in the early stages of development are the Campus IA or AI project at FUJU in Saint-Aimant, east of Paris.

What's happening in France then and where, why exactly?

How bad are they and where is worst hit in France?

Well, at the time of recording, they're still bad, with 14% of petrol stations, that's out of almost 10,000 across France, currently reporting completely being out of one category of fuel, so basically either petrol or diesel.

But that figure was up at 16% earlier in the week.

In terms of which areas are impacted most, well, we've got an article on the local's website with a detailed map based on the government figures, and it shows you how badly each department is affected by using a kind of traffic light map, meaning the closer to red a department is coloured, the worse the shortages are.

There are still departments marked in orange, including the Lowe, Territoire de Belfort, near the Swiss-German border, and central Paris.

And it's still yellow across many other parts of the country, which means that between 10% and 25% of those areas' petrol stations are reporting shortages.

But on that same map, there's now more light green, a bit of dark green and even some blue.

Now, finally, what has the government been doing so far to ease the situation around the shortages and the high prices to prevent any kind of social unrest we've talked about earlier?

Before we get into the details, what are the PISA rankings exactly and should we take any notice of them?

So, PISA stands for Programme for International Student Assessment and it's the world's biggest cross-country study of school performance.

It happens every three years and last year, when the tests that this latest study are based on were actually done, 91 countries took part.

Now, the students involved are 15 years old, so they're at the end of collège, start of lycée here in France.

And the tests aren't based on any given country or subject's curriculum.

They're done through real-world reasoning and problem-solving tasks relating to three subjects.

There's reading, maths, and science.

are there any other reasons that can explain the poor performance of french pupils and what other issues do they face

Do they really hate Parisians?

Well, they certainly don't hate the money they bring in.

Tourism is worth around 8% of Brittany's GDP.

That's according to Tourism Bretagne, the region's official tourist board, and Parisians make up one of the biggest slices of the French visitors here.

But they don't always appreciate the habits of Parisian tourists.

The locals, Emma Albright, spoke to a restaurant owner called David in the Cote d'Amour, And he said that he can always tell when someone's from Paris because they want everything immediately.

They bring the Parisian rhythm with them wherever they go.

What about some of the stereotypes about Parisians? What are they? Are they really true, Katie?

[chuckles]

So, uh, I live down in Te Anau.

We are on a deer and beef farm about 900 acres just out of, out of Te Anau here.

I actually grew up here as well, which is kind of cool.

I grew up in Te Anau.

Grew up actually in the deer recovery, aviation deer recovery industry.

And that's what my dad did for a job.

And, and that's sort of the sort of thing that actually does take literal generations to change.

So do you have any stories about the positive impact of what you're doing on this programme?

Yeah, maybe I could give a little bit of background, if that's okay, as to why I decided to join the Happy Leadership Programme, because then it will explain the impact a bit better.

I became Chief Executive of Clumset Gables in 2019.

And at that point, we were a really small team.

So there was myself and two other colleagues, one of whom was part-time.

Over a couple of years, we developed a number of projects and each of those projects had a consultant running them.

So at one point, I was line managing 11 consultants and two members of staff and it was not a good model for leading really.

In terms of coaching, is that something that your organisation does? And if so, how does that work for you guys as leaders?

What's the overall picture in each region?

Well, at first glance, there's not actually a huge difference in the cost of property in each region.

So according to official government data, Brittany's regional median stands at €2,100 per square meter, whereas in Normandy it's €2,000 per square meter.

So that puts them both well below Paris, where it's €10,000 per square meter, and the Côte d'Azur, where property averages in places like Cannes are almost €6,000 per square meter.

However, those headline figures don't tell the whole story.

There are some big variations within each region.

So in Brittany, the most expensive place to buy property is in the city of Saint-Malo.

Which of these two regions, Brittany or Normandy, win on those grounds?

Governments over the years, local authorities, they've been pushing the change to make it easier for people in French towns to try it, have they not?

Yes, they have.

It's a combination of political will and the law that have propelled the growth of car sharing in France, and it began about 20 years ago when car sharing was given its first legal definition.

At that point, certified operators were given reserved parking spaces and preferential rates from local authorities.

But what really got things going was the Loi d'Orientation des Mobilités, the LOM, which came in 10 years later and required every corner of France to be covered by a local mobility authority, and their job was to oversee the provision of transport alternatives to the private car, including car sharing.

I mentioned the government's new target to have 70,000 shared vehicles by 2031.

And just last month, the Cour des Comptes, France's independent public auditor, recommended a new legal framework to succeed the LOM.

So where can you find these cars in France then, Katie? Are they only in big cities?

Katie, what's happened here?

Well, as of Thursday last week, anyone trying to access the website dcl.education.gouv.fr, that's the official online portal for the Diplôme de Compétence en Langue or DCL, has been met with a predominantly white screen and a short message saying, "The DCL website is currently closed for maintenance.

It is due to reopen shortly." Now, we've been in touch with the French Ministry of Education to find out what's going on, and bizarrely, they say they've run a check and found no problems.

However, we've run several tests of our own, and have even contacted an organization that monitors data breaches in France, and we can categorically say that the site is currently out of action.

However, we can't yet say if there's been a data leak.

We've also spoken to one user, a teacher, who told us that since discovering that the site is down, she's been in contact with a small admin team who've been handling all the inquiries and registrations that would normally be processed by the website.

Now, as you'd imagine, this is slowing things down somewhat.

Now, the interesting thing about this is, is that it isn't the first French government website to suffer a kind of outage this year, is it?