Emergency Pod 2 - Protest developments (recorded 23/10)

So France is, this will begin with the student movement, which started in Créteil, in Lycée Saint-Exupéry.

Last time I said it was timetabling issue that caused it, I was wrong.

I shouldn't have said that.

It was an issue about staff, staff not being, staff posts not being filled.

They're not being adequate staff.

at that school, the movement spread to other leases in different bond year.

And that was met with police violence in different places.

And then that spread more as schools joined in solidarity and then universities joined.

And then last week it coincided with, um, uh, plat preplanned cost of living protests.

So I I've been to a couple of blockades over the last, um, week or so.

I went to a blockade in the 13th around this small.

And I went to a blockade in the 10th arrondissement and spoke to the students about their demands.

The demands are very clear.

And I would say that the students have like a remarkable political analysis.

Not, not all of them probably, but lots of the students that I spoke to are just remarkably clear about the political situation, what their demands are, why they're doing this.

They want more teachers.

They want more resources in school.

They want the abolition of parkour soup, which is the platform through which you apply to university, which ranks students and there are kind of algorithms involved.

And it's like basically like a black box.

Students don't know and teachers don't know like what the process is that generates the outcomes.

And basically it's leading to bad outcomes for poor students and people don't know why.

But the suspicion is that there's a kind of bias in the way that it operates.

They also want the recognition of AOSHs.

That's the like send like special educational needs support.

So they want them to have their, they want them to be better paid and for them to be recognized as like vital work and for there to be more of them so that handicapped and students with special learning needs can, you know, like adequately learn and be a proper part of the student body.