Life inside a struggling lycée

Every morning, Mohammed, 17, wakes at 6am, cares for his younger siblings to help his single mother, who works as a security guard, and then travels by two crowded buses and a train to his school in Sevran, north-east of Paris. He is in his final year of high school and wants to study management and digital communication at a university in the capital.

His account of the lycée's daily conditions is stark. As he described it:

Packed classes, he said, make it hard to interact with teachers, and during this year's heatwaves overcrowded rooms with no shade or curtains felt like 40 degrees. Staffing is a further problem: absent teachers are often not replaced, and one class went without a French teacher for several months just before the French baccalaureate. In another case, a teacher newly arrived for a subject taught through English did not speak English - "when that teacher arrived they didn't speak English", Mohammed said.

Photos stored on students' phones document the state of the buildings:

• •broken chairs, holes in walls and ceilings, and mould
• •buckets placed to catch leaks and faulty lights
• •toilets that were broken, or doorless, often without paper or soap
• •a lack of projectors and science equipment

Support is also thin: Ilian, another 17-year-old student, has waited months to see a child psychiatrist, and the school has no nurse and lacks support staff for disabled pupils. Students' names in this article have been changed.

A week of blockades and clashes

The protests come amid France's biggest youth movement in decades: hundreds of thousands demonstrated across the country this week against educational inequality, decrepit schools, teacher shortages and large classes. Hundreds of schools were blockaded, thousands of teenagers were arrested, and rights groups warned of alleged police brutality - including a child losing the use of an eye and another losing a hand.

At the Lycée Blaise-Cendrars in Sevran, in Seine-Saint-Denis - one of mainland France's poorest départements - students barricaded their school with backing from parents and teachers. Mohammed said police on horseback charged students gathered to protest outside the school, firing teargas and making arrests. Ilian said the police look down on teenagers "as if we're animals", and told local politicians some students alleged racial insults by police during the protests.

Accounts of the policing are disputed. Stéphane Troussel, the Socialist head of the Seine-Saint-Denis council, called the policing intolerable and called for the police to stop using a type of rubber-bullet launcher, after stun grenades were suspended over injuries. The French interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, has defended the tactics.

A département used to being forgotten

Seine-Saint-Denis has the youngest population in mainland France, one of its highest birthrates and among the lowest average incomes, and its high schools see high teacher turnover. The area co-hosted the 2024 Paris Olympics, and successive governments have launched plans against its long-running inequality and poverty, yet it remains disadvantaged compared with the capital.

Its tensions are not new: in 2005, unrest that spread across French housing estates and triggered a national state of emergency began in the département after two young boys died in an electricity substation while hiding from police.

The Lycée Blaise-Cendrars itself has more than 1,000 pupils. In 2024, students and teachers made a viral video about the state of the classrooms, toilets and equipment, and the Île de France region announced a major refurbishment - but students say key problems remain.

Sevran's mayor, Stéphane Blanchet, has backed the protesters. Many people in his town of 52,000, which has a higher-than-average poverty rate, felt "relegated" and forgotten by the state, he said.

Government response and next steps

The education ministry this week promised 3,000 teachers to urgently fill gaps. Unions have voiced doubt about the promise and are demanding longer-term plans and more funding, while the government says there is little spare cash. The French prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, conceded that teenagers had "legitimate" concerns.

For the students, stopping is not straightforward. Ilian, whose family has Moroccan roots and whose father works as a traffic warden, said parents who are not wealthy cannot buy their children books or take them to films. "Our parents aren't as rich as others, they can't buy us books, they can't take us to films", he said, putting students at a disadvantage.

He said students risk falling behind in an exam year, but "we're desperate to get back into class to study, but the conditions we're facing are so bad", and they cannot stop until the government commits to action.

Sarah, 17, who hopes to study at an elite Paris engineering faculty, said her warehouse-worker father was proud she was protesting and meeting the mayor, and that banlieue teenagers "really feel abandoned". She added that students from better-off areas marching in support was appreciated, and that "we have to work 10 times as hard as others to escape discrimination against our postcode".

The students have voted to continue their protests next week, taking their grievances to the mayor, elected officials and education representatives.