Secondary school student line-up to enter the canteen at the College Henri Matisse school during its reopening in Nice after the summer break, September 1 2020. Picture: REUTERS/ERIC GAILLARD
Education minister Jean-Michel Blanquer said the overwhelming majority of France’s 12-million pupils had returned without any problems and that glitches were to be expected.Pupils aged 11 and over must wear masks at all times. Attendance is mandatory, though schools can adapt to surges in local infections by limiting numbers for a few days or weeks — again forcing some parents to juggle work and childcare.
Though his son was not caught up in the closure, Ambrosini said he and his partner — who spent the spring coronavirus lockdown at his family home in Italy — would need to devise a back-up plan were the school to close. “We both work, so it’s not easy.” “The dynamic looks terribly like what we experienced before the lockdown,” Jean-André Lasserre, head of school parents’ union FCPE in Paris, said of the virus’s spread in the capital.