With each reshuffle, the controversy returns like a refrain. Since the re-election of Emmanuel Macron in 2022, no Minister of National Education has escaped this. This January 12, the day after her appointment on rue de Grenelle, the new Minister of National Education Amélie Oudéa-Castéra aroused indignant reactions from the left and the unions, by admitting to the press her choice to educate her children in the private. His three boys, aged 17, 15 and 13, are enrolled at the Stanislas college-high school, a private Catholic establishment in the 6th arrondissement of the capital.
The same controversy targeted Pap Ndiaye, just after his arrival at rue de Grenelle in 2022. The minister’s two children were educated at the École Alsacienne, a secular private establishment also located in the 6th arrondissement of Paris, prestigious and elitist. “There are moments in a child’s development that can be complicated,” he explained. It is the choice of parents of children for whom, at one point, the conditions for a peaceful and happy schooling were no longer met.”
Even though he has no children, his successor Gabriel Attal has not escaped controversy either. Pointed out for having completed all his schooling in the private sector, again at the Alsatian School, the young minister justified this during his entry speech on rue de Grenelle: “Yes, I went to school private. I don’t have to deny or apologize for this choice my parents made at the time like millions of parents do every year. And I don’t believe that the fight should be to criticize the parents who make this choice. The fight, on the contrary, is to guarantee that the school, the whole school, can provide parents, all parents, with the essentials of what they expect for their children.”
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In reality, this situation is not new, even if it has become the rule since 2022. Minister of National Education throughout Macron’s first five-year term, Jean-Michel Blanquer had educated three out of four children in the public sector. The fourth had alternated between private and public.
Under Jacques Chirac, this was the case for at least three of the six tenants of rue de Grenelle who succeeded one another. François Bayrou, in office from 1993 to 1997, declared to our colleagues in Le Monde that of his six children, “three were then in public school, and three in private school”. Luc Ferry, who was head of National Education from 2002 to 2004, also confessed to having educated his three daughters in an establishment in the west of Paris. “My wife is Catholic. For my part, I wanted my daughters to receive a religious education,” he justified. Same choice for his successor from 2004 to 2005, a certain François Fillon.
“I have children in the public and private sectors,” Luc Chatel, tenant of rue de Grenelle from 2010 to 2012, under Nicolas Sarkozy, also declared to the Parisian. Depending on the children, you say to yourself that there is a system that may be better suited. The two systems should enrich each other. The private sector under contract has long practiced differentiation in teaching methods and teamwork. But the public need not be ashamed of their innovations. For the reception of disabled children, I also think that it is more efficient.
Faithful to the left’s traditional attachment to public schools, François Hollande’s ministers of national education had all placed their children there. In office from 2016 to 2017, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem had nevertheless been questioned by Nicolas Dupont-Aignan. On a television set, the member for Essonne had suggested that his twins, then in first grade, were being educated privately. But the minister denied: “It was a completely false statement, my children are obviously in the audience.” Vincent Peillon, his predecessor from 2012 to 2014, also declared that all his children were educated in the public sector. Between the two, Benoît Hamon, then father of two little girls aged 2 and 6, made a fleeting visit to rue de Grenelle, from May to August 2014. “My two children are in a public school, in the suburbs,” he declared. three years later at Le Parisien.
Basically, the ministers of Macron’s second five-year term differ from their predecessors in at least two aspects. First, Pap Ndiaye is the first left-leaning tenant on rue de Grenelle to have publicly declared that his children were educated in private education. With the exception, perhaps, of Jean-Pierre Chevènement. The one who was Mitterrand’s Minister of National Education, between 1984 and 1986, would also have had recourse to the Alsatian School. But this solution would only have been temporary, during a move, when Chevènement was not rue de Grenelle.
While the ministers concerned made embarrassed confessions and spared public education, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra chose to very clearly take responsibility for the schooling of her children at Stanislas. The new Minister of National Education thus spoke of “the frustration” of seeing “a bunch of hours which were not seriously replaced” when her son was at school in Littré. “At one point we got fed up, like the parents of thousands of families who made the choice to seek a different solution.” If the declaration has the merit of clarity, it has aroused the anger of education unions and is open to attacks from the left.
