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Migrants don’t leave their right to education behind

By: Audrey Azoulay.

The number of migrant and refugee children in the world today could fill more than half a million classrooms. Their parents are perhaps seeking new opportunities in the city, or even in another country. Others are forced to flee conflict or natural disaster.
In all, there has been a 26% increase in children on the move since 2000.

These children have the right to education, no matter where they are from and what they have been through. This is the focus of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation’s (Unesco’s) Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report.

Migrants, refugees and internally displaced people are some of the most vulnerable in the world. Sometimes simply being in school means being safe. Eight-year-old Jana, a Syrian refugee at the Unesco-run school in the Zaatari refugee camp, Jordan, says she felt happy just to escape the sound of gunfire. School has also given her hope; she wants to be a teacher when she grows up.

When possible, these children should be placed in the same schools as host populations to help them to thrive. Teachers are on the front line supporting children who face discrimination or who suffer from trauma. They also need support to manage multilingual, multicultural classes and the psychological consequences of what they have endured.

A well-designed curriculum that challenges prejudices is also vital and can have a positive ripple effect beyond the classroom walls, enhancing social cohesion. Unfortunately, some textbooks include outdated depictions of migration and undermine efforts towards inclusion.

Adults also need educational support. Many have qualifications, but in Europe and North America only about one in 10 of those who have gained a higher education degree work in a job that matches their skills. The Unesco Global Convention on the Recognition of Higher Education Qualifications, due to be adopted next year, aims to resolve this problem.

The cost of educating immigrants is often exaggerated. Financing for refugee education, however, is woefully inadequate — only a third of the funding gap for refugee education has been filled. It is a collective responsibility to ensure that development aid plugs the holes, providing predictable and long-term funding so the burden does not fall on those countries least able to cope.

The world is poised to adopt the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration and the Global Compact on Refugees, both of which highlight the crucial role of education and reaffirm the importance of “leaving no one behind”. This year’s GEM Report offers a blueprint for countries to deliver on their promises. We hope all governments will use it to turn despair into hope for a brighter future for all.

Source of the article: https://mg.co.za/article/2018-11-22-00-migrants-dont-leave-their-right-to-education-behind

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Shrinking Japan: Lack of Japanese language education hobbling integration of foreign kids

Asia/ Japan/ Source: mainichi.jp.

A female instructor holds up cards each bearing a Japanese phonetic katakana character, and the nine children with foreign nationalities in the class read them out in unison, «A, i, u …» The instructor changes the order of the cards, and the students follow right along: «I, o, u …»

This basic Japanese lesson is part of the four-level language course offered by the Tabunka Free School, run by nonprofit organization Multicultural Center Tokyo in the capital’s Arakawa Ward. Most of the 30 or so students at the school are aged 15 or above and have finished compulsory education in their home countries. Many of them are aspiring to enter Japanese high schools, for which they also study math and English at the school.

«I would like to pass the entrance exam for a high school,» said Nguyen Quang Duc, a 16-year-old Vietnamese student in an advanced Japanese language class at Tabunka.

Seven Tokyo metropolitan high schools offer alternatives to regular entrance exams for foreign students who came to Japan within the past three years, screening applications through interviews and compositions. However, only one in two applicants gets through the highly competitive selection process. As for regular exams, foreign students are allowed certain exception to the usual rules, such as bringing a dictionary, but the need to take science and social studies segments makes it hard for them to get in.

According to government statistics, in 2016 there were roughly 150,000 foreign children aged 6 to 17 living in Japan. Of them, more than 80,000 attended public schools here. It remained unclear, though, where most of the remaining students were studying, even if those enrolled at private schools were factored in. There are known cases of foreign students being shunned by elementary and junior high schools due to their poor Japanese language ability. The Multicultural Center Tokyo received 243 consultations about places of learning for foreign children in fiscal 2017, almost double the figure of five years ago.

Multicultural Center Tokyo representative Noriko Hazeki, 66, told the Mainichi Shimbun, «Japanese (as a second) language education at schools in this country is insufficient. The government should look into the realities of the situation and improve things swiftly.»

Ruhina Maherpour, a 21-year-old Iranian citizen studying at Nihon University, was born and raised in Japan due to her father’s job. However, her Japanese was not sufficient to move on in her education here despite understanding the language. And so she went through the language courses at Tabunka Free School, finishing them in academic 2012.

Maherpour then started evening classes at a Tokyo metropolitan high school while studying at a school at the Iranian Embassy in Japan. She quit the metro school after a year after she found going to both too burdensome, but this made her preparations for university entrance exams even harder.

Although she sought to take admission exams for Japanese universities with special quotas for foreign students, an education ministry official told her that the quota was only for students based overseas. Among the 30 or so schools she contacted, only five allowed her to sit for their exam. One of them was for Nihon University, where Maherpour now studies sociology while engaging in activities to introduce Iranian culture here in Japan.

«I get the sense that Japanese people welcome foreign tourists but not residents. I want to do whatever I can to make it easier for people from abroad to live here,» she said.

There are now growing calls for creating places and opportunities for foreign residents here to improve their Japanese skills to a sufficient level. Education minister Masahiko Shibayama told a press conference on Nov. 13, «We will support efforts across the country and introduce new skills certifications for Japanese language teachers.»

According to a 2017 Agency for Cultural Affairs study, about 60 percent of the roughly 40,000 Japanese language teachers in the country are volunteers. While at least 415 local governments and education boards provide Japanese language education to non-native speakers, even lessons given by public institutions depend heavily on volunteer instructors.

Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward, where foreign residents account for about 12 percent of the 346,000 inhabitants, provides Japanese language classes for foreigners at 10 locations. The classes are taught by roughly 70 volunteers registered with the ward after going through 70 hours of training. As the fees for the Japanese lessons are just 2,000 yen for a weekly, four-month course, some of the classes have long waiting lists.

«There are limits to what municipal governments can do. In order to improve Japanese language education, support from the central and prefectural governments is imperative,» said a ward official in charge.

A government-sponsored bill to revise immigration law to accept more foreign workers into Japan is being debated in the current extraordinary Diet session. If it passes, the government envisages allowing up to 340,000 foreigners to work in the country over a five-year period beginning next spring. However, questions are being raised over whether the government has plans to integrate these newcomers as full-fledged members of local communities, instead of just treating them as a boost to the country’s workforce.

To answer that question, the government needs to consider not only Japanese language education but also social security programs for foreign workers. For example, a foreign worker who paid pension premiums for more than three years cannot get the money refunded. Policy holders are also required to stay on the program for at least 10 years to be eligible for future pension benefits.

If their home countries have a social security agreement with Japan, foreign workers do not have to make duplicate payments here and back home. However, there were only accords with 18 countries as of August this year, including just three Asian countries: South Korea, India, and the Philippines.

There are also concerns that medical costs could increase if more foreigners start working in Japan. Public health insurance policies held by company employees cover the medical bills of dependents within three degrees of kinship — even, under certain conditions, if they live abroad. However, the health ministry is planning to submit a bill to revise the Health Insurance Act to next year’s regular Diet session to limit coverage to those living in Japan.

Source of the notice: https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20181124/p2a/00m/0na/012000c

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Queering sex education in schools would benefit all pupils

By: Kennedy Walker. 

All power to the pupil activists drawing attention to the lack of information about LGBT issues in sex education in England

All I remember from my relationship and sex education in school is phallic objects, condoms and everyone being terrified of pregnancy. Looking back it’s clear how disjointed and inadequate this was at a time when I was struggling with the complexity of being a black, queer, working-class boy navigating life inside and outside school.

If I had been given information about the kind of relationships I would later come to be in and given the space to think critically about my gender it would have made my road to self-acceptance a less bumpy one. It was also a missed opportunity to address toxic elements of masculinity such as suppressing emotion or objectifying women. Modernising the sex and education curriculum wouldn’t just make LGBT+ people safer, but would benefit the wellbeing of all students.

So when I found out that young south Londoners had put this particular new year’s resolution to the Department for Education, I was elated. Students put banners on every secondary school in Lambeth, demanding that relationship and sex education (RSE) in schools be inclusive of LGBT+ relationships and for it to examine gender and stereotypes. When you consider that inclusive RSE isn’t mandatory in schools in England, hasn’t been updated for well over a decade and almost half of young people no longer identify as exclusively heterosexual, it’s clear it’s time for a much-needed overhaul.

The demand is there. According to a report published by the Terrence Higgins Trust looking at responses from 900 young people aged between 16 and 25, 97% of them thought RSE should be LGBT+ inclusive, but the vast majority (95%) had not been taught about LGBT+ sex and relationships.

This isn’t the only front the current RSE is failing on: 75% of young people were not taught about consent and 50% of them rated their RSE as “poor” or “terrible” with only 10% rating it as “good”. In this context, the shocking 22% rise in cases of gonorrhea between 2016 and 2017 is sadly unsurprising.

I spoke to one of the students responsible for this action; they are 17 years old and asked to remain anonymous. When asked why they felt this action was necessary they said: “Being LGBT+ in school can be an isolating experience … I have experienced ignorant remarks from students and teachers alike. We wanted to do this visual action to draw attention to what feels like a hidden issue, but the impact of which I and many like myself feel on a day to day basis.”

Only 13% of LGBT+ young people have learned about healthy same-sex relationships. Those who do receive inclusive education are less likely to experience bullying and more likely to report feeling safe, welcome and happy according to Ruth Hunt, chief executive of the LGBT+ equality charity Stonewall.

The feeling that this is a “hidden issue” comes as no surprise given the long history of active exclusion of LGBT+ people and their experiences from public life. In 1988, the Thatcher government introduced section 28 which stopped local authorities from “promoting” homosexuality in schools. It took 15 years for this piece of legislation to be overturned, but many teachers still don’t know if they are legally able to openly discuss LGBT+ topics, and many feel that they lack the expertise to do so.

The reason inclusive RSE isn’t mandatory is because sex education as we know it today was introduced by a Labour government in 2000, but section 28 (the law that banned “promoting” homosexuality) wasn’t overturned until 2003. It is humiliatingly out of date. An inclusive RSE curriculum could mean LGBT+ identities could be celebrated in a place they were once erased and demonised.

Thanks to campaigning organisations such as the Terrance Higgins Trust, the government has committed to making RSE lessons compulsory in all secondary schools in England and relationship education compulsory in primary schools. This was meant to be rolled out in 2019, but has now been pushed back to 2020. Whether this will cover LGBT+ relationships and gender adequately remains to be seen, as the finalised guidance that will be used by schools to deliver the RSE has yet to be published.

The rollout can’t come soon enough. LGBT+ people are more likely to experience poor mental health in the form of depression, suicidal thoughts, self-harm and substance misuse due to the pervasive discrimination, isolation and homophobia they experience. This shake-up of RSE could be an important step towards changing this.

Source of the article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/24/queering-sex-education-lgbt-pupil-england

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We would like all practitioners who are involved in delivering career guidance to feel that social justice is a key value that underpins their work

By Tristam Hooley.

 

Tristam Hooley es catedrático de la University of Derby (Reino Unido) especializado en orientación. También es director de investigación de The Careers & Enterprise Company y cuenta con una larga trayectoria como investigador y autor de diversos libros sobre orientación profesional. Es coautor y editor del libro «Career Guidance for Social Justice», en el que también han colaborado los investigadores Rie Thomsen y Ronald G. Sultana, expertos en el tema. En los últimos años, Hooley, Thomsen y Sultana han trabajado conjuntamente para proponer políticas sobre orientación profesional que puedan convertir en una fuerza positiva para cambiar la sociedad.

Esta entrevista se ha realizado en inglés y se ha respetado su idioma original. Si quieres traducirla puede utilizar herramientas web como ésta.

How can career guidance help citizens to conceive their own life and professional project as part of a whole, including the benefit of the whole society?

Career guidance is about helping people to think about their futures. Of course, working life is an important part of this, but it isn’t everything. When we make choices about our careers, we are making choices that will have implications for our work, our learning, our families and our communities. Career guidance should be about helping people to think about these different opportunities and making choices about what to do about them.

In the past, career guidance has often been accused of being very individualistic and encouraging people to think about themselves. But there is no reason why this must be the case. People live and thrive in communities, careers are pursued alongside others in organisations and all our happiness is dependent on us living in well-functioning societies. It isn’t possible to extract the individual from society, so when we are talking about career, we are really talking about how we can all live together in society whilst we try and get what we individually aspire to. Career guidance must help people to try and navigate these issues.

What specific changes should be applied in academic and career guidance to develop interventions that contribute to social justice?

We would like all practitioners who are involved in delivering career guidance to feel that social justice is a key value that underpins their work. To help people to think about what this means in practice we have proposed five signposts that can help to take people towards socially just forms of practice.

Firstly, we argue that career guidance needs to build individuals’ critical consciousness and encourage them to think deeply about the world that they live in and how it works.
Secondly, we argue that we should be helping our students and clients to name oppression where they see it. Next, we would like to help people to problematise the norms, assumptions and power relations that they experience while they are building their careers. This is about helping people to see that the way that things are today, is not the way that they always need to be.

Fourthly, we want to help people by building solidarity and collective action. Linking people to other who have similar issues and problems to them will employer them and open opportunities that will help them to develop their career. Finally, we must work at a range of levels from the individual to the global. This means that we need to simultaneously be helping people to find a job when they have been made redundant, but also helping them to organize politically to challenge the causes of unemployment.

«When we make choices about our careers, we are making choices that will have implications for our work, our learning, our families and our communities».

Which factors generate social disparities in the educational and professional trajectory of people?

There is a lot of research that investigates how various aspects of your identity, position in society and background will impact on your chance of career success. Exactly what these are will vary from society to society, but factors like wealth, educational level, gender, race and religion are often used to structure power and access to opportunities. In most cases these issues are magnified where people have more than one characteristic (inter-sectionality). How your career develops is not just an outcome of your personality, but of how other people treat you and how the society in which you live is structure. This point makes the moral case for a lot of the social justice work that we are doing.

What good practices related to career guidance do you know that contribute to social justice?

I’ve already talked about our ‘five signposts to emancipatory career guidance’. We hope that this can act as a framework for the development of more socially just practices. But we’ve built these signposts up through talking to people about practices that they’ve been undertaking in various countries across the world. Sometimes this could be as simple as asking different questions in a careers interview, e.g. ‘who can help you?’ and ‘is there anyone you could work with on this?’ In other cases, it might be about designing career education in different ways that encourage critical reflection on the world, e.g. changing a module about the labour market to include material about inequality, precarity and the role of trade unions. What is likely to make sense will vary in different contexts, but it is always likely to involve a mixture of education, advice, empowerment and advocacy.

What changes in educational policies should be made to facilitate equal opportunities and achieve greater social justice?

Again, this is likely to vary depending on your context. We would like to see more policies that support equality of access to education, but also which mitigate income disparities and provide opportunities for everyone to access decent work and the good life. Education policy has an important role to play in this, but it can’t do it alone. So, you need good joined up policy making between education, employment, social support, immigration and so on. This is challenging for governments, but it is also important as public policy provides a critically important infrastructure for individual’s careers.

Please, suggest three practical tips you would give to guidance professionals to direct their interventions towards social justice

  1. When you are listening to the stories that people tell you, help them to think about their context and to understand that their story is part of a bigger story about organisations, politics and the economy.
  2. Encourage people to be optimistic and to feel that there is always something that they can do to change the situation that they are in. But, be careful not to make them feel that if things don’t work out it is their fault.
  3. Help people to find a way to link up with others. Networks and communities are a huge resource for people’s career development.

Source of the review: https://www.educaweb.com/noticia/2018/12/04/social-justice-is-key-value-that-underpins-their-work-18625/

 

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Special educational needs ‘It’s hard to watch your child struggle. All you can do is chase people’

By: Michael Savage.

As council budgets are slashed, desperate parents speak about their exhausting battle in the courts to protect the forgotten victims – their children

As a former bouncer working in north London nightclubs, John Roden thought he knew a thing or two about stressful situations. But taking on the care of his five-year-old granddaughter Hope brought his greatest confrontation. Hope is disabled, and her rare condition means she cannot walk unaided and communicates using a form of sign language.

“Caring for Hope is stressful at the best of times,” says Roden, one of a group of carers to launch a legal challenge heard in court last month against proposed cuts to special educational needs funding in Hackney, east London. “Hope came to me when I was 57. I’m 62 this year. All this is heaping a lot more pressure on us. It grinds you down. There’s so much going through my head that I’ve been forgetting simple things. You spread yourself thin and something has to give. But we can do it.”

When the council announced proposals that could cut spending by more than £300,000 over the next academic year, Roden was among those who agreed to take on the fight. Like many parents looking after a child with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), Roden describes an exhausting fight to secure the best support.

Fellow Hackney campaigner Dana Thompson’s daughter, Sade, 16, has narcolepsy and cataplexy, conditions that can cause her to fall asleep suddenly, or collapse. Thompson’s application for support was rejected four times before she received help – a battle that lasted 10 years.

“I couldn’t live with myself knowing I didn’t try one last time,” she says. “Unfortunately, many children have fallen through the net. That affects mental and physical health. With Sade, it has affected her.”

As councils nationwide face budget pressures that threaten them with bankruptcy, some are having to consider cuts to SEND funding that they would never have contemplated just a few years ago. Yet their desperation to balance the books has run up against the desperation of parents determined to secure support for their children. The clash is now being played out in court actions across England.

Alicia McColl is among the parents taking action against Surrey county council’s proposal for a £21m cut in its SEND budget. She has been battling for the right support for her 14-year-old son Kian, who has autism, hypermobility, dyspraxia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. After years of campaigning, she is aware of the toll on her family. “All my money and inheritance went on my son’s education – on the battle,” she says. “The people who have missed out the most are my other two children. I try to make up for it now, but my eldest son is an adult and he missed out on a lot of my time. The impact is massive.”

Hopes have been raised by the success of a case in Bristol in the summer, in which a judge ruled that the council had unlawfully cut its SEND budget by £5m. Other campaigns are being drawn up in areas including Portsmouth, Gloucestershire and Sussex.

Hackney councillor Chris Kennedy insists everyone is “on the same side”, but adds that the court case “doesn’t address the fundamental issues that have led to councils up and down the country facing bankruptcy in their efforts to fund one of the most important services they provide”. Surrey county council said it was facing “huge financial pressure” and that it was wrong to describe the £21m saving as a cut “because we haven’t made or even proposed cuts to services”.

So what is causing the system to creak? The trouble, according to experts and council insiders, is that funding cuts have combined with recent education reforms to create a system loaded against councils – forcing them into cuts and legal battles with parents.

They point to 2014 changes designed to give “greater control and choice” to parents, which raised expectations about the support available and increased the legal responsibilities of councils. However, the new system was not matched with the necessary funding. With schools also under pressure to keep costs down and improve results, some are finding ways of removing SEND pupils from their rolls, or not accepting them in the first place.

That often leads to even higher costs for councils. Parents realised that some kind of national action was needed. A legal case has been launched against the government, with campaigners arguing that it is simply not providing sufficient funding. Among the parents in the group is Lorraine Heugh, who has faced cuts in funding for the care given to her son Nico, 15, who has autism and anxiety. “We had to go down the legal road and in the end they did supply the funding,” she says. “It didn’t stop there. The following September we had the same problem again. Now we’re in a situation where they have given a little bit of funding, but cut by half.

“The people who get forgotten are the children. For children like my son, when their needs are not met at school, it has a knock-on impact on them. It leads to children having breakdowns – why would you allow a child to go through that?”

Kirsty McFinnigan, from North Yorkshire, got involved through social media. After fighting for resources for her son Benedict, 14, she joined the legal battle out of “sheer and utter desperation”. “There’s too many people in this position,” she says. “My son is 14. I’m going to ultimately have to answer to him about why he didn’t get an education, so at least I can say I did everything I could.”

For Mary Riddell, who has fought her council in Birmingham over the support given to her nine-year-old daughter Dakota, it is simply about trying to be heard.

“We’ve had to fight every step of the way,” she says. “It is hard to watch your child struggle and all you can do is chase the people who are meant to be helping you – and knowing their hands are tied.

“I’m not holding out any hopes that they will instantly say, ‘here’s lots and lots of money’. But I would like them to take notice and understand what kind of effect these cuts are having.”

Source of the article: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/nov/10/its-hard-to-watch-your-child-struggle-all-you-can-do-is-chase-people

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Iran: Student Day commemorated across Iran by students, teachers

Asia/ Iran/ 12.12.2018/ Source: women.ncr-iran.org.

Iranian students held gatherings in Tehran, TabrizSemnanBabol, and other cities across the country on Saturday, December 8, 2018, to honor and observe the Student Day in Iran.

young women of Tehran University observe the Student Day

In Tehran, students of Tehran University, held a gathering and sit-in by the entrance gates of the university to observe the Student Day. When the State Security Force intended to disperse the participants,girl students stood up to them. One of the girl students called on other students to come to their aid.

On the same day, students of the Teachers’ Training University in Tehran also held a gathering on the occasion of the Student Day.

Students of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the Noshirvani University of Babol, Mazandaran Province in northern Iran, held a gathering on their campus while holding pictures of the students killed on December 7, 1953. They called for the release of imprisoned teachers and students.

Students of the University of Technology No. 1 in Tabriz, East Azerbaijan Province, northwestern Iran, also commemorated the Student Day by holding a gathering on Saturday and lining up their food trays on the floor to protest the low quality of food.

In Semnan, students of the School of Engineering and Computer held a free speech forum to commemorate the Student Day, and a number of the students made speeches. Two days earlier, Thursday, December 6, 2018, when the mullahs’ president, Hassan Rouhani, visited the University of Semnan, students shouted at him and asked, «What is your answer to high prices and inflation?”

In Kermanshah, western Iran, a group of teachers held a picket on the occasion of the Student Day and congratulated all Iranian students. They called for the release of imprisoned teachers and workers.

Students of the Medical Sciences University of Tabriz, held a sit-in outside the office of the university’s president on Thursday, December 6, 2018, to protest insufficient legal supervision of the university’s conducts.

On the same day, employees of the Hospital of Karaj held their 34th round of protests to demand their unpaid wages long overdue.

On December 6 and 7, 2018, a woman teacher from Isfahan and Ms. Adineh Baigi -wife of the imprisoned teacher activist Mahmoud Beheshti- paid visits to Hamid Rahmati, a teacher, who has been on hunger strike since December 1. He is sitting in the court yard of the Department of Education in Shahreza, Isfahan Province, demanding freedom of imprisoned teachers.

On Thursday, December 6, 2018, some 150 of the staff and employees of the Parseh Clinic in Kermanshah staged a protest against sealing off of the clinic. A large number of women participated in and led this protests. They were demanding that the Prosecutor of Kermanshah stop this inhuman measure as a result of which a large number of people lose their jobs.

defrauded clients of the IRGC-backed Caspian Credit Institute held a gathering outside the mullahs’ parliament in Tehran on Thursday, December 6. A similar protest gathering ws held in Kerman in front of one of the branches of the institute.

Also, on Thursday night, a group of political and civil activists visited the mother of Dr. Farhad Maysami, political prisoner who has been detained for his protest against the mandatory veil.

Source of the notice: https://women.ncr-iran.org/iran-women-news/5624-student-day-commemorated-across-iran-by-students-teachers

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France detains 32 students protesting education reform

Europa/ Francia/ 12.11.2018/ Source: www.aa.com.tr.

Protests erupt after Macron administration unveils plans to change education system

French police detained 32 students Wednesday who were taking part in protests against government plans to overhaul the country’s approach to education.

Students in a number of cities have been protesting against President Emmanuel Macron’s educational policies. The major reforms by his administration include changes to the Baccalaureate Examination, which students must pass to be eligible to enter university.

Six students were detained in a demonstration in Stalingrad Square in Bordeaux after they damaged vehicles and threw projectiles at police.

In southern Toulouse, another 13 students were detained for harming the environment and attacking police.

Tensions were also high between the police and students in the Henin-Beaumont commune, where students set fire to a large number of waste bins in front of a high school. Thirteen students were detained in demonstrations.

Around 100 high schools throughout the country were blockaded Monday by students protesting the education reform, with lessons at the schools fully or partially disrupted.

Source of the notice: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/france-detains-32-students-protesting-education-reform/1330753

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