Collectif #EcolePourTous (or the Collective #SchoolForEveryone) brings together 100 young people living in extreme precarity across France to fight against the systematic exclusion and discrimination of the French educational system. Their goal? To ensure that the French state guarantees equal access to education to those who face grinding financial hardship and exclusion because of their nationality or ethnicity. And they want themselves – the people who experience violations of this fundamental right to education – to be at the centre of the fight.
There’s one core problem with the French educational system: the state’s republican ideal of “universalism”, which in practice turns a blind eye on inequality through race or ethnicity. This results in systemic socio-spatial segregation, tracking biases, and everyday aggressions which disproportionately affect marginalised and lower-income students more. The exclusion and racism at school that this results in is the raison dêtre of #EcolePourTous: they want to make the educational system not only accessible but also stable and safe for the hundreds of thousands of children and young adults who face dire forms of prejudice on a day-to-day basis.
To achieve this, they have developed an autonomous and innovative movement based on popular, community organising. One of its fundamental principles is that there can be no justice without power. So this crew works to build power from below by conducting trainings and anti-racism workshops, developing public actions in which affected people are not only implementing but designing the campaigns, pushing for a seat at the table with those who decide, and bringing the community together to collectivise their struggles and weather the storm.
In the long term, they aim to affect legislative changes that can lead to more humane institutional practices regarding the schooling of children in highly precarious situations, from nursery or elementary school to university.Yet for this to happen, there needs to be a change in perception of the minorities to which #EcolePourTous belongs: to move from being objects of hatred or pity to subjects of political action and public presence. This would involve a lot of them, mobilising and organising for their own emancipatory struggle – a task of utter importance today when the far right is consolidating in France and recruiting its base in working class, disadvantaged schools.
The Guerrilla Redistribution
With our funding, #EcolePourTous wants to keep doing what they do best: give agency to marginalized youth to organize and win changes against educational injustice in France. Particularly, they will use the funds for national meetings and strategic campaigns: the meetings being crucial moments of attunement between organising members, where needs-based trainings and strategic developments of their work take stock, and the public campaigns being direct actions with clear, directional demands that would work towards the material betterment of marginalized youth in France. To give you a taste of their demands, they are asking for changes like the introduction of an anti-racist training for pupils and professionals at schools, the introduction of school mediators to support children deprived of schooling, or a “school truce” where no evictions would happen during the school year.
While the beginning of 2025 focused on recruiting new members and reflecting on the new demands of the #EcolePourTous Collective, the end of 2025 and 2026 is devoted to implementing the campaign and soliciting meetings with those in power. They aspire to have at least 10 “useful” meetings with decision-makers, where our demands will be taken into account and concrete follow-up actions will be agreed upon. Considering change is a long term pursuit, their aim is that at least one of their six demands is met through a public decision (decree, law, specific budget allocation decision, etc.).
