Teachers at the Gambetta-Carnot school in Arras in northern France had twice reported Mohammed Mogouchkov to authorities when he was a student there. But he remained at the school and graduated, and on 13 October he stabbed to death a teacher, claiming allegiance to the Islamic State armed group. The Education Minister has since called for radicalised students like him to be removed from schools.
After the commemorations at schools across France on 16 October to honour Dominique Bernard, who was murdered in Arras, and Samuel Paty who was beheaded in a terrorist attack in front of his school three years earlier, middle and high school directors have reported about “500 disruptions and protests”, according to Education Minister Gabriel Attal.
He said 183 students would not be returning to school on 6 November after the two-week Toussaint holiday break, until disciplinary committees could be convened to decide if they can could back.
These are students who threatened teachers or who advocated or glorified terrorism, the minister said on BFM television last weekend.
Removing radicalised students
Attal earlier had said that he would be looking at how to remove radicalised students from schools completely, to make schools “sanctuaries” where teachers and students do not feel threatened.
He will work with the Interior and Justice ministers to come up with “measures that will allow us to remove them from our schools”, he told France 2 television.
Interior Minister Gerarld Darmanin had said more than 1,000 minors are on the ministry’s radar for “Islamism”.
Some are under surveillance because family members are actively radicalised, but others have been tracked looking at Islamic state propaganda online.
Many of these young people are already in detention, or already in special judicial facilities, Darmanin said, but some are still in school.
How to get them out?
Attal evoked specialised facilities for these students, but teachers and education unions have raised questions, especially about how to identify them in the first place.
School directors are provided with a leaflet on preventing radicalisation, which warns that each case is unique, and that signs must not be taken in isolation.
Among the signs to look out for are “a sudden and excessive interest in religion or an ideology”, a break with friends or family or a change in dress or food habits.
Some say the current system that exists to report concerns should be improved before new, more drastic measures are implemented.
“Today, staff often do not know that they can report someone and they do not know how to do it,” said the Unsa Education union in a statement after Attal’s announcement.
Some teachers know they can report, but they “self-censor”, because they do not know what will become of the student afterwards.
“Teachers send in reports like what happened in Arras, but nothing happens,” the national secretary of the SE-Unsa teacher’s union, Jérôme Fournier told BFM television.
“That’s where we should first focus on.”
Special facilities
France has Centres educatifs fermés, or closed education centres – residential facilities where minors are placed under supervision, as an alternative to prison, until they are 16 years old.
While the minors do receive instruction at these facilities, they are not schools and are administered by the Justice Ministry.
If radicalised students are to be placed in such facilities, legal frameworks would have to change, because radicalisation in and of itself, does not have a legal definition, and is not considered a crime.
“We are not judges,” the Unsa Education union said, warning that whatever is put in place should be rooted in education, and needs to “avoid reinforcing radicalisation” of already fragile students, and to find ways to not “shut them up definitively in their radicalisation”.
