‘We have a tendency in France to think you need a single solution for everyone.’
The most startling feature of Sandy Sablon’s classroom at the Oran-Constantine primary school, on the outskirts of Calais, is the collection of old tennis balls that she has wedged onto the legs of all the little chairs. At the start of the school year, the teacher spent a weekend gashing and fitting the lime-green balls in order to cut down noise. This became a problem when she introduced new teaching methods that broke with established French pedagogy. Out went desks in rows. Instead, she grouped children of a similar level of achievement around shared tables, which meant pupils got up and moved about much more. ‘When we just did dictation,’ she tells me with a laugh when I visit, ‘there wasn’t any noise to worry about.’
All the strains of post-industrial France crowd into Fort Nieulay, the Calais neighbourhood surrounding the Oran-Constantine school. Red-brick terraced houses, built for the families of dockers and industrial workers in the 1950s, jut up against rain-streaked tower blocks. On the estate, the Friterie-Snack Bar is open for chips, but other shop fronts are boarded up. The children’s swings are broken. This is not ethnic disadvantage, but France’s ‘misère blanche’, or white destitution, an educationalist says: the hidden side of French poverty. Sophie Paque, the primary school’s energetic head teacher, tells me that a staggering 89 per cent of her 330 pupils live below the poverty line. Obesity is a growing concern. There are cases of scabies, a disease spread by mites that fester in old bedding. ‘We give them a structure they don’t have at home,’ she says.1 Outside a garage on the local housing estate, three adults in ill-fitting tracksuits sit on plastic chairs, watching, or maybe waiting. Youth unemployment in Calais is over 45 per cent, twice the national average. In Fort Nieulay it touches 67 per cent.
In the autumn of 2017, however, Oran-Constantine, like 2,500 classes in other priority schools nationwide, became the beneficiary of Macron’s promise to halve class sizes to 12 pupils for five- and six-year-olds. The new policy caused a certain amount of chaos elsewhere, as head teachers tried to find space for the extra classes. But Oran-Constantine was ready, and keen. It had already been part of a pilot experiment launched in 2011, based on smaller class sizes, a rigorous new scheme to teach reading, and more personalized learning. This experiment was put in place under Jean-Michel Blanquer, who went on to become Macron’s education minister. Using voice-recognition software on tablet computers, the project allowed faster learners, wearing little headsets, to practise pronouncing sounds in the corner of the classroom, thus freeing up their teacher to help weaker classmates. Smaller class sizes enabled teachers to spend more time with individual pupils. The pilot also broke with the country’s tradition that put the maîtresse, or teacher, at the blackboard and the children in rows. ‘French teachers tend to advance like steamrollers: straight ahead at the same speed,’ Christophe Gomes, from Agir pour l’Ecole, the partly privately financed association that ran the government-backed pilot scheme, tells me. At Oran-Constantine, he says, ‘pupils set the pace’. Some teachers feared at first that technology was threatening their jobs. In fact, it freed them up to do their jobs better. One year into the experiment, the number of pupils with reading difficulties at the 11 schools in Calais that took part had halved. Gomes is visibly proud of what they have all achieved: ‘It’s a little revolution.’2
The Calais experiment feeds directly into the plans that Blanquer and Macron have drawn up to improve education in France. By international standards, these may seem uncontroversial and no more innovative than those introduced long ago in countries such as Finland or Singapore. Yet in France they challenge central educational tenets, which will have to be confronted if the country is to lift school standards. For many years, French education has been subject to what might be called ‘the tyranny of normal’. Ever since compulsory, free, secular primary education was introduced in the 1880s, uniform schooling countrywide has been part of the French way of doing things. The nineteenth-century instituteur, or schoolteacher, was regarded as a sort of missionary figure, a guarantor of republican equality and norms. Teachers were trained in écoles normales. The Ecole Normale Supérieure, today one of the most prestigious and selective French higher-education institutions, was established in 1795 to train the young republic’s educators. To this day, the mighty Ministry of Education in Paris sets standardized curriculums and timetables for state schools across the country. All 11-year-olds, for example, spend exactly four and a half hours on maths a week. Experimentation is frequently regarded as suspect. ‘Classes are not laboratories’, noted a report by the conservative education inspectorate a few years ago, ‘and pupils are not guinea pigs.’
Yet ‘in reality our standardizing system is unequal,’ the professorial Blanquer told me, when we sat down on teak chairs in the shaded garden of the ministry shortly after he took over the job.3 In cities around the world, from New York to Hong Kong, French lycées are regarded as places of excellence, and a gold standard for uniform global education. The centralized, top-down approach means that the French elite can move their children around the world knowing that all schools will be teaching seventeenth-century French tragedy and comedy to pupils in their fifth year of secondary school. Yet, at home, France is failing its young. By the age of 15, some 40 per cent of French pupils from poorer backgrounds are ‘in difficulty’, a figure six percentage points above the OECD average.
French schools, with their demanding academic content and testing, do well by the brightest children, who end up winning places in the fiercely selective grandes écoles, but they often fail those at the bottom. Performance in international maths tests fell significantly between 2003 and 2012, and has stagnated at around the average, despite public spending on education matching that elsewhere. In a 2016 international study of reading, known as PIRLS, French pupils lagged in 34th position, behind schoolchildren in Spain, Portugal and Italy. Their level had dropped by 14 points since 2001. France is an ‘outlier’, said Eric Charbonnier, an OECD education specialist, because in contrast to most countries, inequality in education has actually increased over the past decade. Those who fail to learn to read in the first year of primary school often never make up the learning gap later. Fully 20 per cent of children leave primary school without being able to read or write properly. Too often, pupils who drop out of secondary school without any qualifications are the ones who struggled in primary school. When the French Armed Forces tested all high-school leavers in 2016, as it does every year when teenagers turn up at their local military base for the country’s compulsory ‘defence and citizenship’ day, it found that one in ten still had difficulty reading.
A technocrat, with a quiet passion for education and a curiously extensive knowledge of Latin America, Blanquer had previously worked for years within the education establishment, as head of the Créteil académie, or local education authority, running various pilot experiments. Formerly also director of ESSEC, one of the country’s top business schools, he helped Emmanuel Macron draw up his education manifesto during the campaign. They decided to put reform of primary education at the centre of their policy to combat school failure and improve life chances. Along with smaller primary classes, Blanquer plans to encourage a more rigorous way to teach reading, with more regular nationwide tests. As education policy goes, none of this is revolutionary. But for France even halving class sizes felt like a radical shift. The minister plans to extend the programme to the second year of primary for the school year starting in September 2018.
Smaller class sizes is just the start. Unusually for a French policymaker, Blanquer has studied what works abroad, and how such lessons might be applied in France. He has sought out his counterpart in Singapore, and has praised methods used in Finland. ‘Egalitarianism,’ he told me, taking on a creed shared by much of the teaching profession, ‘is the real enemy of public service.’ Blanquer is keen, rather, on autonomy and experimentation, which put the educational establishment on edge. He told primary schools, which had been ordered by the government to introduce classes on Wednesdays, traditionally a day off, that they could return to a four-day week if they preferred. Or not: it was up to them. Secondary schools were allowed to bring back bilingual classes, along with ancient Greek and Latin, which had been cut back as too elitist. Blanquer was nicknamed ‘Ctrl Z’ for deleting what had come before. The idea that schools might be free to decide such matters was disconcerting for a profession that had long been run along almost military lines. An army of 880,000 teachers is centrally deployed to French schools across the country. Head teachers have no say in staffing. In the course of their careers, teachers acquire points that enable them to request reassignment. Newly qualified ones without such points are sent to the toughest schools, and turnover in such places is depressingly high.
During his campaign Macron promised to give schools more autonomy over teaching methods, timetabling and recruitment, and to stop newly qualified teachers from being sent to the toughest schools. At the Oran-Constantine primary school in Calais, Sophie Paque, the dynamic head teacher, calls the system a ‘straitjacket’. She has 48 members of staff in her school, and yet none report to her. Paque can neither recruit them directly, nor evaluate them, and certainly not get rid of them. Instead, teachers apply for jobs via a vast centralized and computerized deployment system, known as I-Prof. ‘Sometimes teachers leave and they don’t tell me,’ Paque tells me. She had no institutional authority to impose the pilot teaching experiment at Oran-Constantine, and had to use her impressive powers of persuasion to convince sceptical teachers. Her pupils now leave primary school with a reading level that is within the national average, an astonishing result for a school in this sort of socio-economic catchment area. Not all French head teachers, however, are like Paque, and the existing rigid system gives even the ones who are limited scope for transforming a school. ‘Head teachers do not have the solid means to lead a team, although they are the only ones in a position to do so,’ noted a report by the Cour des Comptes, the public auditor, in 2017.
If France is to introduce greater freedom for schools to experiment, and adapt an ossified system for the innovation age, this will require quite a change in mindset. It will doubtless also at some point provoke a battle with the country’s teaching profession. Blanquer’s plan to redesign the baccalauréat, the final school-leaving exam, for those graduating from secondary school in 2021 makes for explosive reading in a French context. Currently made up of around 12 final exams, the bac will become more modular, centred on a smaller core of four subjects (of which philosophy, naturally, remains compulsory), with more specialism, and a big dose (40 per cent) of continuous assessment. The preliminary recommendations of the report into designing the new bac make for uncomfortable reading for those used to the traditional ministry-driven command structure. ‘A system piloted from the centre never diversifies, it turns into an everlasting hierarchy,’ it states.4 The document goes on to declare: ‘It makes sense to let lycées move at their own rhythm and according to their own ideas ... It seems to us neither legitimate nor appropriate to make precise suggestions about either the number of hours for each subject or the organization of semesters or the exact choice of subjects offered.’ By French standards, this was ground-breaking.
Not surprisingly perhaps, Blanquer was accused of being reactionary and ideological. The head of curricula at the Education Ministry resigned in protest, even before the reforms were unveiled. Teaching unions, fearing a creeping increase in the hours they would be expected to spend in the classroom and worried that continuous assessment would aggravate inequalities between schools, decided to go on strike. Old habits, backed by strong lobbies, will be hard to shift. Only 20 per cent of French teachers currently adjust their methods to individual pupil ability, according to the OECD, compared with over 65 per cent of those in Norway; and far fewer work in teams. Such weaknesses will need to be fixed if Blanquer is really to make French timetables less rigid, classes less dull, teachers more involved, head teachers more autonomous, classrooms more connected, and the curriculum more adapted to the coming digital disruption.
The government may also try to make school a less crushing experience. Before he became a minister, Blanquer published a book about reforming French education, deploring the lack of confidence that his country’s schools generate.5 Between the extreme rigour of some Asian teaching systems, and the pupil-centred approach of American and Northern European schools, France, he suggested, could offer a middle way: ‘between tradition and modernity, fulfilment and rigour, effort and liberty’. At the start of the first school year on his watch, Blanquer called his project that of building ‘a school of confidence’. French tradition is for teachers to grade harshly, and praise with extreme moderation. For a dictée, a piece of dictation read out by the teacher to test pupils’ written French, points are taken off for each mistake, so a child can end up with zero. This approach prompts excessive anxiety. No less than 75 per cent of French pupils worry that they will get bad grades in maths tests, according to an OECD study, close to the level reported by stressed-out South Korean schoolchildren (78 per cent). A government-commissioned report on a small pilot experiment in some French secondary schools, where ruthless grading had been shelved in favour of a more encouraging system, noted with some surprise that weaker pupils were absent from school less often, more confident in the classroom, and ‘less stressed when faced with failure’.
The government seems to have taken on some of these weaknesses. ‘Pleasure in learning is a condition for pupils’ success,’ Blanquer stated shortly after taking office, as if unveiling a fresh discovery. ‘To create a favourable environment, schools must offer a benevolent framework and inspire pupils’ confidence.’6 The reforms will be a heroic task, and require deft handling of sceptical teaching unions, as well as some wary parents. However, if Blanquer gets it right, France might be able to find a new, more productive balance, one that keeps the best of Cartesian rigour and cultural breadth – where else can a physicist quote Rousseau and Voltaire? – while injecting a much-needed dose of creative thinking, autonomy and even fun.
At the other end of the education ladder, a hint of how creative autonomously run French education can be when left to itself can be found inside a boxy building on the inner edge of an unfashionable stretch of northern Paris. This is 42, a ‘coding school’ in which students learn advanced computer programming. It is named after the number that is the ‘answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything’, according to Douglas Adams’s science-fiction classic, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The entrance hall at 42 is all distressed concrete and exposed piping. There is a skateboard rack, and a painting of a man urinating against a graffiti-sprayed wall.
The school is everything that traditional French higher education is not. It is entirely privately financed by Xavier Niel, the tech entrepreneur, but free to pupils. The school holds no classes, has no teachers, fixed terms or timetables, and does not issue formal diplomas. All learning is done through tasks on screen, at students’ own pace. ‘Graduates’ are often snapped up by employers before they finish. There are no lectures, and the building is open round the clock. The school is hyper-selective and has a dropout rate of 5 per cent. When it opened in 2013, Le Monde newspaper described it politely as ‘strange’. ‘What’s difficult to understand is that we’re not about the transmission of knowledge,’ Nicolas Sadirac, the hirsute director in a baggy T-shirt tells me. ‘We are co-inventing computer science. The robot age isn’t about repeating tasks, but innovation. We need individuals who create, not ones who replicate.’7 He likes to call computing a ‘creative industry’, and 42 an art school.
On a spring weekday morning when I drop in on 42, I find Guillaume Aly, dressed in shorts and trainers, swiping his security badge at the entrance. He takes off his headphones to answer questions. Aly had been in the army for eight years before he applied, and went to school in Seine-Saint-Denis, a nearby banlieue just over the Paris ring road, where joblessness is well above the national average. He heard about 42 after seeing a documentary about the school on television. ‘I’m 30 years old, and you don’t have much hope of training at my age,’ he tells me. But 42 shows a deliberate disregard for social background or exam results. It tests applicants anonymously online, then selects from a shortlist after a harsh month-long immersion in what is known as the piscine, or the ‘swimming pool’. Each year 50,000–60,000 people apply and just 900 are admitted. At the back of one of the school’s big rooms of computers, I come across three students puzzling over an online challenge. Léonard Aymard, originally from Annecy, explains that he was a tour guide when he applied. Sitting next to him, Loic Shety, who hails from Dijon, tells me that he won a place at 42 even though he lacked the school-leaving baccalauréat certificate. ‘It’s not for everyone,’ says Mathilde Allard, who is from Montpellier and one of a minority of female students. She slept in the school for four weeks, as many of the students do, when she was going through selection in the piscine. ‘But we work together so we don’t get lost.’
To understand quite how innovative 42 is in a French context, I cross the river Seine to the capital’s fashionable left bank to visit the University of Paris-Descartes. A world away from 42, it is run from an eighteenth-century building in the 6th arrondissement, whose amphitheatre was begun under Louis XV. In the president’s reception room, a grand piano stands in the corner and eighteenth-century tapestries adorn the walls. Home to one of the most prestigious medical schools in France, places at the university are highly sought after by the capital’s brightest, and it is a world-class centre of research in medical and life sciences. As at all French universities, tuition there is free, bar a small enrolment fee, so students do not graduate burdened with debt like their counterparts in America or Britain. Yet a glimpse at Descartes also shows how French higher education can tie the hands of innovators, including the university’s president, Frédéric Dardel, a molecular biologist.
Like universities the world over, Descartes receives far more applications each year than it has places available. Yet unlike university heads in other countries, Dardel is not permitted to select undergraduate students at entry. Ever since Napoleon set up the baccalauréat, which is awarded by the Education Ministry, this exam has served not so much as a school-leaving diploma but as an entrance ticket to university. Students can apply for any course they like, regardless of their ability. A university place is considered a right. And a centralized system allocates Dardel’s students to his institution. This routinely overfills certain courses and causes overflowing lecture halls. When a university cannot take any more, those at schools nearby are supposed to be given priority. Such is the demand that places have increasingly been allocated through random selection by computer, known as tirage au sort. By 2017 this was happening to 169 degree subjects across France. ‘It’s an absurd distribution system which leads to failure,’ Dardel tells me.8 He calculated that the average dropout rate at Descartes over the previous six years had been 45 per cent. Students took on average four and a half years to complete what should be a three-year degree, mainly due to retakes. The total extra cost during that period of non-selection was, on Dardel’s estimates, €100 million.
An admirer of 42, Dardel nonetheless argues that there is still a place for theoretical maths in computer science. In year three the computing degree at Descartes puts a heavy emphasis on mathematical theory, as perhaps a university named after one of the fathers of analytic geometry should. Yet, because the university lacks the right to select those who attend, too many students fail, breeding disillusion and waste. In 2014, 81 of the 268 students allocated to the maths and computing course at Descartes did not have the bac ‘S’, the maths-heavy version of the school-leaving exam. After the first year as undergraduates, only two of those 81 passed their exams.
France’s university system encapsulates many of the drawbacks of its over-centralized, bureaucratic model. The country has 71 universities, catering to 1.6 million students, nearly twice the number in 1980. All universities are public, and all the lecturers are civil servants. Universities are barred from selecting undergraduates at entry. Enrolment fees amount to less than €200 a year, and tuition is paid for by the state. Medicine and law aside, the brightest pupils opt instead for the upper tier of institutions known as grandes écoles, which cater to a tiny fraction of the student population. They are highly selective, and supply the French elite in government as well as in the boardroom. Entrance exams to such places as Polytechnique and Mines ParisTech (engineering) or HEC and ESSEC (business) are so stiff that they require two years of preparatory study. Such schools are regularly rated and ranked. But they serve only about 8 per cent of the student population. Selection and excellence are acceptable for the elite, it seems, but not for everybody else. Elie Cohen, a French economist, put it well when he once told me: ‘The French accept the brutality of selection on condition that we maintain the illusion of formal equality.’
For years, this two-tier higher-education system has led to top jobs for the few, and confined most students to courses that ill prepare them for the world of work. I began to understand this only after visiting the elegant, pink-bricked city of Toulouse in south-west France to look at two universities that lie just a few kilometres apart. Both are big: Toulouse 1 Capitole, a quick walk from the Place du Capitole in the city centre, has 21,000 students; Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, known as Le Mirail when I went there and a short metro ride away on the city’s outskirts, has over 30,000. Both were spun off as separate universities after France’s 1968 student riots, which led to the break-up of many of the country’s giant universities. Both cover, broadly, the social sciences: Toulouse 1 offers economics, political science, law and management; Jean Jaurès spans literature, philosophy, history, human sciences, arts and maths. But there the similarities end.
Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, a low-rise 1960s campus of squat grey concrete blocks when I visited, looked like a demonstration model of France’s difficulties with its university system. It has pockets of research excellence, such as in archaeology, and has adapted to international standards by introducing the Europe-wide structure of bachelor’s and master’s degrees. But it concentrates on mass teaching in subjects – philosophy, psychology, sociology – whose graduates find it hard to get jobs. Over 5,000 students there study psychology alone. Lecture halls at Jean Jaurès were overcrowded. In one vast 800-seat amphitheatre, steeply banked rows of students sat impassively while a lecturer mumbled on a distant platform. Each year, 46 per cent of new students dropped out. The university did not seem to consider this to be its problem. ‘This is a left-wing university which has a social project,’ its director at the time told me. ‘It is not an institution designed for professional training.’
Yet jobs seemed to be a worry for its students. A generation ago most university graduates could have gone on to secure work. But the rapid expansion of numbers passing the bac – from 26 per cent of the relevant age group in 1980 to 79 per cent today – has flooded France’s non-selective universities. School-leavers who might in the past have done an apprenticeship sign up instead for courses in social sciences that ill prepare them for the job market. Across France, as Jean-Michel Blanquer likes to recall, an astonishing 70 per cent of those who start an undergraduate degree still do not finish it in three years. ‘Unemployment weighs on our minds,’ said the student-union leader at Jean Jaurès at the time. ‘We’re the first generation that lives worse than our parents.’ Student unions blockaded the campus at Toulouse-Jean Jaurès during university sit-ins in 2006, and again in 2018. Graffiti sprayed on the walls declared: ‘We will strike against capitalism’ and ‘We do not want to return to life as normal’. It was hard to find anybody satisfied with the way things were. Teachers were fed up because they were poorly paid and felt treated as second-class citizens. Students did not feel they got enough support. The 4,000 new undergraduates who arrived there each year got no tutorial help or careers advice. There was no bar on campus. The library was light, airy and brand new. But it closed at 6 p.m. on weekdays, and was shut at weekends.
On the other side of the Garonne river, at Toulouse 1, bicycles were leaning against red-brick courtyards and students sat cross-legged in the shade of plane trees. This university had not found a solution to all the difficulties that Jean Jaurès faced. Yet, across all disciplines, 82 per cent of undergraduates got their degree in three years. During the student revolt, the Toulouse 1 campus was shut for just a brief period. In the Toulouse School of Economics (TSE), a faculty within the university, it has a world-class department of economics. One of the TSE pioneers, Jean Tirole, won the 2014 Nobel Prize in this field. Indeed, the history of the TSE, which arose from an institute originally set up in 1990 by Jean-Jacques Laffont, shows both how France has tied its hands with the existing system, and how to circumvent it. Instead of accepting its lot, the school’s founders decided to work around the rules. They sought private sponsorship for research, setting up research centres as associations, officially outside the university management structure and therefore not subject to civil-service rules. I first met Tirole when he and his colleagues were flying up to Paris for fundraising meetings, to solicit research contracts directly with private firms. French universities are handicapped in international rankings, because most research goes on not within their walls but in the many excellent national public-research bodies. So the TSE encouraged its lecturers and researchers to work and publish together, and under its name, in order to lift its position. In a final twist, the school used a transfer procedure to lure top researchers, as it was unable under French civil-service rules to recruit them directly. In short, the struggle to stay competitive internationally, and to subvert the system, required relentless creative efforts.
Under Nicolas Sarkozy’s presidency, universities were in 2007 given a degree of autonomy from such central state control, which made life simpler for places like the TSE. Universities were free to recruit more of their own lecturers, and to set up private foundations – with tax breaks for donors – to complement public finance. Some merged, including the three universities of Strasbourg and three of the four in Bordeaux, to give themselves critical mass. Other merger projects struggled to overcome internal divisions and rivalries. Yet selection at undergraduate entry remained taboo. And autonomy turned out in reality to be partial. As the Cour des Comptes pointed out in 2015, eight years after the law on university autonomy was passed, an average of 82 per cent of university budgets were still paid directly by state subsidy, the bulk of this being staff salaries. ‘The financial flexibility of universities in reality appears to be limited’, it concluded.9 Meetings of the board of governors were too often dominated by national politics and union concerns rather than the strategic place of higher education. This made outside governors ‘flee’ the job. Almost all university buildings and premises remained the property of the central state.
Ten years ago, I asked a top education official at the ministry in Paris whether France would ever allow universities to pick undergraduates at entry? ‘Oh là là!’ he replied. ‘It’s not in the French mentality.’ Macron’s government has now decided to break the selection taboo. Within months of taking office, it put in place a new online post-bac application system, known as parcoursup, for all pupils enrolling at universities from the autumn of 2018. Out went the algorithm and the randomized allocation of places. In came the right for universities to study applications themselves and make pupils offers, as well as to impose something coyly referred to as ‘requirements’. The ministry put it this way: universities, it declared, ‘will henceforth have the possibility of making enrolment conditional on a special educational programme in cases where they judge that the applicant does not have what is required’.
Nobody was under any illusions. Although the ministry could not quite bring itself to say so, this was code for universities to be able to start a form of selection. At the very least it will make it possible for a university’s maths department to require an applicant for a maths degree to have a minimum level of maths. Once this principle is established, more meaningful selection may be possible later on. Above all, the reform of the bac and university entrance go hand in hand, and have been designed together. The new bac, based on a three-year cycle to begin in 2018, will involve grading some subjects earlier in the school year, to give universities a fuller idea of the applicant’s abilities. At that point, France may be able finally to get over its selection hang-up.
The real question for French education is how far President Macron is prepared to go. Not all institutions can be as creative and experimental as 42. And not all students could survive there. But Xavier Niel has understood what many French education ministers in the past have not: that the world of work is being upturned, and education has to be too. ‘We have a tendency in France to think you need a single solution for everyone,’ Nicolas Sadirac, the director of 42, told me. His school points to how it is possible in French education to overcome the tyranny of normal in order to make more of what the system does well, and minimize what it does not. Macron’s approach is not to devise an entirely new model. He seeks to innovate largely within the existing institutional system. Yet this still leaves much space for novelty. There is plenty of thinking about how to break free from standardization, and make teaching more individualized, without losing the excellence and cultural breadth that French education provides. The underlying challenge is to persuade public opinion, students, parents and teachers that variety, autonomy and experimentation are not a threat to equality but a means of restoring it to an education system that has lost sight of it. If Macron can do this, he will have gone a long way towards improving the lot of people in places like the housing estates of Calais whom the system currently fails.