Macron’s new education minister under fire over kids’ private education

PARIS — Calls for France’s new education minister to resign are growing louder less than a week after her appointment, after a controversy around her children attending a private school was amplified by her own PR missteps.

Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, who has served as sports minister since 2022, was put in charge of national education last Thursday, making her head of an expanded ministry with multiple prerogatives. French investigative news outlet Mediapart immediately pinned Oudéa-Castéra for her decision to put her children in an elitist Catholic private school in central Paris known for its traditionalist approach to religious education.

Oudéa-Castéra initially tried defending her choice by claiming she had pulled her first-born from her neighborhood’s public school due to his teacher’s repeated absences. A report by Libération later revealed that the minister’s oldest son had only spent six months in a public kindergarten and his former school teacher denied claims of absenteeism.

Her comments drew outrage within public education, with a spokesperson for the sector’s top union calling her claims “absurd and inflammatory.”

In a second attempt to defuse the controversy, Oudéa-Castéra apologized for her statement and visited her son’s first preschool on Tuesday to meet with his former teacher. She was met with jeers from a hostile crowd of unionists and parents’ representatives.

Oudéa-Castéra is “responsible for her lies,” Jordan Bardella, head of the far-right National Rally said in a TV interview on Tuesday. The heart of the issue, he added, is not the minister’s educational choices for her children but rather her criticism of public education seven years into the Macron presidency, which he said underlines the government’s failure on the matter.

As sports minister, Oudéa-Castéra made herself known to an international audience after blaming Liverpool FC for the chaos which surrounded the 2022 UEFA Champions League final, accusing the Merseyside club of having “its supporters out in the wild.” She later apologized to the British team for her remarks, the Times reported.