My daughter started secondary school on 1 September. She was very excited. I wish I could report that she skipped through the gates on her first day, but this is France, and no child skips through school gates in 2016.
Instead she stood in a queue outside the entrance, as one by one she and her new classmates had their satchels searched by a pair of security guards. Not that I’m complaining. In fact if I did have a gripe it was that the security was too light. According to Bernard Cazeneuve, France’s interior minister, 50m euros has been provided to tighten security at schools and colleges, and more than 3,000 police reservists were mobilised when French children returned en masse on the first day of September. There were none outside my daughter’s front gates, something of a surprise given it’s a Catholic school.
In 2012 Mohamed Merah strolled into the playground of a Jewish school in Toulouse and shot dead three children aged 3, 6 and 8.
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