Pupil rings French PM Valls for homework help

A 16-year-old Parisian pupil ignored Wikipedia and Google and decided instead to call the personal mobile phone of France's prime minister Manuel Valls in an attempt to get some inside help for a school presentation on politics.

Published: 26 May 2015 12:33 CEST

Pupil rings French PM Valls for homework help

Prime Minister Manuel Valls speaks on the telephone. Photo: AFP

Who says the youth of today aren't resourceful?

One 16-year-old French school pupil showed unusual determination to get straight to the source for a school project about politics that his girlfriend was writing.

The boy managed to get hold of Prime Minister Manuel Valls's personal phone number a year ago from his friend's mother, who works as an MP, reported the Le Figaro newspaper.

He even exchanged a few short texts with Valls at the time.

Last week, when he realized he could do with a hand with the presentation, he decided not to trawl the internet as most pupils would have done, but to pick up his phone and give Valls a call.

“I said to myself: I'm going to call him and see what he has to say,” the young boy told the paper.

“If he doesn't respond then it's no big deal, I'll only have wasted five minutes of my life.”

Valls was quick to respond, the paper reported, but seemingly too busy running the country to be of any use on the project.

“I'm sorry but I can't help. If I did, I wouldn't be able to do my job,” Valls wrote. “But drop me a text message, since you have my number, and I'll see what I can do.”

The PM didn't get back to the boy again, however, and his girlfriend was left without the PM's inside word.

French prime ministers don't always leave students empty handed, however.

In early 2014, former PM Jean-Marc Ayrault responded to a student's plea for help on Twitter, sending him information about the Matignon Agreements – a set of agreements between trade unions and the French state in 1936 – and wishing him luck with his studies.

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France has in recent weeks been shaken by a series of attacks on schoolchildren by their peers, in particularly the fatal beating earlier this month of Shemseddine, 15, outside Paris.

The far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party has accused Attal of not doing enough on security as the anti-immigration party soars ahead of the government coalition in polls for the June 9th election.

Speaking in Viry-Chatillon, the town where Shemseddine was killed, Attal condemned the “addiction of some of our adolescents to violence”, calling for “a real surge of authority… to curb violence”.

“There are twice as many adolescents involved in assault cases, four times more in drug trafficking, and seven times more in armed robberies than in the general population,” he said.

Measures will include expanding compulsory school attendance to all the days of the week from 8am to 6pm for children of collège age (11 to 15).

“In the day the place to be is at school, to work and to learn,” said Attal, who was also marking 100 days in office since being appointed in January by President Emmanuel Macron to turn round the government’s fortunes.

Parents needed to take more responsibility, said Attal, warning that particularly disruptive children would have sanctions marked on their final grades.

OPINION: No, France is not suffering an unprecedented wave of violence

Promoting an old-fashioned back-to-basics approach to school authority, he said “You break something – you repair it. You make a mess – you clear it up. And if you disobey – we teach you respect.”

Attal also floated the possibility of children in exceptional cases being denied the right to special treatment on account of their minority in legal cases.

Thus 16-year-olds could be forced to immediately appear in court after violations “like adults”, he said. In France, the age of majority is 18, in accordance with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Macron and Attal face an uphill struggle to reverse the tide ahead of the European elections. Current polls point to the risk of a major debacle that would overshadow the rest of the president’s second mandate up to 2027.

A poll this week by Ifop-Fiducial showed the RN on 32.5 percent with the government coalition way behind on 18 percent.