France is failing its newest generation of poor students as classes move online

A high school student takes a test online at her home in Chisseaux near Tours while her pet cat 'supurrvises' on the eleventh day of a lockdown in France to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus Covid-19. The pandemic has exposed shortcomings in educational systems around the world as schools scrambled to digitise their lessons, and poorer students who couldn’t afford tablets or laptops were left to fend for themselves. But if any Western country was in a position to rise to this challenge it was France. — AFP

When France shut its schools in March, 12-year-old Noussaiba Meziane recognised right away that this wasn’t going to be a holiday, and that continuing with her education wasn’t going to be easy.

As the nation’s 13 million pupils went online to receive their lessons, she and her two brothers, aged 10 and 14, traded turns on their mother’s mobile phone to make contact with their schools – her parents couldn’t afford to give each child their own computer. With a total of eight people living under one roof in the southern town of Montpellier, Meziane did barely any studying in the first week of the confinement.