Black student says she was called 'monkey' as she suffered years of racist abuse at £17,000-a-year French private school
A black student has claimed she was called 'monkey' and suffered years of racist abuse at a £17,000-a-year private school in London favoured by the Parisian elite.
Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle, in ritzy South Kensington, is run by the Agency for French Education Abroad, with day-to-day supervision overseen by the French embassy in the British capital.
The Lycée is the educational establishment of choice for the mostly white Parisian professional class, including senior figures in the worlds of banking, diplomacy and academia, The Times reported.
Scattered across multiple locations in London, the school charges fees of up to £16,923 a year for day pupils.
Writing in the school's newspaper this week, Gabrielle, a sixth-form pupil described the sustained racism she had experienced while studying there.
The teenager alleges that she was called a 'monkey' and told 'it is better to be dyslexic than black' - as well as being exposed to racist jokes on class WhatsApp groups.
She also says that white pupils asked black students for an 'N-word pass' - the right to say the racial slur.
'Racism and xenophobia are widespread in all years. Reflecting on my personal experience, I realise that I have always evolved in a school environment where racism persists,' she wrote.
Gabrielle claimed that non-black pupils used the N-word 'indiscrimately, whenever they want.'
Even more shockingly, she also alleges that racist language was casually deployed by some teachers in a way that likely inspired the pupils to feel comfortable making similar remarks.
She claims certain teachers made 'racist and incredibly xenophobic remarks' to non-white pupils, including 'king of the jungle' and 'close to monkey'.
She added: 'There may be a correlation between the teachers' crude comments and the behaviour of the pupils, amongst whom there is now a tendency to make derogatory 'jokes' about what they call dirty Arab and black immigrants.
'Monkey insults are also very common towards black children, and some boys go so far as to proclaim that they "don't like black girls". Many justify their comments by labelling them as humour.'
The teen says that the 'revolting remarks' over her seven years at the school have 'hurt me a lot' and forced her to 'build a shield for myself'.
Her account of racism at the school has reportedly been backed-up by the experiences of parents and other ex-students.
The mother of a biracial pupil at the school said the article had been a hot topic among pupils and parents - and that she had heard parents of non-white pupils discuss moving their children to other schools due to the racism directed at them.
She blamed Parisian Catholics 'who are quite right-wing' and said they 'probably believe there are too many Arabs and immigrants in France'.
The mother said too often systemic racism was dismissed as 'teasing' and that the German-occupation of France during WWII had led to a fear of being deemed a 'snitch'.
The Lycée has a number of pupils from French-speaking African countries as well as British children whose families want them to get a bilingual education.
The school has produced a number of famous alumni including actresses Jacqueline Bisset and Natasha Richardson.
Former Tory MP Dominic Grieve also attended the school, while illustrator Quentin Blake, famous for his work on Roald Dahl's books, was a teacher there.
The article was actually authorised by the Lycée's headteacher Catherine Bellus-Ferreira, who as appointed in 2023 and is also the 'director' of the school newspaper.
She said she thought the article was 'courageous' and thought it shone the spotlight on a 'real issue'.
The headteacher said that it was insufficient for the school to simply say 'we are against dicrimination', adding: 'It is important to me that this school struggles against racism.'
She said there has been investigations into around a dozen of the school's 2,000 secondary-school students over the last 12 months.
Pupils found guilty of racist behaviour face being suspended for eight days and potentially are required to attend mandatory workshops.
Ms Bellus-Ferreira has helped overhaul the school's Ofsted rating after it received an 'inadequate' in 2023 due to 'too many weaknesses in how leaders work to keep pupils safe'.
Last year the school was upgraded to 'good' for pastoral care and 'outstanding' for education.
Ms Bellus-Ferreira said it would be dishonest to claim there was no instances of racism at the school, but that it was not 'a racist school'.
The Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle in London has a main site in South Kensington and three additional primary school sites, in Fulham, Clapham, and Ealing.
The school was originally founded near Victoria station in 1915 as the French School of London to take French-speaking refugees from World War I.
The school was visited by iconic French president General Charles de Gaulle in 1960 and the institution was subsquently named in his honour in 1980.
The French system is facing a challenging time in the classroom, with 16 'serious incidents' reported per 1,000 pupils in 2023-24, according to a report by the education ministry.
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If you ever thought, as I did growing up there, that Northern Ireland's fame was limited to 30 years of bombs and bullets, or building a ship that sank on its maiden voyage — you'd better think again. Twenty-one years ago, we were also host to the biggest robbery in British or Irish history at the time — in fact, the sixth biggest robbery in the world. Pretty impressive, eh? In one sense, it was impressive. On December 20, 2004, £26.5 million in cash was stolen from the Northern Bank headquarters in Belfast's city centre — in clear view of the public as Christmas shoppers strolled round the continental market just feet away. Glenn Patterson, an admired Belfast-based novelist, has written a book showing how the robbers did it, and how they got away with it. It was not just a monetary robbery, but a symbolic one. The Northern Bank building is a landmark in Belfast's post-industrial city centre, a great, sturdy 1970s edifice in concrete. It's a building you can imagine Bill Bixby walking out of, coat over shoulder, in the credits for The Incredible Hulk. But the robbery was not the first of its kind that year. Already in 2004 there had been other 'tiger kidnappings', where robbers would take family members hostage and force bank employees to help them to carry out the heist. In response, the Northern Bank had changed its operations so that two key holders were needed simultaneously to access its cash vaults. The criminals' solution? To abduct two employees' family members at once. Kevin McMullan, the bank's assistant manager, and Chris Ward, a junior employee, both had a knock on the door the night before the robbery. Armed men took over their homes and held their families hostage while McMullan and Ward were taken away. The men were held overnight, then told to go to work the next day and act normally. At clocking-off time they were to use their access to remove cash from the vault, disguised in containers to look like rubbish, and load it into a waiting white van. And so they did: great blocks and boxes of new and used notes, kilos upon kilos of it. The cover of Patterson's book shows a CCTV image of Ward leaving the bank's side entrance with a holdall over one shoulder. The holdall contains £1.2 million. Little wonder he's leaning to one side to counter the weight. So who did it? There's no doubt: the only criminal outfit in Northern Ireland with the organisational capability to plan and execute the robbery so methodically was the IRA. (The single sign of amateurishness was that two men in the van wore Russ Abbot-style ginger 'Jimmy' wigs beneath their baseball caps. This odd sight alerted passersby and almost foiled the robbery.) Opinions are divided on why the IRA carried out the robbery. For a pension fund? Investment abroad? • The 21 best history books of the past year to read next The whole story is presented beautifully by Patterson, who adopts the right tone for each phase of the tale. The abduction scenes have the horrible tension of a thriller, and reminded me of Brian Moore's great Troubles novel Lies of Silence. Elsewhere, Patterson adopts a tone of amused incredulity at the shocking details of the robbery and its aftermath. 'You have to take your hat off to this country. It has a way of exceeding your worst, most lavish expectations.' But the robbery also presented a political problem for the British and Irish governments. In 2004, the fledgling Northern Ireland Assembly had collapsed, and there were 'talks about talks' to get it up and running again. 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And in a world where every conspiracy theorist sees two-tier justice in any outcome they don't like, the aftermath of the robbery provided a real example. The senior IRA man Bobby Storey — believed to be the brains behind the robbery, and 'a great human being' in the words of Gerry Adams — died in June 2020 and his funeral attracted more than 1,500 people, in contravention of Covid regulations. Other people could have no more than 30 at theirs. None of the Sinn Fein politicians who attended were prosecuted, while at a Black Lives Matter protest in Belfast a few weeks earlier, 70 people were fined. Patterson had once planned to write a screenplay of the robbery. I wish he had. It has everything: tension, dark comedy, human interest, big issues and more. But this book will do very nicely in its place. And if the Northern Bank heist was indeed a symbolic robbery, then here is the other symbol. Why did they do it? Because they knew they could get away with it. As Patterson points out: 'Something [else] disappeared in that white van in December 2004 that has never been recovered.' The Northern Bank Job: The Heist and How They Got Away With It by Glenn Patterson (Head of Zeus £16.99 pp272). To order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
