Amélie Oudéa-Castera announced that she would withdraw from acts relating to the Stanislas private school. The education provided in this establishment, in which the minister’s children are enrolled, is the subject of a damning report from the ministry.
One less file from the new Minister of National Education. Amélie Oudéa-Castera asked to be able to “remove acts relating to” the private Parisian school Stanislas, where her three children are educated, learned from BFMTV and franceinfo. By relinquishing this matter, the Minister of Education is handing over to the Prime Minister’s services the responsibility of handling matters linked to the establishment targeted by an administrative investigation since 2022 for accusations of sexism and homophobia revealed in Médiapart.
Due to the investigation targeting the Stanislas school, the Ministry of National Education had written a report on the establishment during the summer of 2023. This document made public by Médiapart on Tuesday January 16 effectively reveals “drifts” in the education provided by the private school. The Minister of Education had promised, following the publication of the report, to follow all of the ministry’s recommendations. Ultimately, it is up to Gabriel Attal, who was Minister of Education at the time the report was produced, and his cabinet who will have to implement these recommendations.
The decision of Minister Amélie Oudéa-Castera to immediately withdraw from the Stanislas school file responds to the recommendation made by the president of the High Authority for Transparency in Public Life, Didier Migaud. The representative of the institution which guarantees transparency and warns against certain conflicts of interest spoke with the minister before the latter’s announcement.
After the revelations concerning the schooling of the minister’s children in the private establishment and the controversy aroused around this information, the positions of Amélie Oudéa-Castera with regard to the school could have been discredited by political detractors of the makes his report to the establishment. The appointment of Amélie Oudéa-Castera to Education having already been the subject of criticism and several calls for resignation having been issued by members of the opposition, particularly on the left, it is better not to take the risk of weakening again the position of the minister, or worse to see her accused of a conflict of interest.
Amélie Oudéa-Castera assured on Friday January 12 that she had not opened the report of the Ministry of National Education, at the head of which she was appointed, on the Stanislas school as reported by Médiapart: “I am going to be very clear, this inspection report is not on my desk.” Before her, Minister Gabriel Attal had also been very discreet regarding this document and its content. The investigative newspaper reports that the two ministers have refused to make the report public since it was submitted to the ministry in early August 2023. Could the government have been embarrassed by the conclusions of the four inspectors commissioned last May to draw up the portrait of the establishment? The document indeed confirms the existence of homophobic and sexist “drifts” and practices that do not comply with the law in this private Catholic school in the 6th arrondissement of Paris.