(Radio France) France’s education minister Pap Ndiaye said that there were “about 500 cases” of breaches of secularism in French schools this March — figures that were up on previous months — due to the observance of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
Ndiaye was speaking on France 3 television on Sunday about the so-called “barometer” that France uses to record the wearing of religious symbols, dress code, verbal provocation, the rejection of republican values in over 59,000 schools, colleges and senior high schools.
The education minister told the “Dimanche en Politique” programme that: “The figures … show a decrease since a peak in October [as] there is always a peak in [then] linked in particular to the commemoration of the murder of Samuel Paty.”
