As of Monday, primary school children in 47 departments across France will no longer be obliged to wear face masks to school. This comes as the number of Covid cases in these areas dropped below the rate of 50 cases per 100,000 inhabitants.
On 22 September, government spokesman Gabriel Attal announced that any French administrative department where the number of Covid cases had dropped to less than 50 per 100,000 people, would be eligible to move down to the lowest health protocol level (one out of four).
Although children no longer have to wear masks to school in these regions, teachers are required to keep wearing them.
"We're putting the masks aside for now, but it's in our interest not to put them away completely, we need to remain cautious because we know the epidemic can start up again with new variants," says Stéphane Crochet, general secretary for the SE-Unsa union.
In both junior and senior highschools, the rules regarding wearing masks indoors remain in place.
Concerns
The Snuipp-FSU, trade union warned on Thursday last week however that teachers should remain careful, as there was an "incoherence, and lack of management for the health crisis in schools".
"We'll have to make sure classrooms are well aired, and that protective masks are delivered to teachers in sufficient numbers," Catherine Nave-Bekhti, from the Sgen-CFDT union said, adding that some of the departments in the list still had high numbers of Covid cases among young students.
The Snuipp-FSU has also called on the health ministry to increase the number of saliva tests delivered to schools to cover the needs of 6 million primary school children.
"So far only 300,000 tests per week have been delivered when we need 20 times this amount to be able to adhere to the government's scientific recommendations," the union wrote.
Currently, one Covid case in a classroom leads to the closure of the class. However, a pilot programme is being put in place in schools in 10 departments - including 5 departments where masks are no longer obligatory. Classes would no longer be closed systematically, rather all children would be tested and only the positive cases would be isolated.
The departments affected by this experimental protocol are l'Aisne, l'Ariège, la Côte-d'Or, les Landes, la Manche, le Morbihan, la Moselle, le Rhône, le Val-d'Oise and le Var.
In the case of contamination at highschool, only contact cases who are not vaccinated are required to self isolate.
According to the Education ministry on Friday, under 1,692 classes were closed due to Covid, representing 0.32 percent of the country's classes.
