Latest news with #LycéeFrançais
Daily Mail
7 hours ago
- Daily Mail
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.
The Guardian
18-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Norman Page obituary
My father, Norman Page, who has died aged 94, was a scholar of English literature. For more than three decades he edited a stream of academic books on literary figures and their work. He also wrote critical biographies of Thomas Hardy (1977), AE Housman (1983) and Muriel Spark (1990). A lecturer by trade, Norman produced a volume on the language of Jane Austen and an account of the years that Christopher Isherwood and WH Auden spent together in Berlin. In addition he was general editor of Macmillan's Modern Novelists and Author Chronologies series, as well as a contributor of chapters to academic books and a writer of articles and book reviews for journals. Norman was born in Kettering, Northamptonshire, where his father, Frederick, and mother, Theresa (nee Price), ran a general store in the front parlour of their house. From Kettering grammar school he went to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, to study English. For most of the 1950s he taught the subject at various schools, including the Lycée Français in South Kensington, London. In 1958, he married Jean Hampton, a student at the Royal Academy of Music, after meeting her while holidaying in Spain. In 1960 they moved northwards so that Norman could teach at Ripon College of Education in Yorkshire, until nine years later he took up a junior lecturer's position at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, then flush with oil money. Later, back in straitened Britain, he would marvel at how the university library in Edmonton had had more cash than it knew how to spend. While he worked in Canada, galley proofs soon began to cover the dining table. The Language of Jane Austen (1972) and Speech in the English Novel (1973) made his name quickly, and his scholarship ranged from Samuel Johnson to Evelyn Waugh to Vladimir Nabokov. At times he also crossed the border into history, as with The Thirties in Britain (1990). He was made a Guggenheim fellow in 1979 and elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1982. Norman always kept his feet on the ground by teaching undergraduates and resisted blandishments to ascend into university management. In 1985 he returned to the UK as chair of English literature at the University of Nottingham, and the family settled in Oakham, Rutland. He retired in 1993, and after Jean's death in 2002 he spent much of each year travelling – above all to India, where Mumbai became a second home until his 90s. There, as throughout his life and despite severely deteriorated eyesight, he remained ever open to new experiences, knowledge and friendships. He is survived by his partner, Dinesh Kumar, four children, Camilla, Ben, Matthew and me, and three grandchildren, Will, Ed and Alice.
New York Times
15-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
In the Ring, It Doesn't Matter How Much Money His Parents Have
Even for hard-core boxing fans, it is difficult to see how Sean O'Bradaigh emerged as a fearsome light heavyweight. His somewhat posh background, with private schooling and vacations in St. Tropez and Greece, is about as far as can be from those of Mike Tyson or Jake LaMotta. O'Bradaigh's father is a private wealth manager from Ireland, and his mother is a Belgian film and theater producer. He grew up in a doorman building a few blocks from the Hudson River, is a strong skier (he actually prefers Aspen to the Alps), and is fluent in French after attending the Lycée Français on the Upper East Side for 15 years. He enjoys brunch with his mother and the occasional Broadway show. He will graduate from New York University in May with a degree in real estate finance. And he can knock you out flat. 'Someone like me is not supposed to be good at boxing,' O'Bradaigh (pronounced oh-BROAD-ee) said on Wednesday while reclining on a couch in his family's stylish living room. 'To become good, you need to have been punched in the face thousands of times and do a lot difficult stuff that most people with my background aren't willing to do. I could have quit any time, but I didn't.' O'Bradaigh, who turns 23 in April, will make his professional debut on Sunday at Madison Square Garden, where he watched fights as a boy. It is part of an Irish-themed boxing card, headlined by Callum Walsh vs. Dean Sutherland, on the eve of St. Patrick's Day. O'Bradaigh will face Jefferson Christian Almeida in the same arena where he won the 2023 Golden Gloves (now the Ring Masters) as a middleweight. He won 25 of 39 bouts as an amateur, won the New York Boxing Tournament as a light heavyweight and twice reached the semifinals of the amateur national championships. He picked up boxing at 13 after watching Conor McGregor, the polarizing Irish champion, in a mixed martial arts fight. McGregor beat up a cocky opponent that night, and then strutted about in the ring. Thinking it was the coolest thing he'd ever seen, O'Bradaigh begged his parents to take him to a gym on Canal Street. He was hooked. At first he was into M.M.A., but when coaches saw his technique and hands, they recommended boxing. What once seemed like an adolescent phase is about to become a job in a punishing sport that his mother, Nastassja Many, cannot bear to watch. She attends every match, but she keeps her head down, staring at her knees while well-trained and highly motivated opponents try to smash her son's face in. His nose has already been broken twice. Many, an entrepreneurial former actress who speaks five languages, respects her son's choice, and is happy he discovered his passion. She just wishes he had chosen pro skiing instead. 'The first time I saw him walk into a ring, I was in tears,' she said. 'You see your son walking in under all that light, body to body with some huge guy. I'm concerned about his pretty face and his brain.' She met Sean's father, Cillian Ò Brádaigh, in Montauk, Long Island, in the late 1990s, and in 2003 they had fraternal twins, Sean and Oscar. Of all the Irish and Irish-descended boxers on Sunday's card at the Garden, O'Bradaigh's ancestry may be the most ardently Irish republican. His father grew up near Dublin speaking Gaelic as a first language. Sean's great-great-grandfather and his great-grandfather fought in the Irish Republican Army against British rule, and his great-uncle was Ruirí Ò Brádaigh, a former I.R.A. chief of staff and president of Sinn Fein, the Irish Republican political party. Sean's father took another path. A dapper, erudite businessman, Cillian Ò Brádaigh manages personal financial portfolios, attending to wealthy clients in the Hamptons, Manhattan and various locales around the globe. When he picks Sean up at training sessions, other boxers routinely ask Sean about the well-dressed man in the fancy car. 'They call him Trench Coat' Sean said with a laugh, and they assume he is a manager or an agent. He recounted the time he fought in a scruffy gym in the Bronx, and he pleaded with his father not to wear a suit. 'So he shows up in golf clothes,' Sean said with another hearty laugh. The surface differences between O'Bradaigh and many other boxers can be stark, at least outside the ring. Inside it, every boxer stands alone. O'Bradaigh understands his privileged upbringing is alien to most in the American boxing community, and he neither boasts about it nor tries to hide it. It made him who he is. But there have been sparring sessions when opponents assumed — at their peril — that he was soft. 'I don't care what they say,' he said with a shrug. 'All that matters is what happens in the ring. Sometimes they are better than me. But usually I make them pay for it.' O'Bradaigh mixes easily in any milieu, breezing from lunch with a group of N.Y.U. business majors to the gym in Midtown where he slugged it out with a bulldozing heavyweight. While in line at a deli, he simultaneously spoke in French to his mother on the phone, ordered food in Spanish and chatted with a guy waiting with him at the counter in English. O'Bradaigh's parents always sought to ensure that he and his brother were not spoiled and that they engaged with the world around them. When the twins were about 8, their parents took them on a volunteer medical mission to Kenya. When Sean was 16, he said, he volunteered at an orphanage on the Senegal-Mauritania border. He and his brother built sheds on the Navajo Nation reservation in New Mexico, and in high school Sean volunteered at an L.G.B.T.Q. homeless shelter in the Bronx and translated for Spanish-speaking voters on Election Day. 'We've purposely pushed them out there in the world,' his father said, 'to make them good, solid citizens with a sense of civic responsibility and social obligation.' O'Bradaigh's parents also insisted that he finish college. His passion, though, is that time in the ring, where a lack of focus during critical, intense and violent milliseconds can mean waking up on the canvas. He nearly had one such moment during a spontaneous sparring session with Conor McGregor himself in New York in September. There was a half-second lapse when he marveled at being in the ring with the former champion, and absorbed two quick punches to the head. He recovered, though, and fared well. But when McGregor's team posted a video on Instagram showing only that brief moment when McGregor scored, O'Bradaigh responded in the comments that it was an honor facing the champ. He brashly added, 'Let's see the whole footage.' According to Richard Stephenson, O'Bradaigh's trainer and the former coach of the U.S. national boxing team, he has the attitude, heart, chin and reflexes to be a good pro. But he has work to do on his fundamentals. 'He's been winning, so it's hard for him to fathom going back to the basics,' Stephenson said. 'He's got to grow, and if he doesn't, he won't get too far.' That probably would not crush his mother, who worries that her baby could get hurt, wind up with cognitive brain impairment, or never find a life partner. O'Bradaigh is very aware of the risks. He said he wants to own businesses someday. 'I value my brain,' he said. 'If I ever start feeling like I'm losing memory or showing other signs, I'll stop.'
