“I’m not stupid enough to think that this will solve all the problems,” says Robert Ménard

“I don’t have the stupidity to think” that the unique outfit at school “will solve all the problems”launched Robert Ménard, mayor of Béziers (Hérault), Monday February 19 on franceinfo. “We are going to do an experiment, we will see if it is useful or not (…) What risk is there? None”, he estimated. Several hundred schoolchildren from Béziers received on Thursday the outfits they will wear when they return from the winter holidays.

“It seems like a common sense approach to me.”defended Robert Ménard. “In a playground, you immediately see who is rich and who is not, who has money, who does not. We will see it a little less”although he agrees that the uniform does not fit “erase everything”.

The mayor of Béziers says that when uniforms were put in place, “Everyone was happy”, parents and children alike. He is particularly pleased with the new popular references associated by children with the uniform: “In kids’ minds today, the costume is Harry Potter or manga. That’s good!” As for the parents, “it’s 200 euros worth of clothes” saved, he recalls, since they do not pay for the uniforms. He also adds that this allows “to avoid arguments over how the children dress in the morning”.

Robert Ménard does not want to do “trial of intent” to Nicole Belloubet, the new Minister of National Education, but he believes that she comes “applying a policy that is the opposite of what she said” in the past, referring in particular to the comments made in 2016 by Nicole Belloubet, who had ironically “tribes about the restoration of authority or the wearing of a blouse”. For the mayor of Béziers, there is therefore “two solutions: she has completely changed, and she has the right to change. Two, she is forced. This is the price to pay for her to be a minister. I am not sure that this is ideal.”