Bobigny (France) (AFP) – “No doors, no paper, no soap”: criticized for decades, the state of sanitary facilities in schools has become at the heart of high school demands, with students seeing it as a symbol of degraded study conditions.

Published on: 06/11/2026 - 11:58

Using the megaphone, on their signs or at the microphone of the media, high school students across France have placed this lack of sanitation and cleanliness very high on their list of grievances since the start of the blockades of establishments launched in mid-September in the Paris suburbs.

At the Raymond-Naves high school in Toulouse, Marc-Antoine, in first STMG, describes "dirty" toilets in which "there is never a PQ". Neither he nor his friends go there, he assures.

Mold, peeling paint, rusty pipes... At the Paul-Eluard high school in Saint-Denis (Seine-Saint-Denis), the toilets bear the marks of the dilapidation of the premises, according to videos filmed by a teacher and viewed by AFP.

Far from being an anecdotal concern, the dilapidation of school toilets crystallizes a feeling of contempt among adolescents, particularly in working-class neighborhoods where students denounce an accumulation of difficulties.

“It’s still our intimate comfort,” notes Kamelia, a final year student at Paul-Eluard.

In front of this same establishment, a mother of a student confides, disillusioned: “My daughter comes home every lunchtime to go to the toilet.”

The lack of sanitary facilities is also the main complaint for Nayla, 16, in a vocational high school in Bondy (Seine-Saint-Denis). “There are only two toilets for a lot of students!”, she says, before listing everything that is wrong elsewhere and concluding: “In the suburbs, society rejects us by putting us in high schools that leave something to be desired, with a lack of hygiene, a lack of teachers…”.

Until the Assembly

In these Île-de-France territories, the subject quickly became political, a few months before the presidential election.

In Sevran (Seine-Saint-Denis), NFP MP Clémentine Autain appeared at the beginning of October with two high school students, telling the camera: "We have no soap, no doors in the toilets, no sanitary napkins."

The issue made its way to the National Assembly on October 8, when students discussed their demands at the invitation of LFI deputies.

Why “repair the floor of the courtyard when the toilets have been broken for a year?” Nissa then said, targeting the Region’s choices.

For its part, the Île-de-France region told AFP that it had launched a “major toilet plan” in 2019, with 85 million euros to renovate the “most dilapidated” toilets in 125 out of 468 public high schools. “We are 80% of the objective achieved,” she points out.

“We also have deliberate damage to the toilets,” she adds, referring to “complaints from principals” who sometimes decide, in this case, “not to make small repairs.”

Hold back all day

The state of toilets is an "ancestral problem" which begins "in kindergarten", estimates school nurse Gwenaelle Thenoz, from SNIES-Unsa Education, from a high school in the Lyon academy.

For her, it is even a “public health problem” because children come to the infirmary with “headaches, stomach aches, urinary infections, constipation” because they “restrain themselves from drinking”.

In the absence of trash cans and protection, young girls “keep the same sanitary napkin all day,” she adds.

In 2017, the National Council for the Evaluation of the School System (CNESCO) had already produced a reference report with the support of researchers, doctors and National Education. He pointed out that many students developed avoidance strategies and refrained from urinating all day.

At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, in March 2020, the Minister of Education Jean-Michel Blanquer recognized that these sanitary facilities were not "up to standard", hoping that the coronavirus crisis would make it possible to progress "this very important subject for the hygiene of our children".

Contacted by AFP, the parents' association FCPE calls on the government to put in place a "real national plan" for toilets.

On November 2, following a high school consultation, the ministry listed 200 priority high schools for building improvement. An Île-de-France, Hauts-de-France and Paca axis was chosen, these regions concentrating 46% of the health problems reported by high school students.

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