On a normal school day, Mohammed, 17, wakes at 6am, cares for his younger siblings to help his single mother who works as a security guard, then takes two crowded buses and a local train to get to his high school in Sevran, a low-income banlieue town in the suburbs north-east of Paris.

“There aren’t enough chairs or desks to go round, so some students have to stand up,” Mohammed said. “Classes can be so packed you can’t interact with the teacher. In this year’s heatwaves, it felt like 40 degrees in overcrowded classrooms with no shade or curtains. It was so hot my brain couldn’t function.”

The 17-year-old in his last year of high school wants to study management and digital communication at a Paris university. But he said conditions were so poor, he felt all odds were stacked against him and his classmates.

“Some of us have to go months without teachers when absent staff aren’t replaced,” he said. “One class had no French teacher for several months just before the French baccalaureate, so they couldn’t even study all the set texts for their exam. Recently we needed a teacher for a subject taught through English, but when that teacher arrived they didn’t speak English.”

The biggest youth protest movement in the country in decades brought hundreds of thousands on to the streets across France this week demonstrating against inequality in the French education system, decrepit schools, a lack of teachers and large class sizes. Hundreds of schools were blockaded, thousands of teenagers were arrested, and rights groups warned of alleged police brutality, with one child losing the use of eye and another losing a hand.

Mohammed and his classmates, often supported by their parents and teachers, have been at the frontline, barricading their school, the Lycée Blaise-Cendrars, which is in one of mainland France’s poorest départements, Seine-Saint-Denis. They have voted to continue their protests next week, taking their grievances to the local mayor, elected officials and education representatives. Many local politicians have supported their demands. Even the French prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, conceded that teenagers had “legitimate” concerns.

Photos on the Sevran students’ phones showed broken classroom chairs, holes in walls, holes in ceilings, mould, buckets to catch leaks, faulty lights. They said basic needs weren’t met, with some toilets broken, others with no doors and often no toilet paper or soap. Video projectors and science equipment were lacking.

“We’re not asking for luxury, just the basics to learn in decent conditions,” Mohammed said. “And yet police on horseback charged us when we were gathered to protest outside our school, firing teargas at us and making arrests. It’s so dangerous to be charged by a horse, it could kill you. I just ran, I was trying to help my classmates.”

The high schools of Seine-Saint-Denis, a suburban area nudging against northern Paris, have been a driving force in the protests. The area has the youngest population in mainland France, one of the highest birthrates and the among the lowest average income. Local high schools have a high turnover of young teachers.

Despite co-hosting the 2024 Paris Olympics, and numerous government plans to try to combat long-running problems of inequality and poverty, the area north-east of Paris is still disadvantaged compared with the capital.

In 2005, Seine-Saint-Denis was the starting point for weeks of unrest on housing estates across France, leading to a state of national emergency being declared, after the death of two young boys hiding from police in an electricity substation. This week’s protests have shown that inequality and discrimination has not been addressed in the Paris suburbs and the mistrust between young people and police persists.

Sevran’s Lycée Blaise-Cendrars, with more than 1,000 pupils, has been at the heart of protests about school conditions before. In 2024, students and teachers made a viral video about the state of classrooms, toilets and equipment. The local Île de France region said it had put in place a major refurbishment project for high school buildings. But the teenagers said key issues had not been addressed.

“We’re starting at an unfair advantage because our parents aren’t as rich as others, they can’t buy us books, they can’t take us to films,” said Ilian, 17, whose family has Moroccan roots and whose father is a traffic warden. “We’re missing school during these protests, we risk falling behind in an exam year, we’re desperate to get back into class to study, but the conditions we’re facing are so bad we can’t stop until the government promises action.”

The education ministry this week promised 3,000 teachers to urgently fill gaps, but teachers’ unions expressed doubts and said longer-term plans and more funding was needed, even if the government argues there is little spare cash.

Children’s mental health is also an issue in Seine-Saint-Denis. Ilian has been waiting to see a child psychiatrist for months. At the high school, there was no school nurse and a lack of support staff for children with disabilities, he said.

“The police look down on us as if we’re animals”, Ilian said. “They talk to us with such cruelty.” He told local politicians that some teenagers alleged police had made racial insults against them during protests.

Stéphane Troussel, the Socialist head of the Seine-Saint-Denis département council who met the pupils this week, said: “It’s intolerable that policing is causing part of the difficulties.” He called for the police to stop using a type of rubber-bullet launcher, after they suspended use of stun grenades following injuries. The French interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, has defended policing tactics.

Stéphane Blanchet, the mayor of Sevran, said he supported the school protesters’ demands. He said many in his town of 52,000 people, with a higher than average poverty rate, felt “relegated” and forgotten by the state.

Sarah, 17, who wanted to study at an elite Paris engineering faculty, and whose warehouse worker father was proud she was protesting and meeting the mayor, said teenagers in the banlieue “really feel abandoned”.

She said: “We’ve been surprised and so appreciative of other teenagers in better-off places in France marching in the streets to support us this week. We know we’re disadvantaged and that we have to work 10 times as hard as others to escape discrimination against our postcode. But we can’t learn properly in these conditions when we’re not even guaranteed a chair to sit on in school.”

Students’ names have been changed