Emmanuel Macron’s reforms are working, but not for him

A BROAD GRIN spreads across Aboubacar Koumbassa’s face as he displays the result of his morning’s class: a tray of oven-hot pains-aux-raisins (currant pastries), which he and his classmates have baked for the first time. The 18-year-old, in a white chef’s cap and apron, had originally hoped for an apprenticeship as an electrician. But it was easier to secure one at a bakery. He now spends one week in three in the classroom, travelling over an hour by train. The other two weeks he is learning on the job. “I made the right choice,” he says, carefully inspecting his pastry, “because this is teamwork. Here we learn the theory, and at my firm we are really working.”

Apprenticeships offer a much-needed path out of France’s highly academic school system and into the world of work. The Campus des Métiers, where Mr Koumbassa studies, lies in the Paris suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis, a neighbourhood of brutalist tower blocks with a poverty rate twice the national average. The centre trains some 1,400 apprentices, in subjects ranging from car mechanics and plumbing to hairdressing and patisserie.