More than 2,000 people have been arrested in France as a fresh day of unrest involving student protesters left at least 65 education workers injured.

Demonstrations have expanded and become increasingly confrontational across the country this week, with young people protesting what they describe as deepening problems in the education system.

Students say school days are too long, classrooms are poorly equipped and frequently overheated, and staff shortages are disrupting lessons. The government has acknowledged that some concerns are valid, while insisting that violence cannot be justified.

Riot police have been deployed nationwide after reports of schools being set alight and teachers being assaulted.

Officials said at least 65 members of staff, including 40 high school principals, had been injured since the protests began. Around 170 students have also been hurt, while more than 100 high schools have sustained what authorities described as “severe damage.”

As many as 400 schools are expected to remain closed today. Numerous high schools, particularly in the southern city of Marseille, have also announced plans to move lessons online.

Footage recorded yesterday in Besançon appeared to show a large crowd shouting as a teenage boy attacked a woman.

The teenager reportedly seized the woman by the hair and punched her repeatedly, stopping only when several bystanders stepped in.

A local source told the Daily Mail that the confrontation was connected to the wider protests, saying: “There seems to have been a disagreement between this woman and this young man.”

“She claimed it was foolish to set off firecrackers and cause damage. The young man rejected that and appears to have insulted her, which triggered the fight. The young woman threw the first punch.”

Other videos circulated online appeared to depict male students assaulting female education workers.

In another disturbing video filmed in Marseille, a young man dressed in black appeared to corner a woman near a bus stop before directing flames at her with an improvised device.

The teenager was seen igniting an aerosol can and aiming it toward the woman’s face.

Witnesses screamed as flames burst toward the woman. She covered her head while the attacker walked away.

Verified footage posted yesterday also appeared to show a lone policewoman being pursued through a city street before a group of young men tripped her.

The video, filmed in a Paris suburb, ended with the officer on the ground clutching a tear-gas canister.

She was kicked once before the person recording the scene moved away. The video was captioned “police officer swept away,” accompanied by laughing emojis.

Paris prosecutors today said they had opened an investigation into the incident. 

Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez yesterday said: ‘A young trainee lieutenant from the Paris police headquarters was chased, thrown to the ground, and assaulted by several individuals in the 20th arrondissement of Paris.’

He promised to ‘find and prosecute’ the perpetrators of the attack.  

‘The situation is catastrophic,’ one viewer of the video wrote. ‘No-one should condone this.’ 

Their sentiments were echoed by former leader of France’s hard-right National Rally party, politician and lawyer Marine Le Pen.

She wrote on X: ‘The image of this young policewoman, pursued by a howling mob screaming its hatred, thrown to the ground and assaulted, is unbearable.

‘These acts deserve exemplary punishments. Let her know that tonight, millions of French people offer her their warm support.’

National Rally President Jordan Bardella said: ‘Footage of a policewoman being chased through the streets and mobbed on the ground in Paris illustrates what France has become after decades of laxity and mass immigration.

‘How long will we tolerate this barbarism? How long will we let our country sink without reacting?’

Around two-thirds of the more than 2,000 people arrested are in police custody, with up to 90 per cent of them believed to be minors.  

This number already appears to be rising, with officials in Yvelines reporting that 82 arrests have been made this morning. 

Justice minister Gerald Darmanin said today: ‘There is an active and violent minority [participating in the protests]… We’re not entirely sure that they are even high-school students themselves.’

Students have accused police of using excessive force and causing injuries by regularly firing tear gas canisters to disperse the protests. 

Intelligence agencies believe the protest movement had been initiated by politicians from the hard-Left, including members of La France Insoumise (LFI).

But senior LFI official Manuel Bompard accused the government of ‘descending into conspiracy theories’. 

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, de-facto leader of LFI, called on students to remain ‘cool-headed’ and to only use ‘non-violent methods’.

But his calls appear to have fallen on deaf ears, as violence continues to spread across the country. 

So far today, at least two Parisian high schools have been set alight. 

Paris firefighters responded to a fire at the Léonard de Vinci high school in the 15th arrondissement, extinguishing flames at the base of the entrance gate. 

In the 13th arrondissement, the entrance to a vocational high school was blackened by flames after a fire involving bicycles and trash cans spread to the school’s gates, according to the police headquarters. The fire was extinguished by firefighters just before 8am. 

In the western city of Rennes, the tension was already palpable outside the Jean-Mace high school with students dressed in black and wearing balaclavas standing not far from a heavy police presence.

‘As far as we’re concerned, we’ve won – our school is closed this morning,’ said Lola, 16, who declined to give her last name.

She condemned what she said was police violence. ‘It makes us even angrier – the police have no right to hit us or use tear gas on us.’

Police used tear gas at the Kerichen high school in Brest, in western France, an AFP photographer said.

In Strasbourg, riot police threw tear gas grenades at protesters near a university campus following clashes. 

Tear gas was also used against young people outside the Jean-Pierre Timbaud high school in Aubervilliers, a town on the outskirts of Paris. 

Education Minister Edouard Geffray said ‘parents must clearly step up and tell their children not to go’ to the protests, adding: ‘What matters now is ensuring our children are no longer out on the streets, because they are in danger.’

In a bid to ease tensions, Mr Geffray is set to take meetings with education unions, parents’ associations and students’ associations today in light of the violence. 

Justice Minister Darmanin said he has asked prosecutors to hold parents liable for damage caused by their children during the protests and ‘pay for repairs’.

The LFI described this as an ‘absurd measure’. 

There are also calls for LFI to be investigated for their role in the protests. 

Bruno Le Maire, former minister under Emmanuel Macron, wrote on X that he was demanding ‘a parliamentary commission of inquiry into the participation of LFI in acts of violence near high schools’.

An accountant at Historic England reported several colleagues to police for stalking after being asked to attend a workplace meeting in person, an employment tribunal heard.

Tanya Langston’s complaint was described as coming “out of the blue” and forming part of a “deliberate, contrived and calculated plan to tarnish” her co-workers’ reputations.

Ms Langston alleged that colleagues at the organisation were attempting to “exert control” over her by insisting that she attend a meeting.

She also made what the tribunal found to be unfounded allegations that her manager had stalked her via Skype and a dating application.

The tribunal concluded that she was trying to avoid misconduct proceedings at work and cause “as much distress as possible for her work colleagues”.

Ms Langston contacted police about her colleagues and claimed that 10 members of staff were involved in a conspiracy against her.

After she was dismissed, she brought legal claims alleging discrimination and unfair dismissal.

However, Bristol Employment Tribunal rejected her case.

Ms Langston joined Historic England in 2018. The public organisation is responsible for protecting and recording historic buildings and ancient monuments, and she worked at its base in Swindon, Wiltshire.

She was promoted to Assistant Systems Accountant in 2021, but by December 2022 managers had become concerned about repeated errors, despite providing her with additional support.

The tribunal heard that she had displayed “a lack of attention to detail”, including sending welcome letters to the same client more than once and entering incorrect email addresses into the system.

In March 2023, managers decided that formal performance management should be considered, citing her “resistance to and lack of engagement with [staff]” when concerns were raised or attempts were made to correct and train her.

Two months later, in May 2023, Ms Langston sent Matthew Ulyatt, Historic England’s head of finance, “a series of messages on Teams”.

The tribunal was told that some messages were random greetings, while others featured MS Paint images of what appeared to be an octopus or a Game Boy character, accompanied by questions asking what he thought of them. She also sent text messages that she deleted before he could read them.

Ms Langston later said she had sent the messages because she was “bored” and had not been given enough work. Mr Ulyatt nevertheless told her that the “bizarre” communications were inappropriate.

In reply, Ms Langston wrote: “You are barely my colleague, you are not my family nor are you my friend and even if you were, you are not entitled to behave towards me as described above.”

The tribunal described that response as “totally inappropriate” and said the messages were subsequently treated as a formal conduct matter.

At a later performance review, Ms Langston reportedly became “extremely hostile” and “very passive-aggressive”, believing that members of the team were deliberately withholding work from her.

She was suspended during a meeting in May 2023.

In response, she ‘threateningly’ said: ‘This isn’t going to be a difficult process for me. I’m going to make sure it’s a difficult time for you.’

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Immediately after her suspension in May, Miss Langston filed a grievance with Historic England, complaining about the weekly informal performance reviews.

In her grievance, she stated she had: ‘Contacted the police for advice, as it is entirely possible that my employment into Historic England is a part of a larger harassment or possibly stalking problem.’

She then filled out a bullying and harassment form which claimed that 10 colleagues were possibly in a conspiracy against her.

An investigation was launched and Miss Langston said the ‘stalking had affected her and her family and was online’.

She also claimed it included being required to attend a performance meeting in May 2023 in person because she said ‘stalking could take the form of attempts to make repeated contact as a method of exerting control’.

During the course of the investigation, Miss Langston clarified that she also believed Mr Ulyatt had matched with her through a dating app and said things ‘intended to cause her trauma’.

She also had been talking to people on Skype who she decided ‘had no genuine interest in developing a relationship with her’, and assumed they were her managers because their voices were similar.

However, she admitted that she had no evidence and did not know if the people she had spoken to even worked for Historic England.

The investigation drew to a close in July 2023, concluding there was no evidence of stalking.

The report said: ‘The stalking claim may have been malicious.’

Afterwards, the disciplinary investigation against Miss Langston resumed and she was given a warning for her inappropriate messages but allowed back to work.

The hearing heard: ‘The Team staff then expressed grave concerns about working with [Ms Langston] in the future given her complaints were directed at all of the Team (some of whom had barely met [her]), included unsubstantiated allegations which had been made out of the blue, and included wholly unevidenced allegations of stalking which [Ms Langston] had reported to the police.’

It was found that the relationship between Miss Langston ‘and those in her team had irretrievably broken down’.

She was dismissed in February 2024, and she appealed the dismissal but it was upheld.

She then took Historic England to an employment tribunal in Bristol alleging unfair dismissal and discrimination.

Employment Judge Andrew Midgley has now dismissed her claims.

He concluded: ‘I am satisfied that [Ms Langston’s] accounts reflected a deliberate, contrived and calculated plan to tarnish [Mr Ulyatt and other members of staff].

‘I am entirely satisfied… that each of those allegations was fabricated, had absolutely no factual basis capable of justifying them, that [Ms Langston] knew that, and that she deployed them with two intentions.

‘First to distract and if possible to defeat the misconduct allegations and performance issues, and secondly to cause as much difficulty and distress as possible for her work colleagues.

‘The allegations that [Ms Langston’s] dismissal was an act of direct discrimination, discrimination arising from disability or harassment related to disability all fail. They are not well founded and are dismissed.’

During Thursday’s broadcast of MS NOW’s “The Briefing,” reporter Jim Acosta said President Donald Trump’s restrictions on the media are “not the American way.”

Acosta argued that the issue extends beyond Trump’s removal of hard passes and press credentials. He characterized it as a broader effort by the far right and the Trump administration to reshape the nation’s news media into something resembling a state-controlled system. In his view, deciding which outlets can cover the White House is only a small part of a larger push that includes MAGA families taking control of news networks. Acosta also said oligarchs should not own the country’s news media and that the public should have a greater role in controlling it.

“It’s just not the American way,” Acosta said, framing the dispute as a question about the country’s way of life. He questioned whether news organizations should be allowed access to federal buildings where government employees conduct the nation’s business. Acosta called Trump’s decision to ban and criticize the press in this manner “completely un-American.”

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Follow Pam Key on X @pamkeyNEN