Lessons from the first lady? Brigitte Macron to return to classroom

PARIS: French first lady Brigitte Macron, a career-long teacher, is set to return to the classroom in a new chain of adult training colleges that she is helping set up.

Macron, a French and drama teacher until 2015, has accepted a supervisory and teaching role for two schools being built, one in a suburb of Paris and another in a rural area of southeast France.

On Monday, she visited the first of the schools by the "Institut des Vocations", which is also backed rap star Ben J and celebrity chef Thierry Marx and is being financed by French luxury giant LVMH.

The school in the poverty-wracked Clichy-sous-Bois suburb in northeast Paris will open its doors in September along with another facility near Valence in southeast France, offering courses to around 50 school dropouts aged 25-30 every year.

"It won't be like the lessons that I gave to pupils before, but more in the Anglo-Saxon style, interactive," the 66-year-old, who taught at prestigious private schools in her home town of Amiens as well as in Paris, told reporters. She said the school aimed to give its students, who will be paid 1,000 euros (1,100 dollars) a month, "the foundations to be able to enter the workplace.

"We know they need to know the four operations in maths, to know how to write French, to express themselves, to construct arguments in a written text. I want to give them a taste for literature," she added.