Grants against failure

Article by Gilles Guitton published in Sud Ouest on 27 February 2001. It reports on the launch, by students at the ESC business school in Bordeaux, of the association “Faire échec à l’échec” (“Beating failure”), intended to raise funds to allow children struggling at school to access specialised methods — among them the Tomatis method, presented as a way of “relearning how to listen, how to concentrate”.

Sud Ouest — Gironde Bordeaux centre, Tuesday 27 February 2001, p. G

TALENCE — Students at Sup’TG launch “Faire échec à l’échec”, an association intended to help children in serious academic difficulty

“My little godson is failing in Year 7. That’s what made me aware of these issues.” Jérôme Ducosson, a second-year student at Sup’TG at the ESC in Talence, very much hopes there will be a crowd on 3 March in the school’s lecture hall, for the launch conference of “Faire échec à l’échec”, the association he has chaired for a short while and runs together with Charles Igoho, Thomas Derain and Laurent Bardinet.

“I talked about it with Thomas, and we told ourselves there was surely something to be done. Looking into it, we realised that there were sophisticated and effective methods, but also costly ones. The idea came to set up an association that would raise funds to allow these children who are failing, even though they are not mentally deficient, to access them,” they explain. And they observe: “The school system sets up networks of help and support for pupils in difficulty, but there are often too many children for the number of educators, and it doesn’t work for all the kids.”

Tomatis method

This coming Saturday, “Faire échec à l’échec” has therefore invited the sociologist François Dubé, a child psychiatrist, and the representatives of four specialised structures in the metropolitan area, to come and present their work. These are the Montessori school, practitioners of the Tomatis method, kinesiologists and proponents of mental management. “These are methods that allow people to be unblocked, to relearn how to listen, how to concentrate,” explain the young people, who estimate the cost of access to these methods for a child at an average of 10,000 francs a year. In the case of an association-run school, it can be twice as high.

To raise the funds, the Sup’TG students are going to resort to the classic search for sponsors: individuals, companies or local authorities. They are not a little proud of having convinced Élie Baup, the coach of the Girondins de Bordeaux footballers, to sponsor them. “We hope to manage to help two or three young people each year,” they explain.

For the founders of “Faire échec à l’échec” fully intend to pass the torch to other students at the school. “In the first and third years, you don’t have time to do this kind of project. In the second year, it’s possible. We very much hope to be followed next year.”