I spent all of this morning, together with approximately five hundred other anxious (and then relieved and proud)  parents, at my daughter’s school for the proclamation du baccalaureat. There were speeches and musical interludes (provided by brilliantly gifted young musicians) and then the names of the 223 bacheliers were read out and each made his or her way up to the podium to receive the certificate. Among the speeches was an excellent one made by European Commission Vice-President Maros Sefcovic. He told the bacheliers passionately that it was ‘a duty of each generation to change the world’. ‘You’ve been born with laptops and mobile phones in your hands… you don’t know what it is to be racist…’ But perhaps the most touching phrase was made by one of the student representatives, a young lady whose name I didn’t catch. She told her fellow bacheliers that ‘You should in your own way put stars on our blue flag.’ I am sure they will. (The photograph shows proud father with happy daughter and the equally happy son, Matthieu, of a Committee colleague.)