360 strategy · Professional case study
Ministry of Education
Rebuilding trust between schools and families at the heart of a national crisis.
- Client
- Ministry of Education
- Context
- Professional case study
- Budget
- €1,000,000
- Duration
- 12 months
A crisis communication case study led by ummni. for the French Ministry of Education: a three-phase strategy with a €1 million budget over 12 months, designed to rebuild families’ trust after fatal accidents during mandatory high-school internships.
The problem
550,000 families lost trust in a single sentence.
In 2025, six minors died during mandatory Year 11 internships. Families denounced a lack of preparation and supervision. Unions called for the scheme to be scrapped. A bill was tabled to end it.
The internship, meant as a first discovery of the working world, became within months a subject of grief, anger and national debate - for 550,000 students and around 1.5 million parents every year.
No statement was possible before proving anything: any premature communication would have been read as exploitation.
The idea
Strategic angle
Protect first,
prove next,
communicate last.
Three stages: Acknowledge → Prove → Re-engage.
“The government stands with its stakeholders and wants to learn again, together with them.”
0 national accident register
No official system recorded internship accidents before this crisis. Rather than a weakness to hide, we made it the foundation of the response: creating what did not exist.
The approach
An observatory, a label, and a seat at the table for those who were accusing.
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Phase 1
Acknowledge
Founding the Observatory
- National observatory for internship safety
- Steering committee including unions and parents’ associations
- Ministerial statement of acknowledgement
-
Phase 2
Prove
The reassurance label
- “Mon Stage Serein” label
- Credibility based on students’ post-internship surveys
- Rolled out to schools and companies
-
Phase 3
Re-engage
Giving students their voice back
- “550,000 stories to tell” video contest
- “Entre Nous” internal campaign
- Correcting the gap between lived experience and media coverage
Lessons learned
The absence of a system can become the core of a strategy.
The insight that guided the whole project: students themselves were sharing mostly positive internship experiences online - yet their voice was completely missing from media coverage, dominated by grieving families, unions and politicians.
This gap between lived experience and its public representation became the backbone of the re-engagement phase.