Higher Education in England and France since the 1980s

This book pays tribute to Professor Margaret Archer ‘as a follow-up to the framework of understanding’ which she developed in Social Origins of Educational Systems (1979). This means that, at times, it is heavy going for the non-sociologists, and indeed gets into gear on page 9 with the following summary of Margaret Archer’s theory: ‘An understanding of educational change from a structural elaborative perspective using a dynamic, yet nondeterministic, time dimension . ’! But one needs to persevere and then one is indeed well-rewarded for Cécile Deer provides a neat analysis of the process of change within higher education both in France and England over the last twenty years: her use of the material on English HE is flawless, and (although I am less able to judge) I assume equally flawless for France. Anybody wanting to understand what has happened here to higher education over the last two decades would be hard-pressed to better using this book. Chapter 5 covers ‘Expansion and the Problem of Access’, noting the feature shared by both French and English higher education in their rapid rate of expansion, as each discovered a mass system, and as each has wrestled with issues of equity and equality. Cécile Deer notes that a driver for the expansion of HE has, of course, been the increasing numbers staying on after sixteen in the school systems, and that at times increased levels of unemployment have ‘forced’ the young into higher education. She also notes that, just as ‘Oxford and Cambridge have been repeatedly attacked over their recruitment practices, which have been presented as conservative . ’, so the French higher education system has its equivalent in the grandes écoles where ‘selection is not only present but is fierce’ and where there has been ‘a persistent lack of diversity in the social recruitment of the grandes écoles’ (an equity problem covered up by ‘the politico-administrative élite, the professional élite and the social élite’ of France – no equivalent of Chancellor Brown shouting foul at Oxford over Laura Spence! ). In a chapter on ‘Political Manipulation’ Deer notes again a common theme – ‘the British and French central governments have shared one preoccupation: that of redefining their relationship with academia in an attempt to make it more accountable to internal and external interest groups, that is to say, to those directly concerned with the activities of the institutions, whether they be insiders (academics, students, support staff) or outsiders (central and local government, employers, parents, suppliers, tax-payers). ’ In both countries ‘evaluative procedures as well as forms of decentralisation and centralisation have been instrumental in the hands of central government in their efforts to bring the requisite changes’ (there follows an especially neat account of ‘an accumulation of social resources at central government level’ in England since 1979, i.e. Thatcherite centralisation and the demise of the cosy UGC arrangement as the buffer between State and the then (theoretically) independent universities). She also comments on the fate of English academics: ‘The bargaining position of academics has steadily declined. Not only have academics lost the power to insert themselves in the external decision-making process, but their power has also diminished internally within their own higher education institutions’ (Halsey’s Decline of Donnish Dominion). Meanwhile, in France the hugely significant ‘defining years of French universities and a traumatic one for the French polity’ was, of course, 1968, which has cast a long shadow over the remaining thirty years of the twentieth century. It was not until 1986 that a (failed) attempt was made to impose free-market values on French higher education by right-wing politicians impressed by Reagan in the USA and Thatcher in Britain. The Devaquet Bill was duly defeated by, in the French tradition of political protest, a turnout of six hundred thousand demonstrating students on the streets of Paris in early December 1986; Alain Devaquet soon resigned and the Bill was dropped. French universities