Table of Contents

Preface Part I Context 1 Secular, free and compulsory: republican values in French education 2 Education and training in Europe for the year 2010 Part II Aims 3 The ‘loi Jospin’: The Education Framework Act 1989 4 Work, worth, talent 5 Now or never 6 Avoiding the break-up of the French education system Part III Actors 7 Constraints on policy innovation in education: Thatcher’s Britain and Mitterrand’s France 8 Policy implementation in the French public bureaucracy: the case of education 9 Challenging the idea of centralized control: the reform of the French curriculum in a European context 10 Decentralizing the education system: A test for the regions 11 The regions in the educational race 12 A changing focus of power: from the all-powerful state to the user-customer Part IV Structures 13 Nursery education for the two-year-old: social and educational effects 14 Educational homogeneity in French primary education: a double case study 15 A lesson in progress? Primary classrooms observed in England and France 16 Lower secondary education in France: from uniformity to institutional autonomy 17 The educational renovation of the lycée: continuity or change? 18 A sociology of the lycée student 19 Special education in France 20 From the schoolteacher to the expert: the IUFM and the evolution of training institutions Part V Values 21 Principles for reflecting on the curriculum 22 A pair of boots is as good as Shakespeare 23 The educational maelstrom 24 Is differentiated teaching out of date? 25 Academic failure, social failure: teaching in the lost suburbs 26 Scarves, schools and segregation: the foulard affair 27 The child, a citizen at school