Q. What you are doing offers a striking contrast with the landscape of cuts in British education, where the number of university places is being reduced, and students have been asked to pay higher tuition fees. You’ve said you are opposed to tuition.

A.
It’s not the French model. I’m not opposed to tuition fees for lifelong learning. Lifelong learning has to come into the universities, but when it does someone has to pay for it.

But for first degrees the French model is quasi-free [French undergraduates pay tuition of €174 a year.] This is our national culture. This is what we pay taxes for. There is also an agreement made with French families when they had all these children, because we have a lot of large families. And when they had these children 20 years ago they had them thinking the universities are going to be free for them. It’s a question of trust. So I stand up for a model where tuition fees are not high. We were so late in investing in universities. We were so late in reforming universities. And it’s difficult to do reform without financial incentives. It was really important that universities understand in France — and French people understand — that reform is not always punitive.