The promotion of Lifelong Learning (LLL) by the OECD and the European Union is part of a set of discourses and policies aimed at adapting national education systems to contemporary forms of the labour market (Verdier, 2017). LLL establishes an individual right to benefit from training not only initially but at different times during occupational careers. Breaking away from a linear conception of educational and professional pathways as a succession of irreversible choices, LLL is a consensual ideal combining the axiological principle of equal opportunities and a pragmatic concern for employability.

Sociological research has well-documented the socially stratified nature of educational paths and underlined that education systems, while displaying meritocratic principles, contribute to reproducing social inequalities both in access to training and in the acquisition of credentials (Bourdieu, Passeron, 1977). Over the last twenty years, researchers have also pointed out the intensification of competition between training institutions and between students and families and the growing importance of personal qualities alongside academic degrees and technical skills (Brown et al., 2004; 2010). These two dimensions are strongly present in the French system which combines a persistence of features associated with conservative welfare states (Esping-Andersen, 1990) with a pragmatic introduction of market mechanisms (Fourcade-Gourinchas, Babb, 2002; van Zanten, 2019). 

This paper will present the first results of an ongoing research on the influence of discourses about LLL and employability and of market mechanisms on the emergence, at the regional level, of new ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ devices (Simioni, Steiner, forthcoming), offering both ‘impersonal’ and ‘personal’ information and advice (Karpik, 2010) to young people planning to go on to higher education (HE). Political regions have since 1981 obtained new competences in the area of education, including recently the provision of guidance information to secondary school students. This regionalization of guidance is part of a major national reform of access to HE in a context characterised by widespread competition between applicants and providers (Frouillou et al., 2020, forthcoming). 

While a study conducted a few years ago pointed out that the French political regions resorted primarily to an egalitarian rhetoric in the 2000s (Dupuy, 2020), we will emphasize that the fight against inequalities now occupies a marginal place in their discourses and actions concerning guidance to higher education. Both because of their historical competencies and close supervision of regional economic development and vocational training and because they delegate many of their activities to private actors or various forms of public-private partnerships (PPPs), Regions prioritize discourses and actions towards disadvantaged youth focusing on rapid access to the labour market and training pathways that guarantee their employability. 

In order to document these processes, we will focus on two main policy instruments (Lascoumes and Le Galès, 2007) created or supported by the Ile-de-France (IdF) Region. The first is a regional digital platform, ORIANE, that students and workers alike can use to get not only information but also advice concerning the best higher educational tracks or occupations for them according to their previous educational trajectories and to their personal profiles. This platform is managed by the regional political authorities but integrates information provided by regional public and private actors alike. The second is an outreach programme, “cordées de la réussite” aiming at raising the aspirations and at providing personal advice and support to disadvantaged students planning to continue into HE. This programme was launched at the national level in 2008 by the Minister of higher education, Valérie Pécresse, who became, in 2015, the president of the IdF region. Since then, she has provided strong financial and political support to the programme, which is presently implemented in 88 regional lycées.

The data and analyses presented in the paper are part of an on-going research we are currently conducting on regional guidance policies. Our research design is based on the realistic evaluation approach (Pawson, Tilley, 1997). This approach aims first to highlight the explicit and implicit objectives of a policy by reconstructing the theory of action on which it is based, and then to study its implementation and consequences in an in-depth manner, paying particular attention to the diversity of contexts and audiences concerned. In view of the plurality of levels of analysis that we planned to combine (policy design, implementation, reception and outcomes) we chose to conduct a comprehensive and in-depth study of a single Region, IdF, where Paris is located. This choice was guided not only by convenience and familiarity, but also by the fact that it is France’s more populated region (more than 12 million inhabitants) as well as the richest, exhibiting a very high and varied concentration of HE institutions and employment opportunities. An additional and key reason is that it is also one of the most advanced Regions in the construction of an ambitious guidance policy. Indeed, in May 2019, IdF adopted a "regional strategy for lifelong information and guidance" presenting the main focus of its guidance policy for the coming years and its main instruments, including the digital platform ORIANE and support for cordées de la réussite. The presentation will use data from the analysis of official regional policy discourses and documents delivered during the last five years (2015-2020) as well as from 15 interviews we are presently conducting with political (president and elected representatives) and administrative regional actors involved in the definition and implementation of the guidance policy, notably to highlight the emergence of advocacy coalitions (Sabatier, Weible, 2007) involving both public and private actors and structuring regional socio-political conflicts in the field of guidance. It will also use data from an analysis of the main types of information and advice provided by the digital platform and from an analysis of website documentation and interviews with persons in charge of two “cordées de la réussite” located in two prestigious HE institutions.

The presentation will show how the study of the guidance policy of the IdF Region can enrich existing analysis of the management of HE pathways in France but also in other European contexts. It will highlight the neo-liberal shift in French educational policy where a traditional focus on optimizing the matching between hierarchically differentiated institutions and students’ ‘aptitudes’ and projects is now combined with the organization of competition between providers and students (van Zanten, 2019). It will also emphasize the contribution of regional policies to the optimization of matching and competition in occupations and sectors playing a key role at the regional level. We will describe how young people are channeled in specific directions not only by the national digital platform that manages applications to HE but by the regional one which only aims to provide additional information and advice, and how these two platforms present and orchestrate competition between providers and students. We will also show how the regional platform encourages young people to choose HE vocational tracks directly related to regional needs in blue-collar and low-level white collar jobs. We will also show how the intervention of private actors in the outreach programme leads to a hybrid discourse on raising aspirations and developing the social skills requested private employers. Our conclusion will emphasize how LLL premises and ideas are instrumentalised in the French context to fit with national and regional goals rather than to empower young students and workers.

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