During this period Edufrance came in for other criticism as well, because, in Ms. Dobbs’ opinion, the Agency's creation enabled the government to unload its responsibilities in relation to a policy for foreign students*. In any case, the legal structure chosen, the GIP, provided the government with extensive opportunities for increasing its control over the Agency. This trend has continued right up to the present and has steadily shaped the Agency into a real vehicle for public policy*.

During this first period, there was a striking difference between Edufrance’s difficulties in winning positive recognition amidst widespread criticism and the broadly accepted monitoring function performed by the British agency in the interests of maintaining the quality of the Education UK brand created in 2000; this difference probably stems precisely from the fact that the Education Counselling Service derived no direct benefit from these services while the British Council used them greatly to its advantage, as did British higher education institutions generally*.

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*“Edufrance assumed real leadership, concentrating on itself essentially all the political conflict attendant on the policy modifications in relation to foreign students.";  Dodds A, art .cit., p. 498.

*The founding institutions of this GIP  (which now has over 200 institutional members) were a very limited group of 7 :  the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts et Métiers, the Universities of Nice, Grenoble II, Nancy 1, the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales du Nord.

*To our knowledge, the Education Counselling Service is subsidized in roughly equal shares by the State, educational institutions and the British Council. CampusFrance’s current success can be seen as the successful result of adopting this approach, combining an Agency “seal of approval”, recognition of quality and coordination of mobility players, while leaving to other, private and public, operators (Egide, CNOUS, SFERE, CIUP, in addition to the many FLE centers, some affiliated with universities, others not) the job of directly managing foreign student-related tasks as well as the scholarships and programs inherent to this type of mobility.

In 2001, Odette Trupin’s particularly well documented information report to the French National Assembly concerning France’s foreign educational policy emphasized that the country did not yet have the necessary vehicle for a pro-active policy, following the example of the British Council, which relied on the expertise of the Education Counselling Service, which at the time had 300 advisors under contract, three quarters of whom were affiliated with some fifty British educations institutions.

Ms. Trupin stressed that it was in France’s interest to have "a powerful and autonomous structure like the Deutscher Akademisher Austauschdienst (DAAD) to conduct a policy which is both consistent with the aims of the universities and supported by the government, without falling into the trap of a completely commercial approach*". Already in this period a diagnosis had been made :

« The strict separation between the promotional function and operational management, which the British and the Germans accepted long ago, is not a good incentive and difficult to evaluate in France in terms of results. With regard to scholarships in particular, it is obvious that a complete review is needed: scholarships are currently “sprinkled around” without any overall strategy. Of course, a certain number of scholarships must be available for embassies to award but coordination is essential and Edufrance is the “natural” place for such coordination. This would provide leverage to induce universities to construct an international program. The DGCID’s role would be reduced essentially to managing the Agency, but France would have a real presence on the education market with a single operator. The Agency would be under the joint responsibility of the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and National Education which would evaluate it on the basis of previously established objectives. »

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*Odette Trupin, information report 3204 of June 27, 2001, filed with the French Foreign Affairs Commission, p.23. Among other points contained in the report is the goal of 200,000 foreign students that the International Cooperation and Development Department set as objective attainable in five years; this objective has been largely surpassed (265,000 in 2006).