The University of Provence's collaborative activities with British partner institutions have been steadily expanding in quantitative terms over the past 10 years; they have also branched out in new directions, involving a wide range of academic fields in both the sciences and the humanities, in research and teaching activities, thereby opening up prospects of intensified and diversified collaboration in the future. The University of Provence enjoys academic partnerships with over 40 universities across the United Kingdom, although with a deficit in Wales and in Northern Ireland, which we hope to be able to remedy in the near future. This chapter offers an assessment of the University of Provence's collaborative activities with its British partners, with a view to bringing out the strengths and successes of our cooperation with UK institutions but also to identifying those aspects of it which can be improved. We also look at prospective partnerships in the short to medium term, as well as longer-term projects and ambitions for the development of scientific and academic collaboration between the University of Provence and British universities.

Bilateral Exchange Programmes: Erasmus

Partnerships

The Erasmus exchange programme accounts for 37 partnerships with British universities, a large majority of which (27) involve the

Department of British Studies (DEMA) and the Department of Applied Languages (LEA). The other schools and departments involved are:

• • in the Arts and Humanities Faculty, the master's degree course in European Studies, the Departments of French as a Foreign Language, French Studies, Ethnology, Sociology, Philosophy, History, Linguistic Science and Visual Arts;

• • in the Science Faculty, the Departments of Mathematics, Physical Science, Computer Science and Civil Engineering, and Computer-Generated Imagery.

Student Mobility

Student mobility has proved fairly stable in recent years, with a steady flow of outgoing students matched by a stable intake of incoming students (Table 1).

Staff Mobility

Unlike student mobility, staff mobility with our British partner institutions tends to remain marginal: in 2008/09, only two weeks of staff mobility out of the 13 weeks available were effectively carried out, with the University of Exeter and Middlesex University, London.