Partnerships seem to be the name of the game these days. Nowhere more so than in academia. But let's first set that in context.

At 16 per cent, the United Kingdom's proportion of foreign students is large by international standards, but the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), with two-thirds of its students drawn from outside the United Kingdom, is an even more graphic illustration of the global village which is now higher education.

I am pleased to say that French students now account for some 400 of an LSE student body of around 9000. So it is a substantial proportion – and a steadily growing one, having doubled over the last 10 years. This growth has to be seen against the background of the increase in joint and double degrees offered by British universities of the elite Russell Group, of which ‘Europe’ takes the lion's share. But, that said, the overall number of bilateral programmes as such remains rather modest, compared with the number of programmes which have a multilateral Erasmus Mundus component.

For the LSE, three partnerships form the core of our ‘French strategy’: first (and in no order of precedence), our relationship with our partner institution in the social sciences, Sciences Po, Paris; second, our relationship with the school of management, HEC; and, third, our research programme with Toulouse 1 – specifically through the Paul Woolley Centres for the Study of Capital Market Dysfunctionality. The further development of these partnerships is as strong a priority for us as our work in progress with other first-division universities around the world, such as Columbia, New York University (NYU), Beijing, Cape Town and the National University of Singapore.

Starting with Sciences Po – our most extensive partnership – we have attempted to build on the tried-and-tested principle that the most successful marriages tend to be ones where the partners have a lot in common, including plenty of shared interests. With our specialisation in the social sciences and intimate engagement with the world of public policy, LSE and Sciences Po – two institutions with very different funding models – have been able to pool our strengths and we have, I believe, come up with pedagogical offerings which are more than the sum of their parts. Together we offer double degree master's programmes in International Relations, European Studies, Development Economics, and Urban Policy.