The École nationale d'administration (ÉNA), one of the French graduate schools, was created in 1945 by Charles de Gaulle to democratise access to the senior civil service. The founding principles of the Ecole nationale d’administration are to broaden access to the highest executive levels of government service, and to provide professional training for senior civil servants.

Hence, the school’s principal responsibility is to recruit and train the men and women who will make public service a living institution and enable it to adapt to ever-changing times. At the same time, the school must pass on the ethics of government service to its graduates, based on the values of responsibility, political neutrality and selfless service. 

The ENA produces around 100 graduates every year, known as énarques. ENA is seen as the method of choice to reach the administrative Grand Corps of the State.

In sixty years of existence, ENA has trained more than 6 500 French senior civil servants and more than 3000 foreign nationals. More than a hundred nationalities are represented at ENA each year, and in addition to these 1300 people make study visits to the school.

The ENA is often compared at the EU level to the College of Europe in Belgium, with which it shares several traditions. In 2002 the Institut international d'administration publique (IIAP) which educated foreign civil servants under a common structure with ENA was fused with it.

ENA provides its students with a double set of tools:

• expertise in all the areas of government operations, using a broad approach that cuts across ministerial or specialist lines and includes law, public finance, applied economics, European and international issues, the administration of government policy in domestic regions and e-government.
   
• public-sector management, including team and project management, monitoring and evaluating efforts involving multiple agencies, and human resources management, all in a constantly changing environment.

 

ENA’s Areas of Expertise

• A core curriculum for high-level civil servants, from France and abroad;
   
• Continuing education programmes and advanced training for French and overseas civil servants through short and long training courses;
   
• Bilateral European and international relations in the areas of governance and public administration;
   
• Training in European issues and preparation for the competitive civil service examinations for the European community institutions.

 

International Cooperation

ENA is recognized the world over as a major player in the area of international administrative cooperation to promote good government in the public sector. It has relationships with administrations and schools for training high-level civil servants in over 120 countries on five continents. 

ENA offers its partners abroad a broad range of tailor-made programs of cooperation:

• it welcomes delegations from abroad;
• it organizes study visits on request, ranging from several days to one month and including lectures, meetings and visits centered on a specific theme ;
• it sends expert teams abroad to evaluate governments’ needs in terms and training and assistance in administrative modernization;
• it provides pedagogical consulting to help in the creation and modernization of schools for civil servants, including advice on recruitment, training, documentation and training of instructors;
• it creates à la carte seminars on themes chosen by the requesting institution or country;
• it offers on-the-job experience (stages) in the French government, including ministries, prefectures, decentralized services and local governments;
• it provides technical assistance programs, managed either multilaterally or bilaterally.