Socialist Educational Association

1966 and all that:

a revolution in higher education that is yet incomplete 

Eric E Robinson

The polytechnic policy of the first Wilson government in the mid-1960s was much maligned, even ridiculed, both at its start and subsequently, as a foolish expedient to expand higher education ‘on the cheap’ by creating a divisive ‘half-baked’ (Robbins and Ford, 1965: 13) binary system.  It proved to be one of the most radical and successful policies ever implemented by a Labour government, successful and radical beyond even the expectations of those who formulated it.  It provided the basis for the foundation of half the present university system and set the pattern for the development of ‘education permanente’ in the UK for the new century.  It is important that the institutions it established (now the ‘new’ or post-1992 universities) do not perceive themselves as supplicants,  mimics, cadets or apprentices of the older established universities but recognise that they come from a different tradition  in the heart of social democracy and can confidently take  the lead  in creating the people’s universities for the 21^st century. This article attempts a review and valuation of the development of the polytechnics and associated colleges and goes on to suggest some implications of this development for the future of the UK education system.  I assert that the importance of this development has been greatly underestimated both in respect of quantity and quality; that it constitutes a revolution in higher education that is yet incomplete; and that a better appreciation of it will give indications for the future.

The non-university sector

After 1945 Britain was slow to awaken to the need for a massive expansion of higher education.  Some growth came from the Further Education and Training Scheme (FETS) for ex-service personnel, but student numbers were flagging by 1954 when David Eccles was made Minister of Education, first by Churchill, then by Eden.  He took several steps to stimulate advanced further education (FE) in local authority colleges – a 75 per cent rate support grant; a 1956 White Paper, Technical Education, leading to the designation of colleges of advanced technology (CATs) and regional colleges; the creation of the National Council for Technological Awards (NCTA, the ‘Hives Council’ which awarded a new degree-level Diploma in Technology) and of the National  Council for Diplomas in Art and Design (NCDAD, the ‘Summerson Council’).  All of this was outside the jurisdiction and control of the universities and the University Grants Committee, which were not the responsibility of the Ministry of Education.

In the late 1950s there was a growing movement towards the creation of new universities.  A University College of Staffordshire had opened (at Keele) in 1949; the University of Sussex followed in 1961 and others were on the way.  This movement, in contrast with development in local authority colleges, was conceived as meeting student demand rather than the demands of the economy – none of the proposed new universities were to offer studies in technology.

By modern standards, the thinking about expansion until 1960 was  small scale.  John Fulton, the first Vice Chancellor of Sussex, talked initially of the university having eventually as many as 800 students and was criticised by his peers for being over-ambitious!   When Burgess and Pratt (1970) reviewed the development of the colleges of advanced technology they found institutions of that same order of size which had not significantly increased their student numbers since designation.  Effectively, they had replaced part-time students by full-timers and upgraded the courses.

In response to Eccles’s policies, some of the leading manufacturers, particularly in the electrical and aircraft industries, had given support to the expansion of technological education.  This included the provision, for example, of financial support for students on sandwich courses offered by the CATs and regional colleges.  But in respect of student numbers in higher education, the most important decision of the 1950s was the government’s acceptance of the Anderson Report (1960), introducing mandatory student grants for degree courses, both in universities and local authority colleges.

By 1960 the stage was set for expansion and when the Prime Minister Harold Macmillan appointed the Robbins Committee the questions effectively before it were not whether but when and how this expansion was to happen.  Virtually no one anticipated the scale or the speed of the change that was to come.

The expansion of British higher education  was huge and dramatic –  in half a century, from 1955 to 2005, it grew by almost 1,000 per cent.  What was particularly dramatic and unexpected was that more than half of this growth came not from the universities but from colleges developed by the local education authorities.  The Robbins Committee in 1963 had stated the conventional wisdom of the time:

‘We attach prime importance to the aim . . . of maintaining, and when possible increasing, the size of the university contribution to higher education.  We cannot assert too strongly that if, in the immediate future, other sectors of higher education afford some temporary easing of pressure, this can only be marginal . . .’ (Robbins, 1963: para 824)

In line with this thinking, most commonly the ‘new’ universities (of circa 1960 – Sussex, York, etc) and the Open University are cited as the most significant innovations of the expansion (see Perkin, 1969, for example).  This is wrong.  Both in scale and in substance, the development of the local authority colleges (colleges of technology, colleges of art, teacher training colleges, colleges of commerce), first through the colleges of advanced technology and subsequently through the polytechnic policy (DES, 1966a) (and cognate developments in Scotland and Northern Ireland) is by far the most significant.  This sector evolved most of the radical innovation and best anticipated the needs of higher education for the 21^st century.

Overcoming the ‘Robbins inhibition’

Britain is proud of its pragmatism but is reluctant to think fundamentally, especially in academia, about itself.  The Robbins Committee (1963) recommended massive growth notwithstanding thinking that was remarkably conservative about universities and their role in society.  Robbins assumed that huge expansion need involve no new thinking about the nature of universities and the nature and significance of the degree.  Peculiarly English terminology and practice – ‘pass’, ‘ordinary’ and ‘honours’, the three-year norm, national catchment, narrow specialist curricula, academic and vocational demarcation – were taken as immutable.  Europe, race, disability and computing got hardly a mention and there was no vision of the economy and society of the future.

Most revealing about the thinking of Robbins (1963) is paragraph 438 of the Report:

‘The question remains whether degrees should be made available for students taking courses in art.  While degrees are not appropriate to mark achievement in executive subjects, there are aspects of art, as of music, for which degrees are quite appropriately given. Any institution that becomes autonomous should of itself be able to consider whether to give degrees when the courses are of an appropriate academic nature.  But the main stream of art education provided in the public system of further education should be well served by the Diploma in Art and Design and the Scottish diplomas’ (my italics).

Robbins did not define his term ‘executive subjects’ but his statement can fairly be simplified as meaning that degrees (and hence studies carrying status in higher education) should be awarded not for effective action but for effective writing, possibly including writing about action.  This sums up what was a common thinking in the universities of his day – in Britain – and was hugely limiting.  I shall refer to it as  ‘the Robbins inhibition’.  It devalued creativity.  It distorted the curriculum in some fields such as engineering.  It limited cooperation between industry and the universities, particularly in respect of development and design.  As an abstract principle it may have had some merit but it was not compatible with the needs of the day and Robbins himself compromised it in other parts of the Report (for example, in his recommendation that the NCTA should evolve into the CNAA to award degrees in ‘executive subjects’).

This thinking was not shared in most of the colleges outside the universities.  Robbins regarded these colleges as mere practitioners of vocational education that was essentially inferior to academic education.  In fact, the colleges inherited a much more eclectic tradition from technical schools, mechanics institutes and night schools – a more street-wise tradition in which ‘action’ was not naively identified with wage labour and ‘vocational’ not necessarily considered incompatible with ‘liberal’ (Robinson, 1968, ch 4; 1988).  Also, their tradition was one of service, of meeting demand, in contrast to the universities’ autonomous, self-serving tradition of recruiting members to meet its aspirations (Pratt and Burgess, 1974).  This tradition was important in enabling the colleges to respond much more flexibly than the universities to the challenge of creating a mass higher education system, including even new forms of academic education!

Much of the development in the colleges and subsequently the polytechnics took by surprise those in high places in government and academia.  Believing in their ignorance, often reinforced by snobbery, that the colleges were simply technical training centres, they were entirely unprepared for their rapid growth of courses in the humanities, the social sciences and business studies.  This, in part, helped the colleges because the complacency of the authorities gave them freedom from interference. 

The creation of the National Council for Technological Awards (NCTA) in 1955 and its evolution into the Council for National Academic Awards (CNAA) in 1964 offered the colleges the opportunity to create entirely new degree-level curricula free of the Robbins inhibition.  The 1966 polytechnic White Paper (DES, 1966a) guaranteed them a secure future and they seized the opportunity.  Generally they created new curricula whilst the established universities were adapting existing curricula (to meet a new situation!).  The ‘new’ universities (Sussex et al) and the Open University had similar opportunities to the polytechnics to escape the Robbins inhibition but generally they preferred the safer academic route.  The way was left open for the CATs and polytechnics to create first degree programmes in such fields as business studies, marketing, computing, production engineering, industrial design, quantity surveying, landscape architecture, fine art, music, catering , tourism, journalism, drama, nursing and so many more fields not formerly developed in universities.  The CNAA created procedures for validating degree programmes with a thoroughness never attempted in the universities.       

The imperative of innovation facilitated speed of development.  This was exemplified, for example, in the introduction of computing into the undergraduate curriculum.  The NCTA was urging colleges to do this in many first Diploma in Technology programmes in the late 1950s when the computer was regarded by most universities as merely research equipment. 

In many fields (eg social work, accounting, journalism, education) the polytechnics pioneered new approaches (notably in the sandwich courses) to the design of the integrated curriculum of professional education and training in which the universities had been and continued to be inhibited (except notably in medical education).  As they grew in confidence, the polytechnics then led the way in creating wide-ranging new opportunities for postgraduate study related to or even integrated with work developing in the student’s field of employment – in industry, business or public service.  In this work most particularly, their long tradition of working to meet demand was invaluable.

The city centre location of the polytechnics was vital to the expansion of part-time education – of which those who created the ‘new’ universities were oblivious.  As late as 1960, government was regarding part-time education as an evil of the past and the CATs had been encouraged to discontinue it.  The polytechnics developed many part-time programmes specifically designed for mature students, taking into account their work needs and work experience.  Generally, part-time university opportunities formerly available had been in programmes designed for school-leavers.

In many of their new developments the polytechnics were eventually followed by some of the older established universities, but the inhibitions remain to this day.  ‘Accounting is not really a suitable subject in which to award degrees’ was an Oxford  comment recently offered in a BBC programme.  Although the media constitute a significant part of the modern economy, ‘media studies’ is a popular Aunt Sally – as though it were not obvious that newspapers, radio and television were best run by amateurs.  Bradford University (formerly a CAT) led the way in developing foreign language studies in a contemporary context and was followed by many polytechnics.  Up to that time it had been common for university degree teaching in French or German to be conducted mainly in English and for students to graduate with no fluency in speaking the foreign language!  The University of East Anglia was notably successful in overcoming the Robbins inhibition with its degree programme in creative writing but this seems to be an exception that proves a rule.

In this country the creation of degree programes by credit accumulation was pioneered by the Open University.  This was followed by many polytechnics, and it created new possibilities of transfer of students between one institution and another and between full-time and part-time study. 

A highly significant feature of the expansion of universities is that, amongst the higher social classes, university education is now the norm. According to one minister: 

‘if you come from the top two socio-economic groups , you’ve an 80 per cent chance of going to university.  If you come from the bottom two, it’s only 20 per cent.  In the fourth richest economy in the world in the 21^st century, this is unacceptable'  (Rammell, 2005).   

So much for the traditional and still widespread assumption that only a small minority are capable of benefiting from university education, and so much for any idea that 50 per cent take-up of higher education will imply the end of social imbalance!

A great increase in take-up from the lower social groups depends on new approaches to access to higher education.  In dealing with this challenge the polytechnics took the lead but there is still a long way to go.  They relaxed entry requirements without lowering degree standards; they encouraged entry through FE colleges, in particular by recognising college certificates previously not recognised by universities (ONC, OND, HNC, HND, teachers’ certificate, professional certificates and diplomas); they acknowledged work experience particularly for mature students; they admitted part-time students through ‘link’ arrangements with FE colleges; they developed new ‘access’ courses.  In all this they proved beyond doubt that limiting access to the traditional route through school sixth forms unnecessarily excludes many potentially successful students.

Yet, under the leadership of politicians and others schooled in the older universities, Britain is slow to realise that the change from a system catering for the education of 4 per cent of the population in the 1960s to one now meeting the needs of 40 per cent necessarily makes a qualitative change in the nature of its educational practice and institutions, not merely a change of scale.  Past society may have needed 4 per cent ‘officers’ and 96 per cent ‘men’ but in what thinking does modern society need 40 per cent officers and 60 per cent men?  It was perhaps reasonable and practical for 4 per cent of the population to attend a kind of boarding school for three post-adolescent years, but by what reasoning is it sensible for half the population to do this – or indeed not to do it?

The most significant success in access policy was the polytechnics’ and associated colleges’ leading contribution to giving the UK perhaps the best record in the world in its enrolment in higher education of ethnic minority students.  The UK boasts surprisingly little about this.  Much of it has been achieved by student recruitment from the FE colleges rather than school sixth forms.  Maybe if it had been achieved by the older universities, great play would have been made.  Statistics on this are little publicised and the very collection of them has been strongly resisted, probably because the government can claim little credit for it and because the contribution of the older universities to this achievement has been small.  Nevertheless, Pratt (1997: 64-65) showed that polytechnics and colleges in 1990 and 1991 had a higher proportion of ethnic minority students (14 per cent of admissions to degree courses) than the universities (8 per cent).  The data may overstate the universities’ contribution: it is not uncommon for universities to include overseas students in an ethnic count, thus hiding their failure with home students.  I commend this as a field in which useful research should be done.

The polytechnics also significantly contributed to the opportunities for women in higher education.  By 1991, 46 per cent of their students were women (almost treble the 16 per cent in 1970), though some of this growth was by assimilation of former colleges of education (ibid: 57). Over the same period the proportions in universities changed from 28  percent to 45 per cent.  Also insufficiently recognised in high places is the significance of the greatly increased proportion of ‘mature’ students in higher education.  The polytechnics and colleges again pioneered this development.  By 1992 they admitted 100,000 mature full-time students and 172,000 part-timers, compared with 30,000 and 26,000 in the universities.  Around half their full-time students were aged 21 and over on entry (ibid: 69).

Policy failures

The Department of Education and Science had a success in establishing the polytechnic policy and resisting obstruction of it by the universities, but failed in three ways.  First, it ignored geography.  Many local authorities had no polytechnic and no part in the government of one; whereas some quite small local authorities had control of a polytechnic, sometimes even a large one.  Often this was by geographical accident: for example, Essex had no stake in North East London Polytechnic even though it had founded two of its three constituent colleges, taken out of its area by the reorganisation of London government; in Manchester, England’s largest polytechnic was owned by a small LEA, and none of the other metropolitan districts in Greater Manchester had a stake.  Thus the local role in the implementation of a national policy lacked legitimacy.

The Department evaded its responsibilities. In institutional government the polytechnics were in new territory, working to the prescription of the Weaver Report on the government of colleges of education (DES, 1966b).  This introduced substantial participation of elected staff and students in decision making.  It limited the extent of detailed local authority control.  It was a bold attempt to establish a more democratic system of control than existed in British universities and to some extent protected the emerging polytechnics from the ravages of the international student revolt of 1968.  But it failed.  The local authorities, whose representatives had accepted the Weaver Report as the basis for their control of the colleges (and had reiterated this in discussions with the Minister about the government of polytechnics), reneged on the deal done on their behalf and persisted in trying to override the powers allocated to governing bodies.  In two decades of their control, the local authorities’ contribution to the development of the polytechnics was abysmal.  This was a nuisance to the polytechnics but it was disastrous for local government which through this lost much credibility in education and subsequently soon lost control of further education and much power over schools. The Department had toughly negotiated polytechnic articles of government with some reluctant local authorities.  Subsequently, when polytechnic governors complained of local authorities encroaching on their powers, the Department improperly (in fact illegally) declined to intervene.

The Department of Education and Science and other Whitehall departments failed to acknowledge and deal with the fact that the fundamental changes in local government management recommended by the Bains Committee (1972) were incompatible with the existing law on government of schools and colleges in respect of the powers of governing bodies.

There were other failures.  The polytechnics lacked self-confidence and were uncertain about their role.  Many had a vision of a future distinctive from what had gone before whereas others were reluctant to change, for example in clinging for some years to the degree programmes of London University (and other universities, in the case of teacher training).  Some had little vision beyond emulating existing universities as a means of achieving university status.

In art and design most institutions continued to work within the limitations of the Summerson Council long after its incorporation into the much more liberal CNAA.  The incorporation of art colleges into polytechnics was of immense significance that was not generally realised and for a long time little enthusiasm was shown for the natural extension of this by bringing into mainstream higher education many formerly isolated institutions such as colleges of music, drama, nursing and para-medical studies. 

Generally the polytechnics failed to break through the dead hand of the professional institutions (and the Robbins inhibition) in engineering and create bold new approaches desperately needed by the manufacturing industry.  Undergraduate business studies programmes were developed on a large scale by the polytechnics but sadly were pre-occupied with the private sector and failed to give a boost to the studies of management and administration that were desperately needed by the public sector.  Many polytechnics took the lead in creating teaching links with European universities but generally failed to take seriously enough the need to reconcile professional qualifications and higher education practice on the two sides of the Channel.  That this country might learn something useful from across the water sometimes seems remote from our thinking.

The polytechnic policy unfortunately encouraged ‘academic drift’ (Pratt and Burgess, 1974) in further education to the detriment of work of the colleges not deemed to be ‘advanced’, and was thereby damaging to the education of the lower social classes.

The future

As to the future, I comment with some diffidence. The polytechnic tradition still has much to offer and the former polytechnics have understanding and experience that enables them to maintain a lead in the vital newer forms of higher education that they have pioneered.

The fact of the 80 per cent take-up of higher education by the higher social classes means that most of the population has the potential for it – unless we believe that many of the higher class people now in higher education are wasting everybody’s time.  The traditional residential three year full-time academic degree study following sixth form is neither appropriate nor feasible for the majority of the population.   Failing some fundamental rethinking about the nature of higher education, current gestures of the government and the older universities towards redressing social imbalance will remain just that unless either there is further massive university expansion or student numbers from the higher social classes are substantially reduced.  It would increase variety in universities if some of them were to maintain and reassert the service tradition.  They would, for example, not seek to enrol the ‘best’ students but, if they had to choose, select those they felt would most benefit from their university education.

For many reasons, higher education will involve an ever increasing number of mature students both for initial and refresher courses.  Already, if only for financial reasons, a large proportion of full-time students are effectively part-time because they depend on part-time work.  An increasing proportion of education of adults will be part-time and, particularly for women with young children, there is a need for ‘mixed mode’ programmes  – courses which can be pursued by a mixture of full-time and part-time study.  Ideally, universities would develop programmes which offer a continuum of modes of study and would permit easy transfer from one university to another.  The future is part-time or mixed mode and the future is local.  In future, students will not be seen as a race apart.   People will be students and students will be people.

The traditional and current university preoccupation with middle class school-leavers assumes that they are completely mobile, hence the central admissions system for undergraduate admissions.  This militates against local catchment and thus discriminates against students who are not mobile, including most mature students.  We should slaughter some sacred cows.  Some universities should consider terminating their participation in this system and make it clear to all that they are not in the business of competing for ‘posh’ students.

Universities that come from the polytechnic tradition have particular reason not to participate in or encourage the current fashion of giving priority to student applicants according to A-level grades.  There are several reasons for saying this.  Any excessive preoccupation with exam results corrupts education, as the schools are complaining.  A-levels are an archaism dating back to the time when sixth forms were in effect undertaking first-year university academic studies.  For many, possibly most, students enrolling in new universities, the subjects of their sixth form studies do not provide a particularly relevant basis for their university studies and in effect their A-level successes are merely used as a general education qualification, for which it is highly unsuitable.  As general education, most sixth form courses are desperately poor.  The premature specialisation forced on young people in sixth forms is possibly, by international comparison, the worst feature of British education.  (I say this as a bitter victim of it: I was in full-time education until the age of 21 but followed no studies in English, languages or the humanities beyond the age of 14.)  For university admissions tutors to attach great value to grades at A-level makes all this worse than ever.

We sometimes hear of the gold standard of the British university degree.  There is no such thing.  A degree is what we get if we attend a university for three years and conform.  Two A-levels and three years of full-time study are a proxy for standards – a comment made many years ago by a visiting Canadian academic.

A degree is a certificate of social status and this is why three years is so vital.  This is what rules out the possibility of going to university for one year or two years without being classed as a drop-out or a failure.  Equally nonsensical (and another curiously British archaism) is the chaos of honours and honours classification – the absurdity of labelling someone for life on a five-point scale by a process riddled with inconsistency.  One day a group of universities should sweep away much of the degree baggage of English higher education and introduce a system of transcripts recording student achievement, in effect a certificate of higher education.

Finally in finance, we should start again.  The current situation is unstable and indefensible.   The government’s recent policies for tuition fees and student loans are born of short-term expedient and compromise; they are based on no clear principles and their figures do not add up.  There is confusion about priorities and costs as between teaching and research.  The government’s thinking about universities is superficial and out of date. Who should pay?  How much and why? What are students paying for?  Should students be paying for academic research?  If so, how much and why?  Are academics primarily teachers or researchers?  On what do their career prospects depend?  Is this compatible with institutional priorities or social priorities? 

Higher education expenditure is hugely socially regressive; the rich get much more out of it than the poor.  Will the government publish figures and forecasts about this?   If this is to be changed then how is it to be done?   How will existing policies change it significantly?  If not, then what? 

The persistent English idea of a university as an extension of boarding school makes our higher education unnecessarily expensive.  Universities should not be regarded as advanced schools.  Students are not children.  Universities should not be attempting to make provision for all the needs of their students.  England should learn from Europe, and even Scotland, about students being adults.

University teaching should support learning by students; it should not lead them by the nose.  A school place is a seat in a classroom.  A university place is a figment of the administrative imagination.  Students do much of their studying at home and can use university accommodation, if made available, without supervision for seven long days a week, 52 weeks a year.  Specialist accommodation and equipment is needed by some students and it may be necessary to limit student numbers (assuming this accommodation and equipment is fully used).  Otherwise accommodation for study and teaching is not a problem.  Much of it is empty for most daylight time.

Serious limitation of resources is of labour  – of teachers and support staff.  A university can choose to take all the students who wish to come and do the best it can with the staffing resources it has.  Or it can set standards of the level of staff support it will offer to students and thereby determine how many students it will accept.  Generally, at least in recent years, the English universities have taken the latter approach.  The polytechnic tradition was much more the former.  It would now be useful and appropriate for some universities to reaffirm that (open) tradition.  This would be entirely compatible with the adoption of a continuum mode of attendance approach defined above. 

The recent thinking about financing higher education has been hidebound by the school concept, of requiring students to take a whole package (and now charging them for a large fraction of that) – a waiter service of table d’hote.  But not every student needs the same package.  The charging of tuition fees invites a response (which will be not long in coming) from students about value for money, about efficiency, about restrictive practices, about abuse of monopoly, about conditional selling.

We need to change to a cafeteria, a la carte, service.  When they have to pay, students will rightly want value for money and they will want to decide which services they need.  An open system should give students access to the curriculum and provide at a reasonable price substantial documentation of that curriculum and of the system of assessment for examinations.  The student would then decide which support services he or she wished to have (and maybe even opt to proceed by private study!).  Ultimately a certification of educational achievement, be it degree or diploma, should be simply that.  If the student can achieve a standard, the means whereby he made it should be a matter for him or her to decide and should not be conditional on membership of an educational institution and submission to its rituals and restrictive practices.

A clear implication of much of what I have said is that universities should become much more local in character than at present.  With the cooperation, already established, of the FE colleges in their region, many ‘new’ universities could make themselves open to all – not merely the elite, the wealthy and the meritorious – in their region who are motivated to learn.  They maybe would have to pay for teaching and for facilities but they would not have to pay for access.  This would be the university of the future, the peoples’ university.

Address for correspondence

Eric E Robinson, 8 Roundwood Avenue, Reedley, Burnley, BB10 2LH.

Email: eric@eerobinson.wanadoo.co.uk         

Note

This is an edited version of a public lecture delivered at the University of Central Lancashire on 19 January 2007.

References

Anderson Report (1960) Grants to Students, London: HMSO

Bains Committee (1972) The New Local Authorities: Management and Structures, London: HMSO

Burgess, T and Pratt, J (1970) Policy and Practice: The Colleges of Advanced Technology, London: Allen Lane (The Penguin Press)

Department of Education and Science (DES) (1966a) A Plan for Polytechnics and other Colleges, London: HMSO

Department of Education and Science (DES) (1966b) Report of the Study Group on the Government of Colleges of Education, London: HMSO [The Weaver Report]

Perkin, H J (1969) Innovation in Higher Education: New Universities in the United Kingdom, Paris: OECD

Pratt, J and Burgess, T (1974) Polytechnics: A Report, London: Pitman

Pratt, J (1997) The Polytechnic Experiment: 1965-1992, Buckingham: Open University Press

Rammell, B (2005) The Guardian, 29 November

Robbins Report (1963) Higher Education, London: HMSO

Robbins, Lord and Ford, B (1965) 'Report on Robbins', Universities Quarterly, 20 (1)

Robinson, E E (1968) The New Polytechnics, Harmondsworth: Penguin

Robinson E E (1988) ‘The Polytechnics: 20 years of “social control”’, Higher Education Review, 20 (2): 17-26