Miriam E David
The Robbins Report on Higher Education was published 50 years ago, in October 1963, so this autumn there have been several  celebratory anniversary events – at the London School of Economics (LSE), where Sir Lionel Robbins was then a professor of economics, here at the Institute of Education, and most recently at the Centre for Higher Education and Equity Research (CHEER) at the University of Sussex.
The topics of gender and equality in higher education were absent from the first two, but this lacuna was more than amply filled by the last. In a superb analysis of what she called “the genealogy of the woman student”, Professor Carole Leathwood, director of the Institute for Policy Studies in Education (IPSE) at London Metropolitan University, examined the way women at the time were considered entirely in relation to men as sexual and social beings. She had undertaken a documentary study of Robbins, newspapers and Carol Dyhouse’s Students: A Gendered History (2005). Young women students were seen as ‘dolly birds’, available on ‘the marriage market’ rather than for the labour market.
Interestingly, the Robbins report never once considered women in the academic profession, as lecturers or researchers, nor the question of homosexuality. Carole Leathwood argued, though, that the report did raise the issue of the adult learner along with the mature woman student.
I talked about the position of female and male students then and now, contrasted with that of female academics, drawing on a pamphlet written for the anniversary by David Willetts, the Minister for Universities and Science. Willetts had had the figures re-analysed by government statisticians. These showed most clearly a changing gender balance from female students comprising 25% of the then student body of less than a quarter of a million, to about 55% of undergraduates today, when there are more than 10 times as many – well over 2 million in the UK.
Willetts acknowledges the changes but he does not comment on academia. Whilst these changing student figures mirror international studies, such as UNESCO’s Atlas of Gender Equality in Education (March 2012), they show that women in academia tend to disappear  the more they are educated. She Figures, statistics from the European Union, makes this point very strongly as do two contrasting reports of the now independent UK Equality Challenge Unit. It publishes annual statistics on staff and students in higher education across the UK in separate volumes. What I find most alarming is that gender inequality is rampant amongst staff in UK universities, with 80% of professors being white men, whilst gender equality is so normative amongst students, it is no longer worthy of comment.
Professors Valerie Hey and Louise Morley, both of CHEER, tried to imagine the university of the future, and the position of women academics in it. They envisaged an alternative to austerity, where ethical values, not economic value, are pre-eminent. But the immediate UK policy context remains constricted by an intransigent and intellectually vacuous government. The two key ministers for education – David Willetts for Higher Education and Michael Gove for Schools – vie with each other in presenting the stern and firm smack of ‘back to the future’ government, where ‘boys will be boys’ and girls don’t exist except as bystanders. David Willetts argued that ‘feminism had trumped egalitarianism’ (The Pinch 2011, p. 208) and that men should be encouraged into HE rather than middle class women, whilst Michael Gove ignores discussion of gender even with PISA and insists on a return to traditional selective education where girls and boys had separate provision and separate roles (as described in Robbins).
Professor David’s forthcoming book ‘Feminism, Gender & Universities: Politics, Passion and Pedagogies’ is to be published by Ashgate

Paul Temple

This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Robbins report, or the 1963 Report of the Committee on Higher Education as it’s never called, and we’ll be marking it with a one-day conference at the Institute on 24 October. It’s an anniversary worth celebrating.

From today’s vantage point, we can see Robbins as an early indicator that higher education was moving from the periphery towards the centre of British national life –changing from  picturesque adjunct to essential component. UK university student numbers had grown from 20,000 at the start of the last century to 118,000 when Robbins reported – roughly the combined student populations of Manchester and Leeds today.

The 1963 report marked a wider modernisation, one of a number of developments signalling a break with the immediate post-war years. Philip Larkin, Hull University’s Librarian at the time, later summed it up: “So life was never better than / In nineteen sixty-three / (Though just too late for me) / Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles’ first LP” – though perhaps he wasn’t thinking primarily of the Robbins report.

Although the decisions about founding the 1960s new universities had been made well before Robbins was published (the first, Sussex, opened for business in 1961), it is significant that they are so often associated with the report. Like the report itself, they marked new ways of thinking about higher education, both in curricular terms (Asa Briggs’s “new map of learning” at Sussex), in physical terms (leading architects designing bold new campuses), and in terms of the modestly enlarged entries to higher education that followed their establishment, shortly to be followed by the creation of the polytechnics. Suddenly, higher education looked and felt different.

Parallel modernising changes were taking place in the schools system, overseen by two outstanding ministers: Edward Boyle, the Conservative Minister of Education from 1962-64, and Anthony Crosland, the Labour Secretary of State from 1965-67. As Maurice Kogan notes in his book about the two men, The Politics of Education (1971), they directed the transition from “the assumptions of pre-war education psychology [to those of] the post-war radical sociologists about the extent to which ability could be reliably predicted”. Crosland’s Circular 10/65, which “requested” (not a word now much favoured by Secretaries of State) local education authorities to prepare plans to abolish selection in secondary education was a result. The Robbins-validated expansion of higher education was another response to this dawning realisation (to quote Kogan again) “that access to the more favoured forms of education was differentiated according to social class” – not to ability.

Robbins cleared the way intellectually for the expansion of higher education by driving a stake through the heart of the “more means worse” argument – though, like one of the undead in a cheap horror movie, it nevertheless emerges regularly from its grave. What Robbins’s research showed about what he called “the so-called pool of ability” was that entry to university largely depended not on innate ability, but on your father’s occupation: 45% of children whose father was in a “higher professional” occupation went into full-time higher education, compared with about 2% from families where the father was a manual worker. It was your dad’s job, not how bright you were, that determined whether or not you’d go to university.

The higher education system that we see in Britain today would amaze Robbins in terms of its scale and scope. But its foundations were laid by the work of his committee, and others pressing for social and educational change in the early 1960s. We should use this anniversary to honour their work.

This post is based on a previously published article in the Times Higher Education

Paul Temple
The Institute of Education’s MBA in higher education management  marked its tenth anniversary with a conference on the theme “Managing higher education in the post-2012 era”, with papers given by graduates of the programme.
The title reflected the view that the new student tuition fee regime that begins this year marks the biggest single shift in the financial basis of higher education that the UK – and indeed, we think, any other country – has ever known. In future 2012 will be seen as a milestone year in higher education policy, perhaps on a par with 1963, the year of the Robbins Report, which set the seal on the expansion plans of the 1960s and beyond.
What’s the connection between the MBA and the new tuition fees plan? It is that the idea underlying the MBA, as conceived by its founding directors, Michael Shattock and Gareth Williams, is that the policy environment in which universities operate would become increasingly uncertain, and that both policy analysis skills and the ability to manage change effectively would become key management priorities in higher education.
The years since 2002 have amply justified this view, challenging university managements to an even greater extent than envisaged by the programme’s designers. The government helpfully provided the first MBA intake with its 2003 White Paper – proposing for the first time the introduction of variable tuition fees – as a case study in managing change And the pace has hardly slackened since, right up to the latest 2011 White Paper.
As well as tuition fees, and a continuous debate around their principles and practicalities, research funding has also become more unpredictable as a result of the Research Assessment Exercises of 2001 and 2008 – unpredictable not so much in the RAE findings of where academic excellence was to be found, but in the way that these findings were translated by the Funding Council into funding streams for universities: was the aim to support good work wherever it was found, or to build up a limited number of centres of excellence? Policy veered between the two, with destabilising results.
Regional policy has also affected universities, with first the growth of the Regional Development Authorities and their often substantial support for higher education in their regions, to their subsequent abolition. The growing divergence of higher education policies in Scotland and Wales offers another change in what until recently was a common UK higher education landscape.
We hope that the MBA will continue to offer its participants both a historical perspective on why we are where we are, but more importantly, how we should try to manage our universities to try to get to somewhere else – and perhaps, better.