Expansion of Higher Education

The movement towards a mass higher education system can probably be traced to the commissioning of the Robins Report in1963 which recommended the expansion of higher education through the creation of a small number of new Universities - mostly Colleges of Advanced Technology (CATs) - and the establishment of Polytechnics. The process was not without difficulty. Many

Regional Colleges could lay equal claim to university status as CATs - by virtue of the HE level work undertaken. Despite promises to create a further 10 new

Universities (later abandoned) by the late 1960s the university sector had expanded to just under 40 institutions. The HE sector now had a ‘binary divide’ with the newly formed Polytechnics forming the other half of the provision (cf.

Robinson, 1968).

Although this may be taken as the transition point in the move to a system of mass higher education the size and scope of this transition is less certain. For example, Robinson (1968) writing at the time when polytechnics had just been brought into existence states: “The Robbins report...assumed that HE was only for an elite minority and that we should merely try to increase the size of this elite” (p. 12). This point is also amplified by Wolf (2002) who indicates that the Robbins report cited research which concluded that: “even at the most optimistic estimate...it is unlikely that [applications to universities] could rise to more than 8 percent of the

population” (p.180). The report itself concluded that “the percentage of the age group entering full-time higher education...will reach 15 percent towards the end of the first quarter of the twenty first century” (para.183). In fact expansion was to meet this figure by the mid 1970s.

Robbins saw the purposes of higher education as; producing cultivated people; to engage in the search for truth and to transmit a common culture and standards of citizenship. He also tentatively expressed what was clearly a growing political belief that higher education must also help develop employment-related skills (cf.

Anthony Crossland’s ‘Woolwich’ speech 1965 and Lancaster University speech 1967).

The Council for National Academic Awards (CNAA) established in 1964 to validate awards in the new polytechnics also saw the purposes of higher education as sustaining a set of general intellectual capacities (Barnett, 1994:87). ‘Principle 3’ of the CNAA statutes states:

Each student’s programme of study must stimulate an enquiring, analytical and creative approach, encouraging independent judgement and critical self awareness (CNAA, 1989:18).

However contentious the idea of higher education as a principle player in helping to deliver national economic performance through a direct engagement with

industrial economic imperatives, by the late 1960s Britain had established a binary system of higher education and it was becoming clear that the new polytechnics would be required to respond to the growing demands of British industry and increasing political pressure that they should meet such needs (Robinson, 1968; Burgess and Pratt, 1974).

The 1970s brought profound changes to the nature of employment in the UK. Rising levels of unemployment together with previous and long-standing concerns about international competitiveness (discussed earlier) seems to have shifted the focus away from education for the individual and towards education as a key aspect of economic growth and development. In 1972 the Faure report described a world-wide ‘problem’ (sic) in which education - whilst being the second largest item of expenditure in the world’s national budgets, was coming under increasing criticism as being: irrelevant to contemporary needs; too slow to change when technology was changing knowledge with increasing rapidity and too fixated on traditional academic disciplines which, (it was thought academe valued

disproportionately to their current usefulness (UNESCO, 1972). As indicated earlier, such concerns led directly to the Prime Minister’s ‘Ruskin College Speech’ and initiated the radical new approaches which, it was hoped would provided the ‘necessary skills’ (Callaghan, 1975) to meet this challenge.

Drew (1998) points out that there were three main themes advanced at this time as political and economic justifications for adopting skills approaches: rapid social and technological change; the need [because of such changes] for individuals to be highly skilled and to be able to transfer those skills to new situations and the relationship between an individuals’ abilities and the nation's economic

performance (p. 8). The changes to the nature, structure and delivery of vocational training and education in the 1980s (largely confined to 14 to18 year olds and those in further education) began to have an increasing effect on higher education. The CBI which began lobbying government hard for changes to VET (Wolf, 2002) indicated that: “employment considerations needed greater emphasis in planning the development of higher and advanced further education “ (Education, Science and Arts Committee 1980: 329-330). Although most higher education provision remained untouched by the changes which were about to sweep through further education, Drew (1998) indicates that: “Governments from 1980 had little

sympathy with the notion that undergraduates can develop economically useful abilities without deliberate attention to these skills by HE courses” (p.13).

Throughout the 1980s several surveys were conducted which helped to extend the argument beyond further education and into higher education. These surveys suggested that graduates in the UK were under-equipped for employment.

Employers were indicating skills shortages with their graduate employees (Roizen and Jepson, 1985; Brennan and McGeevor, 1987). The white papers which

followed (Working Together, 1986; Higher Education: meeting the challenge, 1987; and Higher Education: A new framework, 1991) were an attempt to redress what were seen as imbalances between the needs of education and those of industry (Assiter, 1995:11). The concept of core skills was reinforced by the influential CBI report of 1989: Towards a Skills Revolution. Other bodies such as BTEC, TVEI and CPVE also began to reinforce the notion of skills gaps, building in a core of related knowledge; skills and qualities into their programmes (Maclure, 1991). Reports and policy documents from the late 1990’s do not appear to be any more helpful in clarifying the picture than previous attempts. Employability skills - skills development in HE published in1998) lists “knowledge about people and organisations” along with “personal attributes” as key skills. The report goes on to state that:

There is little validated understanding of how these skills can be developed in the course of higher education [and that] These skills are also notoriously hard to assess reliably or validly (para 26).

Later reports are little better. Towards a National Skills Agenda (the first report of the national skills task force 1999) further widens the definition of generic (core) skills to include: “Attitudes, discipline, motivation, judgement, leadership and initiative" (para 3.8). It also goes on to indicate that generic skills also cover: “Reasoning skills (scheduling work and diagnosis), work process management skills" and “personal values" (ibid, para 3.8). And in paragraph (5.11) adds in “Teamworking and customer care" as “generic skills lacking in the workforce". The issue of generic skills is discussed in some detail on chapters 5 and 7).

2.14 Summary

This aspect of the work has attempted to provide a background discursive context for the emergence of ‘skills talk’ over the past several years. The rise of the

discourse of skills seems to reflect long standing political and economic concerns about international competitiveness (Wellington, 1987). Principally concerned to raise the ‘effectiveness’ of education in meeting the needs of national economic and industrial imperatives, government and its agencies instigated radical changes in an attempt to engage secondary, further and higher education in a reformist agenda (Wolf, 2002). These radical initiatives appear to have been successful in placing employment - in the form of ‘employability skills’ - as an important

construct in shaping educational policy and practice (Grugulis et al, 2004).

The subsequent rise of the NCVQ, which was predicated on a new understanding of employment derived and work based competence, set the tone for an

understanding of skill, which persists to the present time (Jessup, 1991). National and global concerns about the purposes, function and increasing cost of education coincided with a rapid expansion of higher education. These two concerns - the changing purposes of education and the rising (perceived) need for increased industrial and economic outputs - appear to have been instrumental in driving forward a reformist agenda. The consequence of which would appear to be a fundamental and much more overtly economic and industrial focus which successfully conflated concerns relating to national economic performance, the

particular skills (thought to relate to economic and industrial performance) and higher education - as the mechanism by which this might be done - into one notion (Drew, 1998). The outcome of which seems to be that skills, once (principally) thought to be the business of industry and therefore provided by industry now appear to have been re-focussed as the business of education (Warhurst et al, 2004). The issues relating to the discursive struggle over the definition and meaning of skill are attended to in chapters 4 and 5.