by Paul Temple
Mike Shattock and I are at present working on a book on English higher education policy from 1963 to the 2024 general election (forthcoming from Bloomsbury, since you ask). Our start date was set for us by the publication in that year of the Robbins report (Committee on Higher Education, 1963), which offers a classical model of “rational” policy formulation, identifying choices based on knowledge of various kinds, supported by testable data, and located in a defined organisational and policy environment. Distinctively, the report addressed both what universities should do, and how they should do it. Perhaps most crucially for the future of British higher education, it demolished the “pool of talent” argument, which claimed that only a fixed proportion of the population would be able to benefit from a university education, and so substantial expansion would pointlessly “dilute” the quality of existing provision. It was remarked at the time that it was indeed a happy coincidence that the size of the “pool of talent” in Britain exactly matched the number of existing university places. Taking this and other research findings, the Robbins Committee proposed a scheme of expansion of higher education in Britain that received cross-party support in Parliament, and created the structure that, in large measure, survived into the twenty-first century.
Simply to outline the work of the Robbins Committee is to invite nostalgia for a bygone age of policy-making, in Britain and probably most Western countries. Rory Stewart, a former minister in the Conservative administration of Boris Johnson, serving between 2015 and 2019, describes how he came to realise that, in different ministerial roles, his task was not to devise and implement policies in order to achieve actual performance improvements in his areas of responsibility – variously, air pollution and prisons – but to present anticipated failures in these fields in the most politically-helpful way: government as performativity (Stewart, 2023). Pathways to improvement in the areas of Stewart’s responsibilities were well-understood within the relevant professional groups, but were blocked by political and organisational obstacles, not least, as Stewart recognised, by the short-term nature of ministerial appointments and changing political priorities, set against the long timescales for change in most areas of public policy. Stewart came to realise that attempts to overcome these obstacles in the time likely to be available to him would merely highlight his political naivete. As a result, policy was enacted as performativity, which, various writers suggest, has become the dominant approach to public policy making in the UK and many other countries (Kim, 2024; Voss, 2014). The contrast with the world of the Robbins Committee is of course depressingly stark.
Performativity may also give rise to overlapping policy agendas that are not necessarily incompatible but which have been developed apparently in isolation from each other. One example is what happened following the 2011 Higher Education White Paper when new policies were intended to create dramatic changes to British higher education. But the performative approach to policy (“How can we present this in a headline-grabbing way?”) produced what has been termed “layering”, when new methods are attached to existing ones, which may change the ways in which the original structures worked (Mahoney and Thelen, 2010: 16; Ward et al, 2025). Thus, the new student fee regime was intended to change institutional methods by giving students market power; however, the institutional status hierarchy was unchanged, and student market power could only be exercised, if at all, in relation to institutions towards the bottom of the status hierarchy. A complicated fee regime was thus overlaid on an institutional structure created on a different basis.
As if that was not bad enough, the implicit (though unstated) assumption was that the students whose tuition fees were to be loaned from public sources would be attending one of the then-established universities, having met relatively rigorous entry requirements, and where considerable effort would be put into ensuring student progression and completion. That is to say, the new fees-and-loans system was to be operated within a well-understood and stable institutional environment. But simultaneously with this radical policy development, the same government was encouraging the creation of profit-making institutions, applying minimal entry requirements and with no control on student numbers and with little interest in academic achievement. These privately-owned companies would then be able to maximise the fee income paid to them on behalf of their students, which they would be free to use as they wished.
Put together, these two policies have created a situation that is financially and educationally disastrous (the same situation that existed in the United States), but no policy-makers seemed willing, at the time or subsequently, to assess the joint impacts of the two policies: each made a certain sort-of performative sense, but together – well, have you heard a coherent defence of the current set-up? Do let me know if you have.
SRHE Fellow Dr Paul Temple is Honorary Associate Professor in the Centre for Higher Education Studies, UCL Institute of Education.
