Gareth Parry

Conceptualising Curriculum Change

Recent developments in UK higher education are turning attention to the undergraduate curriculum. Drawing on Lyotards concept of performativity, this paper explores broad patterns of curriculum change in five subject areas. The curriculum is understood as an educational project forming identities founded in three domains: knowledge, action and self. Curriculum models are proposed that identify these components and their relationships with each other. The evidence suggests that the weightings and levels of integration of these components vary between the sciences and technology subjects, the arts and humanities, and professional courses. Attempts to develop curriculum strategies should take account of the patterns of curriculum components as they vary between the subject areas.

Lifelong Debt: Rates of Return to Mature Study

High rates of return to first degrees have been used to justify increased student financial contributions to higher education. However, no discrete study of rates of return to mature graduates has been carried out although mature graduates now form a significant proportion of the student population. The General Household Survey 1983–1992 was used to examine the earnings of mature graduates compared with those of matriculates. The GHS yielded 616 mature graduate men in full-time work and 296 mature graduate women who were in full-time employment. It was found that the rate of return to mature male graduates was just above one per cent. With recent added costs, new male mature graduates can be forecast to make a sizeable loss on their study. Rates of return to women mature graduates were higher, between five and six per cent, and, based on these figures, the recent increased cost of mature graduate study should be covered by increased earnings. However, these calculations are based on average earnings for the modal age cohort of mature graduates. Those who are older when they complete or earn below the average (a large percentage) will not recoup the costs of study.

Patterns of Participation in Higher Education in England: A Statistical Summary and Commentary

The purpose of this paper is to identify features of participation in higher education which are distinctive to the situation in England and which have exercised an important influence on the shift to mass forms of higher education in that country. Statistical comparisons are made with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland which indicate considerable variations in the levels, patterns and profiles of participation in each territory. At the same time, some limitations and cautions are voiced about the use of official statistics for this purpose, especially where data collection has been the responsibility of separate departments and different agencies.

Reform of Higher Education in the United Kingdom

Funded largely from public sources and formerly trusted to meet social and economic needs, British higher education during the 1980s and 1990s became the target of a series of radical reform measures intended to secure greater efficiency, accountability and responsiveness from the system and its constituent institutions. Led from above and sustained over a long time period by successive ‘new right’ Conservative governments, the creation of more competitive conditions for the conduct of higher education represented an acceleration and intensification of trends that were part of world-wide changes in public sector management. Over the same period, higher education in the United Kingdom made a fundamental transition from an elite to a mass system, with significant consequences of its own for the management of academic establishments, the character of academic work and the balance to be struck between institutional autonomy, market competition and central control.

Education research and policy making in higher education: the case of Dearing

In establishing a National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education in the United Kingdom (the Dearing Committee), the Government expected short-term problems and long-term developments to be examined in less than half the average time taken by previous inquiries. Conscious of the intellectual authority of its predecessor, the Robbins Committee, the Dearing inquiry commissioned a large number of research and analytical studies to inform its deliberations. The ways that research and other forms of evidence were collected and considered by the inquiry are discussed in relation to four themes: the context and conditions for the inquiry; the nature of the work commissioned; the treatment of public evidence and the use of research to inform key recommendations; and what the episode disclosed about the relationship between education research and policy-making in higher education. In the course of this commentary, it is suggested that the uneven engagement with research and academic literatures in the Dearing ...

Higher education in further education colleges

The nature of higher education in further education colleges is poorly understood, even though it is central to government policies on expansion, diversity and widening participation in English higher education. One reason has to do with scale. Out of 2.2 million higher education students, around 177,000 (one in twelve) are taught in the college sector. Another has to do with complexity. Colleges offer not only all the main levels and types of undergraduate education but they provide a variety of higher-level professional and technical qualifications as well. These are funded in different ways, overseen by different bodies and reported by separate agencies. A final reason has to do with their status as further education institutions. By definition, colleges are institutions predominantly concerned with education at levels below higher education. Courses leading to higher-level qualifications are always a minority of their provision, usually a very small proportion. Spread across 280 or more further education colleges, the character of this activity is not easily apprehended, whether by ministers, civil servants, journalists or the rest of us. Occupying the outer reaches and distributed parts of a mass system, many of the degrees, diplomas and certificates taught in these settings are ‘delivered’ in association with universities or other awarding authorities, sometimes under franchise arrangements. The potential for confusion is considerable. What follows is a summary picture of contemporary college-taught higher education in England, together with a consideration of its claims to distinctiveness and its pattern of development since the Dearing report in 1997 which recommended a ‘special mission’ for colleges in subbachelor undergraduate education. The evidence and analysis for this primer is drawn from a research study commissioned by the UK government in 2011 and published in 2012 (Parry et al. 2012). The administrative statistics reported in the study are for 2009–10 and, unless otherwise indicated, this is the base year for the enumeration here.

Mobility and hierarchy in the age of near-universal access

With the shift toward near-universal access, the movement of students within and between systems of higher education has assumed a new importance, especially for policies aimed at widening participation and social equity. Globalization has given rise to increasing levels of student mobility across national boundaries, with participation in international education and its networks serving as a potentially powerful marker of advantage. Rather less attention has been paid to the accompanying localization of higher education and the choice-making and mobility of students positioned in the lower tiers and outer reaches of distributed systems. Where the location of higher education in college and community settings is central to policies of growth and inclusion, new dimensions and complexities are brought to long-standing debates about the divisions of tertiary education.

Access and alternative futures for higher education

Part 1 Access ideas and issues: post-binary access and learning, Peter Scott the economics of wider participation, Leslie Wagner achieving wider access, Peter Toyne. Part 2 Access for schools-levels: a levels and the future, Gordon Higginson the changing relationships between schools and higher education, Michael Duffy. Part 3 Access for adult learners: a higher education system fit for adult learners, Alan Tuckett access to and through further education, Geoffrey Melling and Geoff Stanton. Part 4 Access principles and processes: enterprise, scholars and students, George Tolley need mathematics and science present a problem for access to universities?, Sinclair Goodlad access and the media, Naomi Sargant.

College higher education in England 1944–66 and 1997–2010

As a contribution to the history of higher education in English further education colleges, two policy episodes are sketched and compared. Both periods saw attempts to expand courses of higher education outside the universities. In the first, ahead of policies to concentrate non-university higher education in the strongest institutions, efforts were made after 1944 to recognize a hierarchy of colleges, with separate tiers associated with different volumes and types of advanced further education. In the second, soon after unification of the higher education sector at the beginning of the 1990s, all colleges in the further education sector were encouraged to offer higher-level programmes and qualifications, with a reluctance or refusal on the part of central government to plan, coordinate, or configure this provision. The two episodes highlight very different assumptions about what types of institutions should be involved in what kinds of higher education. They are a reminder too of how short is the policy memory on higher education within modern-day governments and their agencies.

Licensed Partnership: State, Region and Institution in the Regulation of Access Education in England 1987–1992

The paper discusses the evolution and impact of a policy initiative intended to recognise and regulate a new entry route into British higher education: namely, that associated with access courses aimed primarily at adults and provided mainly by colleges of further education. The framework of quality assurance created to achieve this goal is examined from two vantage points. The first comes from within the central body established by the national government to develop and implement the scheme across England, Wales and Northern Ireland. The second is that of one of the agencies in England licensed to recognise access courses at a regional and local level. As an early expression of a shift in government policy in the direction of a mass system of higher education, the framework represented on the one hand an exercise in legitimation and, on the other, an element in a larger process of change in post-secondary education. However, the ability of the initiative to shape priorities on the ground, or to embrace other transformations in and around access education, was always limited.