Making policy in British higher education 1945–2011

Abstract

Michael Shattock has seen policy-making from many perspectives-as a senior university administrator, a well-connected national figure, the troubleshooter of choice in high-profile governance problems and professor of higher education management. That rare combination of senior experience with scholarly research has informed his analyses of management and policy, which culminate in this magisterial but personal narrative of British higher education policy over almost 70 years. What really matters in making higher education policy? Shattock says chronological accounts suffer because different phases are not necessarily distinct; instead he chooses five key themes through which to interpret the period: system structure, finance, research, accountability and institutional management. The book is a history of the substance and the people in the policy-making process rather than a highly theorised account of policy process. The brief opening chapter 'Higher education and the policy process' pays its academic dues and prepares us for Shattock's pragmatic appreciation of how things happen: 'The development of higher education, therefore , fits Lindblom's definition of "disjointed incrementalism" … far more closely than any rationalist planning perspective' (3). The story of the changing structure of the system takes up more than a third of the book. The intimacy of personal interconnections and influence in the small elite system emerging from the Second World War had been nurtured by the Treasury through its oversight of the University Grants Committee since 1919. We see how this was unpicked through waves of policy in technical and technological education, teacher training, expansion through new universities in the 1960s, through the polytechnics and the binary policy of the 1970s and 1980s, to the unified structure created by the 1992 Higher Education Act. Higher education became progressively less special as it expanded, and as it became a much more significant drain on the public purse. From being a Treasury-protected favourite it became, after much high-flown huffing and puffing, part of education's 'seamless robe' in the Department of Education and Science. The concern then was that university policy would become subservient to the needs of schools. Now higher education yearns to be reunited with education and science, to turn back the growing economic instrumentalism of policy subordinating higher education to business. The unwinding of the DES, to transfer HE first to the Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills and then to the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, showed the 'fragility of the seamless robe argument' (102). Shattock persuasively suggests that the progressive elimination of 'buffer' intermediary structures, such as the University Grants Committee and the local authorities which had created and maintained the polytechnics, was not some cunning plan. Rather, Government departments 'stumbled towards that solution in a series of often faltering steps, each step being the product of spasmodic pressures' (68). From a postwar hands-off approach which now seems almost unthinkable, these stumbling steps created a higher education system which is now routinely subject to (attempted) central steering and control.