View From Here

It is now colleges that provide a more traditional `university' education - intimate, engaged, personal

One of the advantages of the former binary split into universities and polytechnics was that it stopped "university" becoming synonymous with "higher education". Before the binary policy was established in the mid-1960s, that mistake was often made. Since the abandonment of that policy in 1992 the same mistake is being made again.

The effect was, and is, to marginalise non-university higher education. Most people at the time of the Robbins report in 1963 thought higher education mainly comprised universities, although they recognised some residual (and, by definition, less legitimate) "others", in advanced further education and teacher training. There was no doubt, in both the official and popular mind, that universities were the higher education institutions that really mattered.

The binary policy challenged this conventional (and conservative) identification of higher education with universities. The former polytechnics were too big and, in their latter days, too powerful to be dismissed as a residual component. But since they became universities in 1992, this conservatism has crept back. The rest of higher education - in the colleges of higher education and further education - is again being regarded as an after- thought, even in the case of the latter an anomaly.

Sadly the Dearing report encouraged this regression. It took a tough line on the proliferation of "university college" titles, recommending that they should be confined to colleges that were integral parts of universities or colleges that had degree-awarding powers.

Most colleges of higher education, therefore, will be labelled second- class if the Dearing recommendation is accepted. Not only is this unfair - because many colleges have just as high academic standards as universities even if they are not degree-awarding - it is also wrong, for two reasons.

First, it discriminates against institutions that have deliberately chosen to offer a distinctive kind of higher education. Most universities, for good rather than bad reasons, have become mass institutions. It is now colleges that provide a more traditional "university" education - intimate, engaged, personal.

Second (and here I must declare an interest because the University of Leeds has three partner-colleges), restricting "university college" titles discriminates against colleges that have deliberately chosen to retain their traditional academic links with universities. Some may have done so for bad reasons, because habits of academic dependency die hard. But some have done so for good reasons, because they see the advantages, economic and academic, of belonging to networks of neighbouring institutions.

In short the Dearing recommendation to restrict the use of "university college" titles not only discriminates against yesterday's ideal of a university , but also against what may be tomorrow's model of the "distributed university" - universities, colleges (of both higher and further education) and other learning organisations linked in networks, both regional and global.

The Dearing recommendations on higher education in further education are even more short-sighted. The report suggests that further education colleges should not be allowed to expand their degree-level work and should instead concentrate on "sub-degree" courses; that these courses, as far as possible, should be directly funded rather than through a higher education link; that, where such sub-contracting cannot be avoided, colleges should be allowed to franchise courses from only one higher education partner; and that franchising should be severely policed by the new Quality Assurance agency.

The message is depressingly clear. Further education colleges are - or should be - bit-players in higher education and must not be encouraged to get ideas above their academic station. Instead they should stick to lower-level vocational training programmes. The sense in Dearing is of two worlds - the degree-world of higher education still too full of academical fantasies and middle-class pretensions, and the honestly instrumental certificate and diploma-world of further education. Two worlds that must at all costs be kept apart, for fear the former is compromised by the earthiness of the latter or the latter tempted by the intellectual glamour of the former.

What Dearing completely missed is the dynamic relationship between further and higher education, its patterns of progression and pathways of opportunity that make a nonsense of the archaic apartheid that the report feebly seeks to reinforce. Bans of degree-level work in colleges would turn the clock back . Restrictions of franchising and a move towards direct funding would break the links between colleges and universities. Either way the effect would probably be to shrivel HE-in-FE?

The development of higher education depends crucially on the health of its non-university sector. This was true before the binary policy when advanced further education reached beyond conventional "university" definitions of higher education. It was true during the binary period when the success of the former polytechnics broke through these restrictive definitions - and, in the process, created our modern system of higher education. And it may still be true today, which is why the distinctiveness of the colleges of higher education and the stake of further education colleges in higher education should be nourished not starved.

The writer is the director of the Centre for Policy Studies in Education at the University of Leeds.