Robbins Report

If I briefly rehearse the key kind of points.

So I think today when we're recording is the 63rd anniversary of the Robbins Report, which...

Everyone references, you reference, it's seen as the key document in the expansion of British higher education because it establishes the principle that anyone who can benefit should be offered a place at higher education and anyone who benefit is basically two passes at A level.

And although there were certain expansion things already in place, this principle of expanding access to higher education is established in the Robbins report.

But the Robbins Report is 1963.

Then we have a general election in 1964, which brings Labour to power, Wilson.

And his education secretary is Anthony Crosland.

And Crosland rejects some key features of the Robbins Report.

So I think there's a question there about the extent to which the attempt to be a little bit more egalitarian, a bit meritocratic and get over a class culture is going to end up reproducing another kind of our class culture because we just can't let it go.

The big expansion, which was to come in the 1960s, was the result of a report known as the Robbins Report, which recommended a large expansion of university education.

Just remind us or tell us who Robbins was and what this report said.

Yeah, so the context for that is there has begun to be an expansion of a number of institutions already.

So Robbins is going to make these policy recommendations for the support of students and the expansion of the number of places on the basis of a combination of a principal commitment to the right of higher education and its role in democracy and on the basis of the need for the country strategically to have a better educated population and for economically to have that population.

And that runs through the report.

It's the first time that we get a clearly articulated, from the sort of government level, sense of what is the point of all this university stuff? What's it actually going on for? And the Robbins report comes up with four purposes.

And again, it's striking that they are all public purposes.