This chapter focuses upon how the two main political parties in Britain, the Conservative and Labour Parties, have viewed the independent sector of schooling since the 1944 Education Act. It elucidates the images of independent schooling that encourage parents to pay fees and that persuade political parties to pursue particular education policies. Although parents and political parties may be misguided in their understanding of educational realities, these failings are small in comparison to how British social science has understood independent schooling. All surveys reveal that most pupils in independent schools have fathers with middle-class occupations whereas the majority of pupils in maintained schools have fathers with working-class occupations. The private sector's function of class reproduction is complicated not simply by its own internal divisions, and the relationship of the class structure to those cleavages, but also by movement into and out of independent schooling across generations.

Examining the history of access to private education this work sheds light on the interaction of state, society and schooling. Organized historically, much of the analysis concentrates on contemporary political struggles, and evaluates the possibility of a unified educational system.

The book concludes with an examination of the demise of the funding council model of governance and the emergence of the new regime under the control of the Office for Students which seems that it will also have the task of evolving a regime for the state regulation of funding to control the charging of student tuition fees. Even if there should be a return to the public funding of higher education we predict that within the current context it will be a funding regime that is underwritten by strong procedures of institutional audit that is unlikely to give institutions much room for manoeuvre.

This opening chapter analyses the structure of governance that controlled the English university system for much of its history, from 1919 to 1988. The UGC was a quasi-state body responsible for steering the development of the English universities. It did so under the auspices of the Treasury until 1964, thereafter the Department for Education and Science. Throughout most of its history it respected the principle of university autonomy with the individual institutions being able to determine their own course of development. Post-1945 the operations of the UGC came under increasing pressure as there were demands to increase and diversify the social character of the student body, as the university had to accommodate an increasingly expanding sector of higher education, the polytechnics, and those broad-based political demands in the 1970s to pressure the universities into helping the nation resolve its economic difficulties. The end result was the emergence of a diversified tertiary model of higher education, the demise beginning seriously in 1988 of the UGC and the subsequent emergence of the funding council model of governance with policy direction in the hands of the incumbent government with the funding councils confined to ensuring policy implementation. What we have witnessed is the emergence of a more tightly regulated model of higher education.

The imposition of student tuition fees has proven to be one of the most divisive policy issues in the history of British higher education and is still far from resolved. The UGC operated on the basis of public funding and higher education was considered to be a public good. However, the economic austerity of the 1970s meant that the quinquennial grant that government made available started to decline. Then there were those, strongly influenced by the work of the Institute of Economic Affairs who started to insist that it was a private good and their influence grew in the years of the Thatcher Governments, especially when Sir Keith Joseph was the minister responsible for higher education. However, thanks to the opposition of Conservative MPs no fees were imposed upon home-based students in the years of Thatcher Governments. That move only took place after the 1997 Dearing Enquiry and was implemented by a Labour Government led by Tony Blair. The ceiling was initially set as a top-up fee at a maximum of 1,000 pound per annum, although this was raised to 3,000 pound after the 2004 Higher Education Act and 9,000 pound by the subsequent Conservative-Liberal/Democratic coalition. Initially there were manoeuvres to exempt students who chose certain subjects (STEM subjects) from the payment of fees and to preserve maintenance grants. However, these moves failed and the expectation is that the institutions will themselves make resources available to selected students, under the auspices of the Office for Fair Access, out of their fee income. The new universities have all gravitated towards charging the maximum permitted fee levels. Over time institutions have steadily increased their fees to the maximum permitted level and tuition fees remain a big political issue with the Labour Party now committed to restore public funding. There is also no doubt that the newly created Office for Students will seek ways to link fee levels to the quality of the teaching and learning process. Thus the imposition of fees will lead to a much tighter auditing of the work of the higher education institutions.

Although the UGC, as revealed in its reports on the university system, was aware that there would eventually need for existing universities to expand in order to accommodate growing student demand, it can be claimed that it was slow to recognise this evolving pressure. In fact when the existing new universities refused categorically to expand sufficiently to meet the projected additional student numbers, it resorted to the strategy of proposing the founding of new universities. It, then, justified this on the grounds that there was a growing need for experimentation in the organisation of knowledge and that newly founded universities would be better able to achieve this. Having achieved government funding for the expansion of the system, the UGC set up procedures for the creation of new universities, of which the approach from Sussex was the first to be reviewed. The Sussex bid established some general parameters; an Academic Board would set up inter-disciplinary degree programmes, the institution would have the university title and be able to award postgraduate degrees, the local authorities would provide a site of at least 200 acres and some initial financial support. The Sussex initiative was followed by six other English foundations, and the University of Stirling in Scotland and the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of how different these universities actually were concluding, with the general consensus, that they were academically innovative rather than new!

This chapter explores the implications for the traditional model of the English university of the sharp cuts in public funding announced in the UGC's Circular Letter 1981/82. The funding cuts were a consequence of government policy; although there were some who felt that the UGC should have resigned and have refused to impose them. One big issue was the selective imposition of the cuts-the financial pain was not experienced equally! One big problem is that there seemed to be a lack of criteria to guide the cuts and it was unclear as to what was the evidence used to guide the decisions. But clearly the UGC was abandoning the principle of institutional autonomy, cutting student numbers in the university sector, and encouraging academics to take early retirement. The research model of the university emerged as the preferred template and the universities became more managed institutions as they started to implement long-term academic planning. The chapter explores the differential impact of the cuts upon the 1960s new universities and discusses the question why universities that had been triumphantly founded by the UGC but a short time ago should now face cuts in public funding. Had the UGC failed to be sufficiently forthcoming in its funding strategy?

The empirical basis of this chapter is centred around the outcomes of the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise, although it is recognised that the assessment process has continued to evolve over time. The purpose of the process was to distribute core research funding selectively-to reflect that research output, in terms of both quality and quantity, varied considerably from one higher education institution to the next with parallel variations being shown by individual academics. The new universities, with Warwick and York leading the way, form a second tier in the UK research hierarchy in terms of the quality of their research outputs and the number of their faculty who contribute to their research output. In these terms they make up a group of universities which falls just below the leading research universities that is comprised of Oxford, Cambridge, the major civics, and the larger colleges of the University of London. However, because of its more specialised academic focus, the University of Essex occupies within the group. The research assessment exercise confers status as well resources, which may help to explain why all UK universities endeavour to have at least one or two departments which have a reputation for research excellence.

The evaluation of the teaching and learning process in English higher education has had a troubled history that is still in the process of change. Historically the university system prided itself on its high academic standards that were monitored internally with the aid of a network of external examiners. The emergence of the polytechnics as higher education institutions saw the emergence of quasi-state regulation in the form of the Council for National Academic Awards. Since the abolition of the binary line between polytechnics and universities in 1992, several institutional forms of ‘quality’ were established with state support: the Academic Audit Unit, the Higher Education Quality Council, and in 1997 the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) was put in place which had the responsibility for making judgements about the quality of their degree programmes. After considerable grassroots protest within the sector (much of it led by the University of Warwick), this perceived draconian form of review was replaced by an audit process which basically exists to ensure that institutions have a satisfactory level of academic quality and procedures in place to preserve it. The object of the process is to ensure that their degree programmes meet UK standards which the latest reviews assures is true for all seven of the new universities in our study. The steady increase in student tuition fees led many to question the QAA’s audit procedures and the Office for Students has replaced the funding council model of governance and we can expect the emergence of a state-regulated market in tuition fees with levels, at least in part, determined by an evaluation of the quality of the academic programmes that the universities offer—so we will move from an audit to a tighter regulatory regime.