Rich crop in fields of learning

Low participation meets blue-chip research: Phil Baty reports on the East in the latest of our regional focuses

"There is no tradition of higher education in this region, the population is spread out and there is a real reluctance to travel," said Mike Malone Lee, vice chancellor of Anglia Polytechnic University.

"East Anglia is made up of a lot of separate, fiercely independent communities which don't mix."

The universities and colleges of East Anglia, Eastern Essex, and Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire could also be described as separate and independent. Traditional research-based provision in the area is focused on three institutions - Cambridge University, the University of East Anglia in Norwich, and Essex University in Colchester. Between them they account for 20,736 of about 50,000 full-time students in higher education in the region, according to the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service figures.

East Anglia attracts the lowest number of students in the country after Northern Ireland at 17,119. The number of students leaving the region is 40,895 - a brain drain of 23,776, according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency. Consequently, provision outside the "big three" is highly tailored to local need, highly vocational and often part time.

So far, external coordination has been limited. The Higher Education Funding Council for England has appointed Jenny Newman as its new Eastern Region coordinator, but her remit, she said, would not be clear until after Sir Ron Dearing reports in the summer.

Sue Gunn, eastern region coordinator of the Training and Enterprise Councils, said the seven Eastern TEC chief executives had only recently started meeting to establish an economic assessment for the area, which is expected later in the year. A new East of England Inward Investment Agency has just been set up, said Mrs Gunn, but its future relationship with the Government's forthcoming Regional Development Agency for the East remains unclear.

College and TEC leaders are unsure about deputy prime minister John Prescott's plans for decentralisation of government. Neil Buxton, vice chancellor of Hertfordshire University and local TEC director, said that he was worried that plans for a Regional Development Agency "would just lead to an extra layer of bureaucracy between TECs, universities and businesses".

Universities are keen to attract more students in the locality and to lure people from other areas into the region. "Anglia Polytechnic University has got five big campuses and lots of small outlets, and we're in partnership with 22 further education institutions," said Mr Malone Lee.

"When colleagues from other areas say to me that I ought to rationalise, I say 'no, no, no'. In East Anglia we have to move higher education out into the community. We can't expect the community to come to us - because they will not."

Luton, with only four years' experience of university status and facing a cash crisis, is pioneering unconventional patterns of attendance for the 56 per cent of its students who are part time. It is running a third semester in the summer and weekend MBA courses.

But as student immobility intensifies, and in anticipation of Dearing, even those institutions that have looked internationally, such as the University of East Anglia, are moving towards more localised provision.