Do we need another Robbins report? Only if it faces up to finance

The 60th anniversary of the Robbins report on higher education in Great Britain is around the corner and it is – or should be – big news. Often compared in importance to the Beveridge report of 1942, which paved the way for the welfare state, the Robbins report, published on 23 October 1963, foresaw a much larger higher education sector.

The report’s influence has endured. A decade ago, for instance, the universities and science minister, David Willetts, made use of the 50th anniversary to tackle the Treasury’s opposition to removing student number caps. Rightly or wrongly, it is unlikely people will talk as much about the later Dearing, Browne or Augar reports when those reach their 60th birthdays.

There is now a growing consensus among vice-chancellors and policymakers that a new review of higher education could be a good idea. So it is the right moment to consider whether the Robbins report would be a sensible model to replicate.

The main thing to note is that the report is often misunderstood. For example, it did not attempt to change the course of the future through manpower planning. Rather, it considered how many young people had already been born and how many were likely to wish to enter higher education, before recommending that Britain prepare for about two-and-a-half times as many students by 1980. As one observer put it at the time, this was “a victory for sober statistical science”.

The forecasting reflected the “Robbins principle” that “courses of higher education should be available for all those who are qualified by ability and attainment to pursue them and who wish to do so.” The Conservative government and Labour opposition both accepted this and, in time, the extra places were largely delivered: the number of full-time students rose from 216,000 in 1962-63 to 524,000 in 1980-81.

On many other matters, however, the report’s legacy is less impressive. Robbins wanted a new Ministry of Arts and Science, to separate universities from schools; instead, there was a huge new Department of Education and Science, covering both types of institution. Robbins wanted a single system of higher education, but a binary one of universities and polytechnics was established instead. Whereas Robbins wanted six brand-new universities, just one was founded (in Stirling). By 1965, Lord Robbins was bitterly complaining about changes that were “diametrically opposed to the conceptions which inspired our recommendations”.

Yet his report remains topical because policymakers are once more in a bind. The Robbins committee was originally established for three reasons: the costs of higher education had been rising; the existing pattern of institutions seemed to defy logic; and demand was clearly going to continue growing. All of this is arguably true again now. Moreover, when Robbins reported, there was a longstanding Conservative government that had been led by multiple prime ministers, plus a resurgent Labour Party.

So should the main parties commit to a new review along the lines of the Robbins report in the run-up to next year’s general election? That remains surprisingly hard to answer.

On the one hand, the report is lucid, coherent and comprehensive. While only some of the recommendations landed on fertile soil, the Robbins committee had interesting and important things to say on the pattern of higher education institutions, on where responsibility for policy should sit in Whitehall and on the future number of students. The report and, even more, the multiple appendices remain a treasure trove of useful information.

On the other hand, the biggest challenge facing both universities and students today is financial. Institutions do not receive enough money to educate each home student in any part of the UK, while students face a cost-of-living crisis. The model of the Robbins committee is not a good one for fixing such urgent challenges. The process of gathering the evidence, then writing and publishing the report took up more than half the lifetime of the 1959 to 1964 Parliament.

Moreover, when the report appeared, it dodged the financial challenge posed by having a growing number of students. Instead, it foresaw the proportion of national wealth spent on higher education doubling from 0.8 to 1.6 per cent and naively pronounced: “Public money is spent on what people want; and if they want more higher education, then, on the estimates we have made, it should be possible to finance it.” It is hard to imagine either the chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, or his shadow, Rachel Reeves, accepting that as a sufficient argument for big increases in public spending on universities or students today. Any new Robbins report would need to be supplemented by more urgent thinking about finance.

Yet, ironically, if the original report had been fully implemented, the question of a new commission would not need to be posed at all. The committee recommended establishing “an authoritative and permanent body that could be asked from time to time to review the whole of higher education as well as its relations with the schools”.

If that had happened, we might be in less of a mess now.

Nick Hillman is director of the Higher Education Policy Institute.