A not so happy birthday to the Robbins Review

The report’s most famous statement – the “Robbins Principle” – declared that higher education should be available to:

…all those who are qualified by ability and attainment to pursue it and wish to do so.

For many in the sector, the removal of student number controls in 2013-15 represents the ultimate fulfilment of that principle.

Around the report’s 50th anniversary, England abolished the caps that had previously limited how many students each university could recruit. No more arbitrary barriers, no more rationing – finally, the Robbins vision delivered.

But what if that was a misunderstanding of what Robbins actually wanted?

He’s using that metaphor again

Two separate things were being controlled before the reforms.

• The baby – limits on how many students can enter higher education overall. These were arbitrary barriers preventing qualified students from accessing university at all.
• The bathwater – limits on how many students each university can recruit. These were planning tools that managed the system, maintained institutional diversity, and ensured different types of provision remained viable.

We could have kept the baby without keeping the bathwater. We could have said something like:

…let’s plan for enough places for all qualified students, but manage how those places are distributed across different types of institution and subject areas.

Instead, the policy threw out both simultaneously. And the consequences are now becoming clear – from franchising scandals to “high-tarriff” over-recruitment, from subject deserts to potential regional institution collapse.

Before 2015, the student number control system did several important things that had nothing to do with restricting overall access.

It maintained institutional diversity by preventing larger or more prestigious universities from simply expanding without limit and destabilising others. Different types of institution – research-intensive universities, teaching-focused institutions, specialist colleges – could maintain their distinct missions.

It enabled geographic planning so that regional provision remained viable. Students who needed to live at home, study part-time, or access local support networks could rely on nearby institutions remaining open.

It protected subject provision by ensuring universities didn’t all pile into cheap-to-teach subjects like business studies while abandoning expensive but nationally important areas like modern languages or laboratory sciences.

It allowed quality maintenance because institutions didn’t face “recruit or die” pressure. Universities could maintain entry standards without fear that turning away borderline students would leave them financially unviable.

It facilitated infrastructure planning since institutions knew roughly how many students they would teach, they could invest in buildings, staff, and support services with confidence rather than lurching from crisis to crisis.

As my colleague David Kernohan noted in 2023, looking back at David Willetts’ Robbins Revisited pamphlet from 2013:

…Robbins itself was a landmark, but it is also a mess. There’s a lot more in there than is usually discussed, enough so you can argue pretty much any position from it by carefully selecting from the text and the surrounding artefacts.

The conventional reading – that removing student number controls represents the ultimate Robbins – is highly selective. Because the Robbins Report wasn’t some libertarian manifesto for market forces in higher education.

Long-term development

In the terms of reference for the 1963 report, the committee was explicitly asked to advise on principles for long-term development and:

…whether any modifications should be made in the present arrangements for planning and co-ordinating the development of the various types of institution.

Note planning and co-ordination – not their removal, their improvement.

The report itself is packed with evidence of the planning mindset. Chapter six is titled “The future demand for higher education and the places needed to meet it” – a chapter dedicated to projecting total numbers, analysing the “pool of ability”, calculating required places, and considering “implications for the economy and for society”.

Robbins worried extensively about institutional diversity. The report carefully analysed universities, teacher training colleges, colleges of advanced technology, regional colleges, area colleges, and local colleges. It argued for maintaining that diverse ecology, not creating a homogenised market where everyone competes on the same terms.

The committee studied international comparisons in detail, examining systems in the United States, the Soviet Union, and across Europe. It found that even these ideologically opposed systems all planned their higher education. The US had state coordination, the USSR had a Ministry of Higher Education. Nobody was running pure markets.

Location mattered to Robbins. The report discussed at length where institutions should be sited, specifically to ensure geographic accessibility. If regional institutions collapse because distant high-tarriff universities hoover up their students, qualified local students face real barriers – mature students, those with caring responsibilities, financial constraints.

Subject balance was crucial. Robbins included extensive analysis of which subjects students were studying and expressed concern about technology education and teacher supply. This wasn’t a report that would have been relaxed about universities all competing in business studies while modern languages departments close across the country.

If Lord Robbins could see English higher education in 2025, he would see mission drift destroying the diversity his report championed. When every institution desperately recruits to survive, they abandon distinctive missions. Teaching-focused universities try to become research universities, specialist colleges add generic business courses, and everyone becomes a poor imitation of the same model.

He would see qualified students locked out – not by arbitrary caps, but by new barriers his reforms never anticipated. If your local university has closed a course because up at the other end of the tables the high-tarriff butter flapped its expansion wings, you can’t go there. The part-time course you needed has been cut. The specialist subject you wanted to study isn’t offered anywhere anymore. You’re “qualified by ability and attainment”, but the provision has vanished.

DK reminded us that when peers debated Robbins, Lord Taylor warned about exactly these consequences. Taylor spoke of “the unpleasantness of over-large classes in the universities” and “the appalling difficulties of housing these young people” if expansion happened without proper resources.

As DK observed:

…we face the ‘unpleasantness of over-large classes’ and the ‘appalling difficulties of housing these young people’ – a state of affairs that slams more doors, and harder, than we can reckon.

The crucial difference is that Taylor assumed these would be temporary growing pains during planned expansion with growing resources. Now they seem to be permanent features of unplanned expansion with declining real-terms funding per student.

He would see the “emergency” becoming permanent. The report discusses institutions’ roles “in the short-term emergency”, assuming planned, steady growth. Instead, universities lurch from crisis to crisis, unable to invest in quality or fulfil their missions properly.

He would see reputational damage to the whole sector. “Falling standards” headlines, franchising scandals, profit-seeking operators posting extreme gross margins. This isn’t what expanding access was supposed to look like.

The irony is that throwing away planning mechanisms now prevents delivery of the Robbins Principle that the free-for-all claims to be honouring.

Access becomes less equitable, not more. When middle-class students colonise institutions previously serving disadvantaged communities because elite universities over-recruited their tier, when regional provision serving mature students disappears, when part-time routes get cut – the system becomes more socially exclusive. Robbins saw expansion as promoting social mobility – but the market creates the opposite.

The “wastage” problem gets worse. Robbins worried extensively about students dropping out. But if students are recruited to institutions that are over-capacity and can’t support them properly, or aren’t suited to their needs but looked prestigious, or are too far from support networks – wastage increases. Getting students “in” doesn’t matter if they can’t succeed.

Quality and standards suffer across the system. Robbins valued research capacity throughout higher education. But financially unstable institutions shed research staff and focus on teaching survival mode. This concentrates research in the over-recruiting elite, creating exactly the two-tier system Robbins wanted to avoid through “parity of esteem” between different institutions.

Teacher supply becomes unpredictable. Robbins devoted an entire chapter to planning teacher training provision. When teacher training institutions get destabilised by market forces, supply becomes erratic – the opposite of what Robbins intended.

Planning becomes impossible. How do you plan infrastructure, staffing, research capacity, or subject provision when institutions don’t know if they’ll hit recruitment targets year-to-year? You can’t. So quality suffers, investment stops, and the sector decays.

DK noted that in 2013, David Willetts committed to ensuring:

….taxpayers still pay 40 per cent of the cost of degrees.

Right now this is projected to be nearer 28 per cent, and will be less than 25 per cent when Plan 5 is implemented. So we removed planning mechanisms – and failed to provide adequate resources. Institutions are both unplanned and underfunded, forced into exactly the desperate recruitment behaviours – franchising, over-recruitment, mission drift – that we’re now seeing.

Round and around

As Elliot Newstead wrote this week on the site, “we’re stuck in a loop” where predictions don’t predict, offers don’t mean what they say, and confirmation looks more like a safety net than a filter. He’s right that:

…unless we start having the grown-up conversation about how predictions, offers, student decision making and confirmation intertwine and interact, the storm will keep building.

For me, the conversation could go deeper. It’s not just about admissions mechanics – it’s about whether we want a planned system that delivers the full Robbins vision – access, quality, diversity, subject provision, regional coverage – or whether we’re content with a market that delivers none of these things well.

The 2015 reforms conflated “removing barriers to student choice” with “removing all system planning”. Those are separate questions. We can – and should – have universal access to higher education for all qualified students. But we also need planning mechanisms that maintain institutional diversity, protect subject provision, ensure regional coverage, and prevent both exploitation at the bottom and destabilisation at the top.

Robbins would have recognised this immediately. His report wasn’t titled “let market forces rip”. It was about building a planned system big enough for all qualified applicants, with diverse institutions serving different needs, in different places, across different subjects, all maintaining high standards. The economy needs that too.

Ironically, access, quality, diversity, subject provision and regional coverage seems to be exactly what the current government wants in its White Paper. But it also looks like we’re going to have to wait a while for the government to realise that it won’t get what it wants without some planning to deliver it. And by the time it realises it, it may well be swept from power.