ABSTRACT

The phrase ‘inary syste’ is now conventionally used to describe the English and Welsh organization of higher education in which the universities, financed by central government through the University Grants Committee, stand apart from the polytechnics, other Further Education colleges, and most Colleges of Education, which are maintained by individual local authorities, or by two or more local authorities together. It is not an all-embracing categorization of higher education establishments, since it covers neither the voluntary Colleges of Education, nor those few institutions financed directly by the Department of Education and Science.† Further, the statement that a college is ‘aintaine’ by a local authority may mislead those ignorant of the system of pooling costs through the Teacher Training and Advanced Further Education Pools, whereby all local authorities, contributing according to set formulae, share the burden of a college's expenditure. It may also conceal, by suggesting a clear division, close similarities in the academic character of some universities and some polytechnics. Nevertheless, the phrase is either accurate or evocative enough to raise passions, some seeing in ‘inar’ the root cause of whatever is or is believed to be amiss in particular establishments — a poor library or excessive vocational emphasis in one, lack of contemporary social relevance in the courses of another — while others argue that any effective system of higher education must have an institutional split between the vocational and the critical or contemplative.