ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter has five goals. First, we will outline what we consider to be the main characteristics of the contemporary model of higher education in Britain. This will build on a much earlier attempt of ours to create models that encapsulated the changing character of the British university system (Tapper and Salter, 1978, 142–78). Second, we present our understanding of how this model relates to the state. The рифове of state action has been to create a new system of higher education; how it is to be sustained depends on the state’s maintenance of a controlling framework. In other words, an integral part of the new system is how the institutions of higher education are to relate to the state. The key actors in the process of change have been neither those institutions themselves nor societal pressures, but rather the state itself. If there is anything different about our analysis, it is the role we have accorded the state in the change process. While recognising the inevitability of policy differences and oscillations within the state, not to mention the constant redefinition of its institutional character, our understanding of the process of educational change stands or falls on our judgement of the state’s role. Our third concern in this chapter, therefore, must be to return to our theory of educational change.
