ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a brief history of university expansion to date. It focuses on the new system of higher education funded through its own funding council to the new unified system of further education and training that will be introduced under the Learning and Skills Council on 1 April 2001. The chapter looks at the two separately funded systems to ask how they could be related – and related also to their students and other partners in their regions and localities – through a new compact. Other than a radical and democratic reconstruction, the chapter questions whether any such compact can be viable and suggests that the relations likely to obtain between higher education and its various consumers in the future are those of contract. Democratically accountable Local Education Authorities (LEAs) have seen their influence much reduced in the move from the national system of education they formerly locally administered.
