ABSTRACT
The Education Reform Act 1988 marks a further stage in the United Kingdom's slow and somewhat erratic progress towards a unified system of higher education. The underlying causes of the prevailing differences and divisions are social and historical. About half the full-time students are in fifty-three universities, collectively known as the private sector despite generous public funding from the University Grants Committee (UGC). The rest in some 500 institutions, thirty polytechnics, fourteen Scottish central institutions, forty-three direct grant or voluntary colleges and over 400 other colleges known as the public sector. In 1963 the Robbins Report spelled out the hitherto implicit policy of social demand as the criterion for higher education provision. Further he emphasized the priority given to full-time study for 18-year-old school-leavers. The labour government rejected the Robbins recommendation that the teacher training colleges, administered by local education authorities or by voluntary agencies. It should become part of the university sector.
