Edge Foundation Senior Researcher Josh Patel has just published a new book, Universities and the Purpose of Higher Education: Expansion and Development in Post-war Britain with Routledge and the Society for Research in Higher Education. In this blog, he reflects on the book’s relevance to Edge’s work.
Edge’s mission, ‘Making Education Relevant’, raises a deceptively simple question: relevant to what? The implication is relevance to the ‘real world’. Criticisms abound as to the inability of education to respond to ‘national needs’ (a contested idea). Still others lament the instrumentalisation of education. These debates have a long history. Edge has been a vocal champion of the importance of Learning from the Past to inform current policy and practice. History offers more than just case studies. It provides tools to help understand why historical agents acted as they did: their influences, intentions, and interactions. It deploys lenses that augment the horizon of policymaking and social sciences by resolving the immediate short-term and broader long-term. My new book (based on my PhD thesis) takes one area of education, higher education, where debates around the relevance of education are particularly tense. If we view these arguments through the lenses that history offers, and attend to the contexts in which they emerged, the familiar story of post-war higher education looks rather different.
Post-war expansion of higher and further education
The conventional history of higher education proceeds like this: at the end of the Second World War, universities in the UK were highly elitist and insular institutions, with no more than 50,000 students. They were protective of their academic freedom and inculcated students in a ‘liberal education’. This study of ‘pure’ abstract principles of the academic sciences or arts was fit only for a leisured, governing class who had no need for ‘applied knowledge’ and repudiated technical expertise and manual labour. However, the experience of the wars and atrocities of the first half of the twentieth century stimulated anxieties regarding the importance of technological and scientific ‘manpower’ (to use the gendered language of the time) to national prosperity and security. A narrow and elite education detached from the needs of society was no longer tenable.
A second stream of higher education, fostered in the further education sector, was developed in earnest around the 1950s and 1960s to expand equality of opportunity and promote vocational and technical education. Total higher education student numbers expanded from 216,000 full‑time students in 1962–63 to 507,000 in 1980–81; today, student numbers in higher education are as high as 2.9 million. Concerns persisted, however, that universities remained insufficiently responsive to perceived ‘national needs’ at the expense of expedient public investment. Even institutions of further education like polytechnics have been criticised as undergoing ‘academic drift’, where vocationally oriented courses, lured by the status of ‘academic’ provision, discard their practical focus.
Liberal vocationalism
This narrative struggles to understand why universities have failed to respond to exhortations to contribute to national need, except for the apparently irresistible allure of ‘status’. Historical lenses can reveal a different story. It is true that universities continued to promote their ‘liberal education’ and some resisted expansion. But what ‘liberal education’ meant, and who it was for, changed significantly. The book explores how university leaders’ conceptions of universities’ national duty changed over time and why.
The power of modern technologies had been demonstrated emphatically by the war. Technologies derived from both the sciences and arts (like radio) had the capacity to engender greater prosperity than ever before – but they could also wreak enormous destruction. University leaders saw they had a responsibility. Through the induction of more students than ever before into academic disciplines, they sought to teach students to appreciate the moral and ethical contexts of their specialisms. Then, it was hoped, graduates would be able to wield powerful modern technologies with responsibility and avoid the mistakes of the past.
Leaders like Peter Venables, principal of the Birmingham College of Advanced Technology (which would become Aston University) advocated a vision in which technically trained students would also understand democratic governance, economics, and industrial relations, taught in small discussion groups rather than lectures. Similar recommendations appeared in government white papers and were adopted by technical colleges. Such a liberal vocationalism was also critical to students’ capacities in the workplace. Graduates needed to learn how to communicate across fields in the complicated, interdisciplinary real world, take the initiative to apply their specialisms in new contexts in innovative ways, and adapt to rapid technological change. It might include understanding the importance of capitalism to providing society’s needs efficiently through the profit motive.
Alternatively, graduates should understand the limits of markets to realise all public goods. There was scope for considerable disagreement in what constituted a ‘relevant’ education. While universities remained small initially, their commitment to the democratisation of liberal education and higher learning was well embedded by the 1970s, and championed by bodies such as the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals (the forerunner of Universities UK) and the Confederation of British Industry. Many of the capacities and anxieties articulated in this period remain recognisable today. The capacities emphasised in the liberal-vocational education of the 1960s remain in high demand even in the comparatively short timeframe between now and 2035.
An education that equips citizens to make good judgements in their work as colleagues and in their lives as neighbours is critical as we face the challenges and opportunities of the rest of the twenty-first century.
However, in the book I explore how post-war liberal vocationalism was ultimately unsuccessful. It failed to provide convincing evidence of its ‘relevance’, given the increased demands expansion placed on public finance. The book takes a historical perspective which helps to understand why. Who defines what ‘relevance’ means? By what criteria is it judged? The answers have relevance for how we understand the purpose of education, how it has been and continues to be governed, and how it might develop in the future.
Universities and the Purpose of Higher Education is published today. An event to mark its publication will be hosted by SKOPE, University of Oxford on 2 March 2026.
Josh currently leads the curation of Edge’s Learning from the Past policy reviews, and has two forthcoming reviews, on the Manpower Services Commission and the Youth Training Scheme, in February and March.