Research and policy relating to post-compulsory education increasingly refers to a single “tertiary system” rather than separate sectors of “higher education” and “technical and vocational education and training”, or “further education” in the UK terminology. Why is this happening now and how might it influence policy across the UK and beyond during the coming years?
These questions were posed at a plenary panel session of the international conference of the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE) in Birmingham last week – the first held in person since the pandemic. I was joined on the panel by Peter Scott, author of a recent book exploring the path towards universal tertiary education, Ellen Hazelkorn and Andy Westwood, who have argued for unified governance of tertiary education, including across a devolved landscape in England, and Huw Morris, who was an influential contributor, alongside Ellen, to the establishment of a Commission for Tertiary Education and Research in Wales.
The panel identified three different conceptions of the shift towards tertiary thinking.
