The arrival of the ‘alternative provider’
In 1997 the Dearing Report saw diversity in British higher education institutions as an advantage ‘especially in providing for student choice; in programme and pedagogic innovation’ and ‘in the ability of the sector as a whole to meet the wide range of expectations now relevant to higher education’. Alternative providers began to be created in a variety of legal forms, but they were ‘private’ rather than publicly-funded.
In 2011 a White Paper, Students at the heart of the system, proposed a revised ‘regulatory régime’, in which new kinds of provider of higher education would have greater freedom about what they wanted to do or to be. It was taken for granted that it should include the conventional principle of institutional autonomy. The Commons debated ‘Higher Education’ on 28 November 2012. David Willetts spoke as Minister for Universities and Science setting out the Government’s intention to stimulate further competition in the sector by widening access to university title for smaller higher education institutions with only a majority of their students needing to be registered on degree courses (include Foundation Degree courses) or engaged in higher education at all. On that basis, having taken advice from HEFCE, he had been able to forward ten institutions to the Privy Council for approval as universities.
Publishing its Second Report in July 2012, the Lords’ Science and Technology Committee said it had ‘received substantial written evidence on the recent HE reforms’.
