A single law ended Britain’s divide between polytechnics and universities. The Further and Higher Education Act 1992 gave 34 British polytechnics the power to award their own degrees, and with it the right to call themselves universities.
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The change ended what had been known as the binary divide: one line of institutions called universities, another called polytechnics. Before 1992, a polytechnic could teach a student to degree level but could not itself confer the degree.
Why the divide existed at all
The polytechnics were not old. Labour education secretary Anthony Crosland set out the plan in a 1965 speech, formalising a split that already existed between “autonomous” universities and “public sector” colleges of technology and education. Out of the latter, he carved a new sector built to deliver “vocational, professional and industrially-focused” courses.
For less than 30 years, “polytechnic” was the name for that sector. The idea was to keep vocational training distinct from the universities. In practice, the split became a hierarchy. A polytechnic education came to be seen as the option for a student who could not get into a university proper, whatever the polytechnic itself actually taught.
What the 1992 Act actually changed
Kenneth Clarke, education secretary under John Major and the minister who abolished the binary divide, told Times Higher Education the real driver was not cost. He rejected the idea, popular at the time, that the government wanted cheap higher education expansion and the polytechnics offered it. He called that theory “cynical nonsense”.
Clarke’s own account is that Britain persistently treated technical and occupational education as second class next to traditional university study, and that the polytechnics suffered for it. He argued that three or four polytechnics were “undoubtedly much superior” to some of the weaker universities, and that in any other European country they would have counted as universities.
Whatever the motive, the mechanism was direct. The polytechnics gained degree-awarding powers and were redesignated as universities.
What “post-92” means today
The 34 former polytechnics, plus Scotland’s former central institutions, are still commonly called “post-92” universities, and the label carries a charge either way. For some, it marks the moment higher education became more open. For others, especially in politics and parts of the press, it still signals an institution ranked below the pre-1992 universities.
The numbers tell a different story about where students actually are. Among England’s post-92 universities, Nottingham Trent, Manchester Metropolitan and Sheffield Hallam each enrol more than 30,000 UK students, and post-92s make up 12 of the top 20 largest English campus universities by that measure. In several former industrial cities, among them Wolverhampton, Stoke and Sunderland, the post-92 university is the only higher education institution the city has.
The post-92 sector is often described as having done the “heavy lifting” of British higher education expansion, drawing in students from less advantaged backgrounds than those typically found at pre-1992 universities. Those students, Times Higher Education reports, often go on to successful careers across UK industry.
The pattern that came before
Britain had upgraded institutions to university status before, and the earlier waves meshed with the spirit of their times. The redbrick universities became independent after the war. The “Shakespearean” universities, Sussex, York and Warwick among them, and the former Colleges of Advanced Technology were established as the welfare state approached its peak.
The 1992 Act arrived instead against the grain of the Thatcherite years, a period of widening inequality. That, the Guardian’s coverage argues, is part of why the change still drew resentment twenty years on.
What has not reversed
The Guardian piece argued there is no going back, because the students starting university that autumn were not born when the divide ended. The distinction that once decided which institutions could call themselves universities is gone, even where the reputational gap it created has not fully closed.
