The End of Expansion and the Consolidation of Differentiation in English Higher Education

Following systems theory to distinguish between cultural and occupational information, this paper reviews the history of English higher education to show the predominance of cultural over occupational transmission in the messages communicated to its students. Despite its formal commitment to vocational purposes, recent expansion of further and higher continuing education (F&HCE) is suggested to have had more to do with cultural than occupational transmission. For a process of class recomposition potentiated by new technology has eroded traditional social divisions between manual and non‐manual labour. Together with mass un‐and under‐employment, this posed a legitimacy crisis for the state to which it responded with new forms of ‘selectivity’ (Offe, 1974) based upon educational credentials (Broadfoot, 1996). In conclusion however, it is suggested that with the consolidation of the new class formation this expansion of F&HCE has halted and will not be restarted by Dearing's 1997 contradictory attempt to do so.