Robbins Report

The Robbins Report was commissioned by the British government in the 1960s to look into the future of higher education in the United Kingdom. The Committee on Higher Education was chaired by Lord Robbins from 1961 to 1964. After its publication, its conclusions were accepted by the government on October 24, 1963.

The report recommended immediate expansion of universities, and that all Colleges of Advanced Technology should be given the status of universities. Consequently, the number of full-time university students was to rise from 197,000 in the 1967-68 academic year to 217,000 in the academic year of 1973-74 with "further big expansion" thereafter.

The legacy of the report is sometimes overestimated. It did not - as the popular recollection of the time states (indeed, recapitulated in earlier editions of this article) lead to the establishment of the plate glass universities; the University Grants Committee had already approved applications for these before the Committee was set up (some in the late 1950s) or reported, and a few (Sussex and East Anglia to name but two) were actually open before the report was published. It did however recommend that the Colleges of Advanced Technology should become universities. The Report reflected, rather than initiated, the post-war trend to higher education expansion, and should be thought of as the 'representative text' par excellence of the time, rather than a foundation stone for the programme.

Lord Robbins himself would later become the first Chancellor of the new University of Stirling in 1968.

As a footnote, the Senior Research Officer for the committee that drew up the report was a Richard Layard, who became a well-known British economist.