Higher Technological Education and British Policy Making: A Lost Opportunity for Curriculum Change in Engineering Education

The opportunity for technical colleges in England to undertake a radical change in the curriculum came when in the nineteen-fifties a select group of these institutions (Colleges of Advanced Technology) had their status raised to offer a degree equivalent diploma for the education and training of engineers and technologists for industry. While there were differences between the programmes offered and university courses they were not radical. With the exception of compulsory liberal studies and a sandwich (cooperative) structure the engineering courses mirrored those from which they were supposed to differ. The question this paper seeks to answer is why this opportunity was not taken? It is argued that the reasons for this lost opportunity to develop a new curriculum lie deep in the culture that formed the values and beliefs of educational policy makers during the industrial revolution. A divorce emerged between the academic and the practical in which training for industry was not considered to be something that universities do. By the end of the nineteenth century a technical education sector had developed in spite of very poor support from industrialists. Some students in Polytechnics were able to pursue studies for degrees of the University of London. The policy makers who suggested the new framework (The Percy Committee) came from the educational élite that valued the pure as opposed to the practical. They were focused on the need to increase the qualified workforce and paid no attention to the structure of the subsystem they were proposing and how it would exchange with the system of higher education per se. Thus universities would train the research and development workers of the future and the technical colleges the engineer managers to degree level. They should be awarded a diploma but it would have degree status which would be achieved by a longer period of academic study interwoven with works hitherto been the practice of part-time day release education. A counter culture developed in the colleges as the staff sought the status of universities for their institutions. At the same time it is by no means clear that they would have been able to develop a radical alternative since there was little in the way of a substantial philosophy or educational theory to guide thinking in a radically new direction. The paper is presented in the form of a historical narrative. The principal threads (culture, social class, status, sub-system and available knowledge) are brought together in a final section that also considers implications for the present. The paragraphs have been numbered for the convenience of cross referencing to this final section. P ge 24666.2