Scottish Universities

Extracts from readings that I think have some relevance to current university issues in  Scotland

A HISTORY of the SCOTTISH PEOPLE

THE SCOTTISH EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM 1840 -

1940

W  Knox

Things did improve in 1889 due to an Act of Parliament which transformed

university education in Scotland from a system based on general arts to a more specialised basis of study. As a result, philosophy, which had previously formed the core of the arts degree, was made optional. Students were also forced to compete for bursaries and this acted as an unofficial entrance examination.

The setting up in 1901 of the Carnegie Trust Fund (CTF) provided a further source of assistance and by 1930 70% of university students in Scotland were receiving awards from the fund. The numbers of students in higher education institutions increased from 4,400 in 1830 to 6,000 in 1900, to 10,000 in 1938. At Glasgow University, working-class students increased as a percentage of the total, from 18.6% in 1860 to 24% in 1910. Most, however, were concentrated in the Arts. Medicine and the law were still the preserve of the middle classes; the chances of a male from the lowest social class from gaining a degree in law was 1 in 20,000 and in medicine 1 in 6,000. The situation also improved for females.

Even so, Scotland fared better in providing access to higher education for

children of poorer backgrounds than England. Scotland had one university place for every 1,000 of the population, compared to 1:5,800 in England; in secondary schools the figures were 1:140 and 1:1,300 respectively.

Dominies and Domination:

Schoolteachers, Masculinity and Women

in 19th century Scotland

by Helen Corr

History Workshop Journal

The accessibility of Scottish education was, even in the nineteenth

century, a subject of debate. In 1834, George Lewis, editor of the Scottish

Guardian delivered a devastating attack on complacency with his book

Scotland: A Half Educated Nation. Lewis found that only 1 in 12 of the

population attended day schools and in this Scotland was lagging behind

Prussia, France and parts of the United States. In the 1860s, the son of a

minister was a hundred times more likely to go to university than the son of a

miner. The Argyll Commission reported in the 1860s, that the burgh school

tended to be the preserve of the middle classes.7 The objective reality was

that before 1914, the vast majority of working-class girls and boys left at the

age of 13, the minimum school leaving age in Scotland as elsewhere in other

Western capitalist countries in search of work to contribute to the family

income.8 The myth of equality of access to an educational ladder did not

apply in the case of girls since they were legally denied the right to graduate

from any of the Scottish universities until 1893.9 Given the invisibility of

women in the sociological and historical literature on education, this paper

explores Scottish women teachers' identity and position in the educational

structure.

Stefan Collini

• The Future of Higher Education
  Stationery Office, 112 pp, £17.50, January 2003, ISBN 0 10 157352 9  London Review of Books

In fact, it was only at some point in the decade after 1945 that the state started to provide even half of the income of any British university, and it was only after the report of the Anderson Committee in 1960 that a national system of mandatory grants for students was put in place

At this point the state played hardly any direct role in financing universities; they were autonomous foundations with their own endowments, or the result of local initiative and funding, or dependent on students’ fees – or, usually, some combination of these. Only in 1919 was a body established to distribute the small grant-in-aid which governments had begun to make to some institutions; called the University Grants Committee, this was essentially a device for protecting the autonomy of universities by allowing a small group, mostly made up of senior academics, to act as an intermediary body to advise the government on the needs of universities and then to distribute such sums as the Treasury should allocate for the purpose. In the 1930s the annual recurrent grant was around £2 million; postwar expansion, especially from the late 1950s onwards, saw this rise to £61 million by 1962. As late as 1956 the total allocated to universities via the UGC for capital projects (as opposed to recurrent expenditure) was only £3.8 million; by 1963 this had shot up to £30 million.