The inclusive nature of the British class structure ensures that all new status situations with potential elite positions are quickly absorbed into the system. In the past, this has usually meant a modification of the educational channels of access to the ruling class, which has been justified by egalitarian principles. However, educational equality achieved in this way has been formal rather than substantial; it has followed and reinforced changes in the class structure rather than led the way to social liberalization. Today, the class structure again needs modification but the conflict between the elitist and egalitarian principles is posed more starkly than it was with past reforms. The international competitive needs of the British ruling class demand more technical and scientific manpower, while the majority of ordinary people want an amelioration of their inadequate health, housing and educational facilities. This antinomy is revealed in the clearest form in the Robbins and Newsom reports on education. Robbins stresses technocratic imperatives, with no discussion at all of social welfare, while Newsom is concerned with social welfare, albeit only in a moralizing religious fashion. But latent in the Newsom report is a programme for revolutionizing society, while the proposals of the Robbins report will directly strengthen the British class system.

The Robbins report is concerned with the expansion of higher education in the next two decades. The arguments for this expansion are demographic (more children are being born), technocratic (the economy needs more scientists and technicians) and pragmatic (children are reaching a higher educational level and staying at school later). Thus in 1962 7 per cent of the age group were in full time education at 19, compared with 3 per cent in 1938. This trend reflects both a shift in middle class mores and, more importantly, a change in mobility avenues within the class structure. Yet the Robbins target of 560,000 in higher education by 1980 is below the Bow Group’s estimate of 630,000 and the Labour Party’s figure of 700,000 by 1983. The committee admit this by stressing that their projections are based on maintaining the 1963 position (which compares unfavourably, as a percentage of the available age group, with the 1955 intake) and that the proposed expansion ‘would not involve a rate of growth as high as during the last 17 years’.

Nor will this expansion reduce the class bias in higher education. The Robbins investigation of the educational histories of a sample of children born in 1941 reiterates the statistics of the built-in class bias of British education familiar from other studies. 45 per cent of the children of fathers in the higher professional groups enter higher education compared with 4 per cent of the children of skilled manual workers and 2 per cent of the semiand unskilled workers. The same inferences can be made from other indices. In 1961 only 39 per cent of Oxford and 25 per cent of Cambridge undergraduates were from local authority schools. The proportion in other British universities was 70 per cent. Yet Robbins does not even have the courage to suggest that Oxbridge should join the clearing house system.

Moreover, Robbins ignores the purpose and content of education in favour of organizational proposals that are clearly designed to ensure that all educational innovations will be enmeshed with the existing hierarchy of universities. The new universities that have been founded since 1958 are not discussed, but he new Colleges of Advanced Technology (cats) do cause the committee trouble. They have to be ‘established’ and just to emphasize that technology too should have an Oxbridge structure, the committee recommend that there should be supercats, called sisters (Special Institutions for Scientific and Technological Education and Research). The emphasis on technology is the core of the report and shows clearly how ready the British governing class is not merely to absorb new elites but even to create partial elites that will help maintain its power position.