Peter Scott

Peter Scott
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Peter verified their affiliation via an institutional email.
University College London | UCL · Department of Education, Practice and Society

About

169
Publications
119,283
Reads
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22,497
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Introduction
Peter Scott is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Studies at the Department of Education, Practice and Society, University College London. His most recent publication is ‘Retreat or Resolution? Tackling the Crisis of Mass Higher Education’ (Policy Press 2021). He was also the Scottish Government’s first Commissioner for Fair Access (2016-2022).
Additional affiliations
January 2011 - present
University College London
Position
  • Professor
September 1992 - December 1997
University of Leeds
Position
  • Professor (Full)
Position
  • Vice-Chancellor

Publications

Publications (169)
Chapter
Emphasis on the ‘social dimension’ of higher education in Europe has featured prominently in successive communiqués following the regular ministerial meetings in the Bologna process, although this high-level policy commitment to widening participation and social inclusion has not always been followed up by significant concrete actions. Nevertheless...
Book
Full-text available
This lecture is based on Burton Clark’s concept of ‘organisational saga’ in higher education. From that base it builds a wider concept of ‘saga’ to explain the evolution of systems rather than simply the development of institutions. It distinguishes between the structural and organisational characteristics of sagas - which I call the ‘foreground’ -...
Book
Full-text available
Annual Report of the Commissioner for Fair Access 2022
Book
PREFACE This book was written in the late spring and summer of 2020 and revised in the winter and spring of 2021 when the COVID-19 pandemic had not only fundamentally changed personal lives, creating the time and space for reflection that enabled it to be written, but also disturbed the course of nations, societies, economies and cultures, and als...
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The rise of populism in the second decade of the 21st century is a delayed response to the banking crisis of 2008 and the economic recession and stagnation in living standards which followed, the cutbacks in social expenditure imposed by many Governments in the wake of this crisis (so-called 'austerity") and the intensification of globalisation. It...
Chapter
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Technical Report
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Annual Report by Commissioner for Fair Access
Chapter
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Two different modes of discourse for thinking about the future of higher education are contrasted – the dominant discourse of markets, managerialism and technology, and other more reflective discourses that focus on deeper social structures and cultural formations, and also scientific and wider intellectual change. One reason perhaps for the contin...
Article
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Technical Report
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Discussion Document Web link: https://www.gov.scot/publications/commissioner-fair-access-discussion-paper-access-postgraduate-study-representation-destinations/
Article
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Martin Trow was among the most influential scholar in Higher Education studies in the second half of the 20th century. He is best known for his conceptualisation of the development of Higher Education into three stages—elite, mass and universal systems. This article considers, first, his intellectual method and the underpinning theory (or lack of i...
Technical Report
Full-text available
Annual Report to the Scottish Government
Book
Originally published in 1984, The Crisis of the University looks at the way in which changes to intellectual life relate to the development of the different institutions that make up higher education. It examines the evolution of the liberal university that flourished in the 19th and early 20th centuries into the modern university that has grown up...
Chapter
Originally published in 1995, Reform and Change in Higher Education is composed of 9 essays originally presented at a symposium, "International Perspectives on the Relationship Between Governments and Universities," and a UNESCO Forum of Experts on Strengthening Capacities for Research in Higher Education. Papers explore how government policy affec...
Book
Originally published in 1975, Strategies for Postsecondary Education looks at how postsecondary education absorbs an increasing proportion of education budgets in developed countries. The book analyses the inequalities in the American postsecondary education system and compares its performance with France and the United Kingdom. The traditional con...
Technical Report
Full-text available
Discussion Document Web link: https://beta.gov.scot/publications/commissioner-fair-access-discussion-paper-retention-outcomes-destinations/
Article
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The contemporary university is subject to two, apparently contradictory, forces. The first is the drive towards the modernisation of its governance and management, often in ways that reflect corporate structures more familiar in the private sector (and other parts of the reformed public sector). This drive has been accompanied by the growth of perf...
Research
Annual Report to the Scottish Government
Chapter
Full-text available
Technical Report
Full-text available
Discussion Document https://beta.gov.scot/publications/commissioner-fair-access-discussion-paper-league-tables/
Article
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Debates about free speech and academic freedom—and their limits—have become sharper but also more confused. Conservatives demand greater restrictions, but so too do radicals worried that offensive speech may disrupt campus communities. Universities have a special responsibility to secure the right balance between free expression and offensive speec...
Article
Full-text available
Debates about free speech and academic freedom—and their limits—have become sharper but also more confused. Conservatives demand greater restrictions, but so too do radicals worried that offensive speech may disrupt campus communities. Universities have a special responsibility to secure the right balance between free expression and offensive speec...
Technical Report
Full-text available
Discussion Document https://beta.gov.scot/publications/ucas-admissions-offers-acceptances-discussion-paper/
Technical Report
Full-text available
Discussion Document Web link: https://beta.gov.scot/publications/ucas-admissions-offers-acceptances-discussion-paper/
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Chapter
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The United Kingdom has a truly mass system of higher education. The total number of higher education students enrolled in universities and colleges was 2.5 million in 2014/15 (Table 1). Many more are studying on lower-level technical education courses in further education colleges and on adult education courses.
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In Valuing Higher Education, leading international analysts examine Gareth Williams’s contribution to shaping our thinking about the economics of higher education in essays that are a testimony to Williams’s conception that the field cannot be properly understood unless viewed alongside social policy, changes in knowledge production, the life chanc...
Article
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p>International higher education, once an aspect of the academy associated with ideals of solidarity and development, is now seen as the most market-oriented aspect. The main reason for this reversal is the so-called ‘neoliberal turn’. But the major trends associated with this turn - a new (and reduced) role for the State; globalization in its vari...
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The widespread assumption that academic mobility and international education are "good things" may need to be tested periodically—to ensure, first, that the lessons of mass higher education at home have been fully incorporated into concepts of international education; and second, that the lessons of globalization have been factored into policies fo...
Article
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Two broad frameworks are used to describe and analyse the mobility of academic staff. The first, and dominant, framework focuses on flows from the 'periphery' to the 'core', although that 'core' is also evolving (and is no longer dominated by North America and Western Europe but is increasingly likely to embrace dynamic East Asia systems). This fir...
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The humanities are going through a period of exceptional vitality characterised by the proliferation of novel interpretative frameworks, methodologies and perspectives. Yet they—and, to a lesser extent, the social sciences—feel threatened by the rising tide of research assessment which appear to be predominantly derived from the needs and experienc...
Chapter
Best-selling ‘guru’ books, often aimed at business people transiting through airports, love alliterative lists – the three ‘S’s, the four ‘C’s, the six ‘R’s and so on. The choice of bulleted advice, it sometimes seems, is constrained by their initial letters. In the same spirit this chapter is about the two ‘M’s– markets and managerialism – both of...
Chapter
In Valuing Higher Education, leading international analysts examine Gareth Williams’s contribution to shaping our thinking about the economics of higher education in essays that are a testimony to Williams’s conception that the field cannot be properly understood unless viewed alongside social policy, changes in knowledge production, the life chanc...
Article
Full-text available
There appears to be little coordination between national policies for higher education and for regional development, despite the fact that universities play a key role in local and regional economies (through direct and indirect expenditure on goods and services, the provision of jobs, the development of a more highly skilled workforce and the gene...
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The Robbins report published half a century ago in 1963 has overshadowed all subsequent reports on the reform of higher education. A large part of its significance was that it made the case for expansion and therefore set higher education in the United Kingdom on the road to become a mass system. However the committee's recommendations for the futu...
Book
Reflecting the changing ideological and economic perspectives of the government of the day, the expansion of higher education in England has prompted numerous reforms aimed at reshaping and restructuring the sector and its funding. Leading to student riots and sparking some of the sharpest controversies in British higher education the reforms intro...
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The utility of post-modernism as an interpretative framework for understanding the development of contemporary higher education systems is sharply contested. Critics argue that post-modernism is, at best, a set of ideas in aesthetics, literature and critical theory with limited relevance outside these domains and, at worst, a passing intellectual f...
Chapter
This introductory chapter is based on the final report by the general rapporteur at the Bologna Researchers Conference held in Bucharest in October 2011. It reviews the wider political and economic context in which the Bologna process has developed since 1999, and argues that the economic difficulties triggered by the banking crisis of 2008 have cr...
Article
This summary presents the main findings from research undertaken for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) to understand the current nature of higher education (HE) in further education colleges (FECs) in England. The study was carried out between March 2011 and March 2012 by a team from the University of Sheffield and the Instit...
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In November 2009, at Noors Slott in Sweden, a small group of distinguished individuals from academia and government met to reflect on the ideas developed in the New Production of Knowledge (Gibbons et al., 1994) and Re-thinking Science (Nowotny et al., 2001). The aim was less to determine the impact of these works on science and policy than to iden...
Article
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to consider whether recent changes in higher education – notably a tripling of student fees and the withdrawal of most direct public funding for teaching – pose fundamental challenges for the pattern of governance, leadership and management in colleges in universities. It considers the impact not only of these...
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This article is divided into two main sections. The first looks at the development of contemporary higher education systems under three headings: expansion, structures and market, and funding and fees. The second considers the future of higher education in terms of three key relationships - with the knowledge economy, with the political and social...
Article
The work of Burton Clark extended over more than half a century – and also from its original base in sociology to embrace wider inter-disciplinary studies. His identification of the major research themes in higher education continues to be valid, despite the substantial changes that have taken place in the scale, structure and values of the system....
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Professor Peter Scott is vice-chancellor of Kingston University in London. Previously he was professor of education at the University of Leeds (1992–98) and editor of The Times Higher Education Supplement (1976–92). He was president of the Academic Cooperation Association from 2000 untill 2008, the Brussels-based international education organizatio...
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As many students are now enrolled on higher education programmes in further education today as the total of all higher education students – whether in universities, advanced further education or teacher training – at the time of the Robbins Report in 1963 when the advance towards mass higher education first got under way. These programmes make a vi...
Chapter
Two of the most important factors influencing the future direction and shape of the academic profession are, first, the growing emphasis on the ‘market’ in higher education and, second, the development of new, more fluid and more open, knowledge production systems. The two are often linked. There is no clearer demonstration of the (overweening?) in...
Article
The significance of the changing nature of Higher Education (HE) in Europe has been largely ignored by institutions in the UK due to variants of either Euroscepticism or a belief that somehow British HE is unique. This article argues that these attitudes are hampering future engagement between HE providers across Europe and those in the UK. It is l...
Article
Access is a central issue in the debate about the future shape and characteristics of the post-binary system of higher education. It is seen as crucial to the shift towards a more open, mass system. This paper examines commitments to access in the contents of institutional missions and strategic plans. The results of our analysis suggest a widespre...
Article
This paper will attempt to do two things. First, to try to establish the context in which the New Universities presently operate, both in terms of the overall shape and structure of higher education in Britain and in terms of the likely evolution of this system. Second, to look forward by attempting to discuss how the new universities’ leading char...

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