The rise and fall of the polytechnics: explaining change in British higher education policy making

The decision of the Labour government in the mid-1960s to adopt a binary policy for British higher education and the Conservative government's initiative in 1991 to abandon the binary divide are compared in terms of four factors drawn from public policy literature: the role of environmental factors; the emergence and impact of competing ideological perspectives; the constraints of limited funds; and the agendas and power of the policy actors. In this case study it is concluded that systems or deterministic models are of limited value in explaining change. An alternative approach is developed, drawing on the strategic choice decision-making perspective in organisation theory, which explains the rise and fall of the binary policy in terms of how the actors in the higher education policy coalition perceive and react to environmental factors and use power resources either to initiate or to block change.