From Robbins to Augar: discourses of access, meritocracy and social mobility in English higher education policy

This article examines how English higher education (HE) policy has framed the relationship between participation and social mobility across six decades through a comparative analysis of the Robbins Report (1963) and the Review of Post-18 Education and Funding (Augar, 2019). Using an adapted Critical Discourse Analysis approach, the study explores how each review constructs policy problems, allocates responsibility and legitimises particular policy responses within contrasting political, social and economic contexts. The analysis identifies a shift from a post-war public-good discourse in Robbins, which justified HE expansion through civic, cultural and collective benefit claims, to a later market-oriented framing in Augar, where social mobility is increasingly articulated through regulation, performance and value-for-money criteria. Despite this shift in governance logic, both reviews sustain meritocratic assumptions that individualise responsibility for educational outcomes and limit engagement with structural sources of inequality. By tracing how responsibility for mobility is progressively relocated from the state to institutions and individuals, the article shows how participation-led strategies persist even as their limitations are acknowledged. The paper concludes by identifying transferable lessons for policymakers in mass HE systems and by highlighting the risks of relying on HE policy alone to address entrenched social and economic inequality.