| Abstract: | Higher education in Britain displays a diversity of patterns of participation and provision. The establishment of funding councils for England, Scotland, Wales; together with the advisory body the Northern Ireland Higher Education Council (NIHEC), for Northern Ireland, will further increase this diversity. As these councils go about their work, a valuable exercise might be conducted by recording the patterns of participation in the early 1990s. Each council confronts a different tradition, with different levels of participation, and with somewhat different issues on their policy agenda. The NIHEC oversees a small two university system, with a high Northern Irish age participation index, and where affirmative action and equal opportunity measures have a particular prominence. |
