Polytechnics, Pluralism, and the Institutional Making of Economics Education in the UK (1960s–1990s)

Abstract

This article examines the role of polytechnics in shaping economics education in the United Kingdom between the 1960s and 1990s, highlighting how their institutional context and purpose enabled greater curricular flexibility than universities. Drawing on archival institutional records (course prospectuses, syllabi, and policy documents), as well as interviews with economics educators, I show that polytechnics, designed mainly to deliver vocational education, played a central role in incorporating and developing forms of pluralism in economics, further supported by relative regulatory tolerance. However, structural reforms in the late 1980s, driven by funding constraints, the rise of performance metrics, and increasing alignment with university norms, progressively curtailed these experiments. The historical trajectory of polytechnics thus illustrates how institutional environments can temporarily support pluralist economics education, but also how reforms produced a “regression to the mean” that ultimately narrowed the space for critical approaches.