Abstract

In 2010 the UK Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government announced a series of reforms to higher education in England. Among these reforms were: (i) raising the cap on tuition fees to a maximum of £9,000; (ii) removing block grants for teaching to the arts, humanities, business, law and social sciences; and, (iii) changing the regulation around granting the title of university to level the playing field and encourage more alternative providers to enter the sector. These reforms triggered a wave of student protests, organised strike action, occupation of university property and the emergence of education experiments that offer free, alternative forms of higher education. Focusing on the latter, the chapter draws upon empirical research conducted as part of a doctoral thesis with seven education experiments based in the United Kingdom, which are: Birmingham Radical Education, Free University Brighton, People’s Political Economy (Oxford), Ragged University (Edinburgh), The IF Project (London), The Really Open University (Leeds) and The Social Science Centre (Lincoln). The research found that while these education experiments tended to be embryonic, ephemeral and contested spaces, they served as places of resistance against the Coalitions’ reforms while; concomitantly, allowing people to experiment with forms of participatory democratic decision-making and critical pedagogical philosophies as well as alternative organisational forms based on collective ownership and control. The chapter concludes by arguing that the practical and theoretical significance of these education experiments, then, is that they have the potential to inform the creation of new higher education institutions or the transformation of old ones along more egalitarian, collectively owned and participatory democratic lines – one possible model is the emerging idea a co-operative university.