The Steering of Universities in the UK –A Policy Documents Review

The central purpose of this paper is to review higher education policy documents of the UKgovernment. For the analysis of recent and changing patterns of HE steering mechanisms, wewill first refer to the salient White Paper "Higher Education: a New Framework" publishedin 1991. However, the main part of this review concentrates on the analysis of the recentlypublished White Paper "The Future of Higher Education" (2003) and a large number ofadditional policy documents relevant to the current debates about the steering of Higher EducationInstutitons (HEIs) in the UK.To frame the analysis and to help to structure the ideas presented in the documents, a heuristicframework based on a literature review, will be introduced. This framework draws on differentkinds of scientific texts, referring to higher education and public administration as well asto postulated changes in the role of the government and the state at the beginning of the 21stcentury.Furthermore, the following questions, addressing different aspects of the steering of HEIs,will serve as another frame for the analyses of the documents. The questions refer...