History of the OU

The below is part of a posting written on an OU blog by Linda Anderson in 2018.

I fetched up at the OU in 2002, already a designer and deliverer of a successful distance learning writing course. Here’s what I knew. Distance learning widens participation in a dramatic way. It is a truly intimate form of shared learning. It empowers shyer people to have their say. Students benefit from a permanent record of feedback and discussions that they can return to as necessary. I also knew about the risk of quarrels that can blaze suddenly, leaving relationships in tatters. I knew on a deeply personal level about tutor burnout. I had been warned about it on the OU training course but had naively failed during the first couple of years to set limits to word counts or frequency of submissions to tutors. In the production of A215, I hope I kept in mind the tutors’ right to have a life.

I still remember how thrilled and challenged I felt by the job. At its core was a highly demanding form of teaching that had to be lucid and accessible as well as replete with lively, planned activities to both practise and test skills. But there was a cluster of other exciting elements: team management, peer review, editing, programme-making, interviewing famous writers, liaising with publishers internal and external, and ultimately, tutor training and supervision.

In the making of A215, what I wanted to import from the Lancaster model was the student-centred approach, to mix tutor-led online conferencing with occasional face-to-face day schools. I wanted students to try their hand at the three main genres of fiction, poetry, and life writing, finally being free to specialise in their chosen form or forms. The production team was a superb one, and despite our fair share of arguments and injured feelings, our work was relatively frictionless. The main authors were myself; Mary Hammond, an expert on publishing; Sara Haslam, a prime mover in the establishment of the ‘Start Writing’ series; W.N. Herbert, award-winning poet based at Newcastle University; and Derek Neale, who was steeped in the UEA writing culture both as an MA and PhD graduate and tutor for many years. Bob Owens, despite his workload as head of department and staff tutor in London, edited the Readings section of the Workbook. He and Shirley Coulson (course manager) contributed their extensive knowledge of how to navigate OU systems, a vital role in a team with so many new staff. Clare Spencer gave us an AL perspective.

I was surprised at how much teamwork kept us to a tight schedule while not curbing our creativity. Different colleagues often pushed the boundaries to create ambitious or unexpected elements, such as Sara Haslam’s recorded panel discussion by eminent biographers – Michael Holroyd, Blake Morrison, and Jackie Kay, chaired by Robert Fraser – a beautifully realised debate. Derek Neale included a range of innovative styles of biographical writing in the Workbook, showing how to mix fact and fiction. Within a couple of years we had an array of audio CDs, a study guide, and a 600 plus page book, Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings, co-published with Routledge.

The course launched in 2006 with approximately 2500 students and gained the highest retention level in the University as well as high scores of student satisfaction. The Workbook was acclaimed and is still in wide use in other universities. Over a hundred ALs, most of them new to the OU, were trained and supported in online teaching. These successes remained consistent over eight years, so that 22,000 students had taken the course by the time I left in 2013. It was Maggie Butt, our first external examiner, who made what felt to me like the best tribute to the course: ‘You have managed the industrial scale without losing the personal touch.’

Creative Writing has gone from strength to strength. Derek Neale chaired A363: Advanced Creative Writing, which launched in 2008. Although I had some hand in the production, the course materials were largely written or produced by Derek Neale and Bill Greenwell. Derek designed a distinctive approach of experimenting with form. He aimed to deepen students’ engagement with fiction, poetry, and life writing while also introducing scriptwriting for various media. The core text A Creative Writing Handbook: Developing Dramatic Technique, Individual Style and Voice was co-published with A & C Black. When both courses were up and running, we were organising teaching and assessment of more than 3000 students annually with a very small course team.

Research developments

The PhD programme began in 2008. Of the four researchers I co-supervised with Derek Neale, two won internal scholarships against Faculty-wide competition and all gained their doctorates either shortly before or shortly after I retired. Three of their four novels have now been published and widely reviewed: The Longest Fight by Emily Bullock was named as ‘a fine addition to the canon of boxing literature’ in ‘The Independent’; Owl Song at Dawn by Emma Sweeney was shortlisted for the Amazon Rising Star Award in 2016; Heather Richardson’s Doubting Thomas was recently listed by ‘The Independent’ as one of the nine best Scottish fictions of 2017.

In the spring of 2012 I founded The Contemporary Cultures of Writing research group with my creative writing colleagues. I organised and chaired our first series of seminars at the Institute of English Studies, University of London on the theme of ‘The Rise of Creative Writing’ to coincide with just over forty years of Creative Writing in higher education in the UK. We explored the question of whether writing courses had a traceable and positive impact on literary culture. I found that eminent authors and academics like Maureen Freely, Andrew Cowan, and Alison MacLeod, were prepared to travel to London and speak for expenses only. (It’s a generosity that my colleagues have subsequently also been able to rely on.) The audiences were gratifyingly large, with about 25 people showing up to two events and a dozen for one on poetry. These series are still going strong and have given colleagues experience in event organisation and panel chairing as well as raising the public profile of the OU.

Linda Anderson worked as Reader in Creative Writing at The Open University from 2002 – 2013. She is a contributor to the short story anthology The Glass Shore, ed. Sinead Gleeson, which won the 2016 Irish Book of the Year Award. She is co-editor with Dawn Sherratt-Bado of the acclaimed anthology Female Lines: New Writing by Women from Northern Ireland (New Island 2017), described by Arts Council Head Damian Smyth as ‘one of the most important books to be published about Northern Ireland in half a century.’ Her novel Cuckoo, first published in 1986 by The Bodley Head, will be reissued in 2018 as a modern Irish classic by Turnpike Books.

FacebookTwitterEmailShare

Source: https://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/english/on-establishing-creative-writing-programmes/

​In June 2024 Peter Keogh, Professor of Health and Society in the Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies attended the graduation in Mountjoy Women’s Prison in Dublin of OU’s first female in Students in Secure Environments (SiSE) to graduate in Ireland.

He said:

“I was incredibly fortunate that the first SiSE graduation I attended after transferring to the OU in Ireland was for the OU’s first female graduate in Ireland. This was a huge achievement for the graduate herself but also for The Open University and the prison education staff.
“Talking to the graduate, I was struck by how little she made of the obstacles she faced studying in a secure environment. She expressed admiration for learners on the outside who juggle their learning with childcare and jobs. But the barriers she faced were all too real and included not only having to overcome the difficulties she faced in her own life but also having to fight entrenched norms against women prisoners learning, and significant technical and IT barriers.
“It was great to have an opportunity to discuss these things with a group of female prisoners who have been inspired to follow in her footsteps and study for qualifications with the OU. The SiSE team in Ireland deserve huge credit for supporting and facilitating all these amazing journeys. ”

“To me, these graduation events go to the heart of the OU’s mission in promoting equality and social justice through education. Never has the term ‘the university of the second chance’ been so appropriate.”

The event was also attended by John D’Arcy, Director of Ireland. He added:

“It was a privilege to attend this degree ceremony at Mountjoy Prison. I was so impressed by our new graduate’s commitment to her studies and how much she was inspiring other prisoners to undertake study. The commitment of the Irish Prison Service Staff and tutors from City of Dublin Education and Training Board with our SISE manager Tony Peoples is a model of good practice.”

Joan Bellamy, nee Shaw, 1926-2023, was an Open University tutor, Staff Tutor and between 1984 and 1990, Dean of Arts. She contributed to a number of courses, modules, including for A101, with Colin Cunningham, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow; The Roots of Western Society; Studying the Arts (1977) and for A102 she co-edited Culture – Production, consumption. She provided ‘Milton and marvell’ for A203 (1981) and for A205, Culture and Belief in Europe, 1450-1600: Royal and Religious Authority. The British Isles. (1996). She also wrote for the OU-focused journal Teaching at a Distance, notably in 1978, an article on ‘Special Support for Students with Academic Difficulties: Experiences in Yorkshire’ and, with John Purkis, Milton Study Guide.

The daughter of Hilda and Tom Shaw (a coal miner and Labour councillor) she grew up in West Yorkshire, read English at Leeds and in the 1940s worked full time for the Communist Party of GB. After her husband, Ron Bellamy, a Marxist economist at Leeds University, accepted a Senior Lectureship at the University of Ghana the couple spent 1963-66 in Ghana where Joan worked in the press office of President Kwame Nkrumah. After a coup ousted Nkrumah the couple returned to Leeds, where Ron became Dean of the Faculty of Economic and Social Studies, 1970-72 while in 1970 Joan (as Communist Parliamentary candidate for Leeds East) received 513 votes. Following the demise of the CPGB she joined one of its successors, her political position unchanged. In 1988, in a collection of essays entitled In search of Victorian values she assessed gender relations while Ron contributed a Marxian economic analysis. Having written for the journal of the South African Communist Party, The African Communist and Communist pamphlets (eg Homes, Jobs, Immigration: the Facts, 1968 and Unite against racism: defeat the immigration bill, 1971 and a ‘Bibliography on Africa’ for the Marx Memorial Library Bulletin (1971), Joan turned to literature. She edited, with fellow OU academics Anne Laurence and Gill Perry, Women, Scholarship and Criticism C. 1790-1900: Gender and Knowledge (2000) and wrote More precious than rubies: Mary Taylor, Friend of Charlotte Bronte, Strong Minded Woman (2002).

Her interest in empowering people and understanding democracy as a process pervaded her work at the OU and her wider contributions. In 1975 she wrote in the CPGB weekly Comment that to rely on the 1976 Race Relations Act was to ‘ignore the potential of the democratic participation of those most bitterly affected by discrimination, the black people themselves’. In 1992, for Labour History Review she contributed a piece on ‘The use of trade union banners in education’. She reported on how she had asked students to analyse trade union banners, her aim being ‘to illuminate the lives, values and culture of sections of the organised working class of the past’. When, in 2018 she offered, via the Guardian, a critique of the proposed developments of OU Vice Chancellor Peter Horrocks, it was in terms of a defence of the OU’s social democratic reputation. She opposed that which could ‘be the final hammer blows to the drawn-out process of demolishing one of Labour’s greatest achievements’. Having travelled to Iraq, Syria, Mongolia, Ghana and Moscow, she returned to the county of her birth and long retained an engagement with the Brontes and with women and Victorian fiction.

The focus in this posting is on the final object of 50 in the series, the people at the heart of the OU, the learners.

← President Cath. No longer a duck, she fits the bill.

It was contributed by Cath Brown. She is well qualified to write about students. She been a student  (she has a BSc in Molecular Sciences (i.e. Chemistry) and a BSc Open (mainly physics, engineering and history) and she is currently studying Computing at the OU. In addition, she has been a STEM Faculty Representative on 2016-18 Central Executive Committee, has chaired an Students Association affiliated society (OU Alchemy) held various OUSA posts and moderated an online forum. Currently she is President of OUSA.

Philip Sully with then OU Chancellor Betty Boothroyd on the occasion of the naming of the building
(Source )

Visitors to the OU’s Milton Keynes campus will see buildings named after many illustrious figures – Perry and Horlock for the first and second Vice-Chancellors, Wilson and Jennie Lee for our political founders, and eminent scientists Alan Turing and Robert Hooke. But the Philip Sully building is the only one (to date) named after a student.

When the building was named in 2006, Philip had completed 61 modules, and his qualifications included two undergraduate degrees, a masters and a doctorate. I somehow doubt he has stopped studying since then – the signs of OU addiction are clear to see!

It’s good to be reminded, in this era in which education is too often seen as solely a means to an end, of the joy and the value of the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. The Philip Sully building thus serves as a splendid symbol of lifelong learning.

Our 50th object – the building – is here standing for Philip, and by extension all OU students, without whom there would be no university. What have these students looked like over the years?

In the early days, there were a significant number of teachers who’d taken the accelerated post-war training, but were now in search of a degree.  These days, there’s still that teaching link – it’s a particularly popular career with OU graduates – but it’s often classroom assistants looking for the degree to embark on initial teacher training.

The OU was once christened the “university of the second chance”. Being told that university was “not for the likes of you” was all too common in days gone by; in 1950 only 3.4% of young people participated in higher education, and this was only up to 8.4% in 1970 and just 19.6% still in 1990.  So  the OU was the natural destination for many whose background had hitherto prevented them pursuing that degree.  Even if they had the formal qualifications for admission to a “brick” university, part-time or flexible courses at conventional institutions were unheard of, so for the employed aspiring graduate, the OU was almost the only game in town.

In the 21^st century, we are edging up to half of young people entering higher education (though who knows whether government proposals will knock that down again). So there are fewer of the “second chancers”. Today’s “typical” OU student (in so far as such a creature exists) is in their 20s, working, and aiming to improve or change their career. In a surprising move, a fifth of OU students are now studying at full time intensity.   Then we have the students with disabilities for whom the OU is a much more feasible and flexible option, and the students who are carers, who can only contemplate studying if they can fit it around the demands of their lives.  Many of these students are very time poor – fitting in study around family and work requires taking advantage of any free moment to keep up.  Back in the 70s and 80s, OU students rose early and stayed up late to catch their course TV programmes; the videos may be all online now, but just as many students are keeping those same hours to carve out some study time.

But the OU still has students from their teens to their nineties, and any broad assumptions about their motivations, their circumstances and their lives are pretty well destined to be wrong.

So are there still students like Philip around – learning for pure pleasure? Most certainly; the rumours of the death of the “leisure learner” are greatly exaggerated (There is even a Facebook group called “OU Study Addicts” with hundreds of members).   In England at least, it’s expensive for a “hobby” now, but there are still students who aim to never leave the OU, some taking advantage of the second degree funding now available for STEM subjects to keep going, others prioritising their studies over more frivolous activities such as holidays!

Of course the OU student experience, like the student experience anywhere, is not just about studying. Many OU students say they’ve made friends for life.  In the early days, the tutorial, the summer school and the unofficial local study groups were where connections were made – a fantastic set up if you happened to click with someone local to you.  The advent of widespread internet access opened up new additional ways to “meet”; students of the 2000s will remember the FirstClass conferencing system with affection, but 2019 students are more likely to speak of Facebook and WhatsApp.

OU Students Association first President Millie Marsland – clearly a force to be reckoned with! She maintained her job as a Headteacher whilst leading the Association.

Like any other student body, OU students have had their own Students Association for most of the lifetime of the university. The Association (known for many years as OUSA) has (amongst other things) pushed for students to have a greater voice in the university (resulting on representation throughout the governance structure), developed its own support service Peer Support, started its own charity for students in financial need OUSET, and supports a raft of Clubs and Societies, including the strangely named  TADpoles. This society was formed by students of the course TAD292 Art and the Environment, chaired by Simon Nicholson, which had its last presentation in 1985…. But the society is still going strong in 2019!.

The Association’s video gives a fuller picture of OUSA history.

What will the OU student of the future be like? Whilst the financial pressures of the day and the demise of the “career for life” suggests that young(ish) career-changers and promotion-hunters may come to dominate our student body, let us make sure that our university always has room for lifelong learners like Philip, and continues to offer that enriching broad curriculum that has changed so many students’ lives.

The court, to be found around the back of the Gardiner Building, is named after Michael Drake, the first Dean of Social Sciences. He is also why Social Sciences courses are prefixed ‘D’. He recalled how in late 1968 or early 1969 the VC’s Committee of the OU (now the VCE) met.

An item on the agenda was to give a letter to each of the proposed Foundation courses and all courses thereafter.  Some letters were easy; ‘S’ for Science, ‘E’ for Education, ‘A’ for Arts etc.  But what about Social Sciences?  SS seemed inappropriate and anyway two letters would double inputting time.  I piped up – ‘Isn’t it obvious?  ‘O.K, D it is’ and Joe Clinch then Assistant Secretary, minuted it.

Now an Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, Michael Drake contributed to numerous modules both in print and on the television and radio. He has encouraged communication between staff, been active in the local history society and his recollections have appeared in the local press. A longer recording has been made for the OU Archives. Much of his research and teaching focused on the population studies (he studied half-a-million baptism, marriage and burial records from Morley Wapentake, Yorkshire as part of an early project). He wanted to bring elements from the social sciences together with elments from the traditions associated with historians.

Building on his interest in the integration of a popular interest in family history with the disciplines of history and the social sciences Michael Drake and colleagues developed a series of OU modules. Historical Sources and the Social Scientist, D301, which was presented 1974-1988, enabled students to engage in ‘explorations of the past undertaken for the explicit purpose of advancing social scientific enquiry’. Students’ history dissertations, on topics of their choice, employed social scientific methods to complete history dissertations. Between 1994 and 2001 Family and Community History: 19^th and 20^th centuries, DA301 was presented. Framed by the wider OU commitment to recognizing and valuing the students’ knowledge and experience it too emphasised the need to employ the scientific methods of clearly identifying aims, hypothesizing and using theoretical models against which the findings of local research might be set. Using a problem-based learning approach, students were taught the skills required for small-scale research. On one occasion, with financial support from the Wellcome Trust, he helped over 30 students to explore the history of infant mortality in the years 1871-1910 with a focus on individuals. The studdents submitted their work for a BPhil, an MPhil or a DPhil. He sought to collapse the dichotomy of ‘inside-out and outside-in’, that is to merge the separate, parallel, streets leading either to universities from independent scholarship or vice versa. This was realised in his work for Object Number 25, FACHRS.

The Perry Building (see illustration) is on the Milton Keynes campus and is named after Walter Laing Macdonald Perry KT OBE, Baron Perry of Walton, (1921 – 2003). One of the influential Scots at the OU he was born in Dundee in 1921. He died in 2003 and was the subject of obituarties in the Independent and Guardian.

The image here includes the art work outside the building.

As its founding Vice-Chancellor Walter Perry was central to the creation and establishment of The Open University. He was appointed in May 1968, felt that the OU could ‘change the face of education not only in Britain but in the world’ and set out to transform learning and teaching. There were 42,000 applications to start studying in 1971 of whom 25,000 were accepted. Other UK universities which opened in the 1960s started with a few hundred students. He established a successful system for transfer of academic credits and he encouraged prisoners to study at the OU. Despite opposition from those who felt the OU should only teach, he noted that ‘it was the intent of the new university to promote the research activities of its academic staff, an intent from which the Open University has never wavered’. Many knew him as a skilled negotiator, despite the fact that as he noted ‘at one Senate meeting in 1971 each member received 487 pages of typescript weighing 2lbs 15 oz’. He was also flexible. When the site was a sea of mud he sent out for slippers which were issued to staff. He initially demonstrated little interest in the regions and nations, claiming that he used an amended version of the further educational administrative boundaries because ‘we had no coherent plan for the regions when we started; they were simply allowed to evolve’. Nevertheless, the model of central planning was amended to encompass the specific needs and aspirations of nations. He insisted on high academic and pedagogic standards noting that

the standard of teaching in conventional universities was pretty deplorable. It suddenly struck me that if you could use the media and devise course materials that would work for students all by themselves, then inevitably you were bound to affect – for good – the standard of teaching in conventional universities. I believed that to be so important that it overrode almost everything else.

He also recognised how difficult it was to study with the OU. His history of the OU, Walter Perry, Open University: A personal account by the first Vice-Chancellor (Milton Keynes: Open University, 1976) was one of the blocks upon which Daniel Weinbren, The Open University, A history (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014) was built.

The Stuart Hall Building, on the Walton Hall campus, is this week’s object.

It was named after Professor Hall, 1932 —2014, a Jamaican-born British cultural theorist, sociologist, and political activist. Hall’s father was the first nonwhite person to hold a senior position within the Jamaican office of United Fruit. This was a powerful American farming and agricultural corporation. His mother was mixed-race. In 1951, Hall won a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford and became engaged with radical politics. Following Kruschev’s ‘secret’ speech of 1956 and the Russian invasion of Hungary, many Communists left the Communist Party. The Reasoner, later The New Reasoner, was created to address some of their concerns. Another journal, less associated with former Communists, was also founded, Universities and Left Review. Stuart Hall was the first editor-in-chief when, in 1960, these journals merged into New Left Review. Hall joined Birmingham University’ Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in 1964, became acting director in 1968 and Director in 1972.

Hall was a popular public intellectual, frequently calling for social justice and against nuclear proliferation.

He left Birmingham University in 1979 to become a professor of sociology at the Open University. He noted that the OU was ‘filled with good social democrats. Everybody there believes in the redistribution of educational opportunities and seeks to remedy the exclusiveness of British education’. He later pointed out ‘it would have been funny to come to the OU and not to be committed to redistributing educational opportunities’. He remained at the OU until he retired in 1997 and became a Professor Emeritus. He played a full part in teaching and research. One of the modules with which he was involved included a popular teaching text: Paul Du Gay, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes and Hugh Mackay, Doing Cultural Studies: The story of the Sony Walkman (London: Sage, in association with The Open University, 1997).

His ideas about race, gender and culture informed much of the OU’s teaching. His focus was less on the conventional division between the culture of the masses and the validated culture of the dominant, the music and books that were supposed to teach people how to be civil and which would reveal them as well-mannered. Rather, for Hall, culture was ‘experience lived, experience interpreted, experience defined’. It was a site of ‘negotiation’ and popular culture was ‘where this struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged: it is also the stake to be won or lost in that struggle’.

The quotations above manage to insult the students (Spectator) the founders (Christopher Chataway) the staff (Robert Jackson) the idea (The Times) and the Scots, Welsh, Irish and others not based in England (Times Educational Supplement). This was a university which failed as:

• it was not a community of scholars, it failed as a university
• it strove to be a university, it failed those best served by technical colleges and adult education provision
•  it used television, it failed to educate and only managed to transmit
• it was party political, it failed to be objective.

These criticisms had an impact. To prove it was intellectually sound the OU made strenuous efforts to present scholarly television programmes. as a result some of them ended up speaking to academic peers, not interested learners. To prove that students were being thoroughly tested to a high standard the OU’s assessment system has long been rigorous. For many years there were external examiners for every module, not simply every degree and there is checking on the marking of tutors through a system of monitoring and tutorial visits. The accusation that it was the creature of the Labour Party shifted. Some teaching materials were accused of bias.

However, slowly, the OU came to make the transition from an ‘electoral gimmick’ (to quote Chataway) to its current status of ‘national treasure’ (in the words of the Vice-Chancellor at another university). As it became more popular, so more politicians claimed it as their own. Winnie Ewing, Scottish National Party President 1987–2005, suggested that the honorary doctorate she received from the OU in 1993 was ‘in recognition of my role in establishing it’. One Liberal claimed that, ‘the idea owes its inception to a meeting at the Liberal Party Council at least a year earlier as any Liberal pamphlet for the year 1962 can amply demonstrate’.

This is an image of some successful OU students in Wales. They are the first cohort of students to gain the Certificate of Higher Education in Social Care Practice (Wales). See here.

Wales was not always treated as such a distinctive entity.In common with many other post-war projects the OU developed out of the centralised wartime state as a unitary institution to serve the whole nation. This reflected attitudes in the 1960s when there was little interest in nationalism in Scotland and Wales. In 1971 the editor of the Times Educational Supplement, referred to ‘England’s Open University’.

The first advertisement for a Regional Director for Wales made no reference to the need to speak Welsh. A new advertisement was written. Harford Williams was appointed. He held numerous television interviews and lectures and has been credited with the rise of over 10 per cent in applications within the country. Today the OU operates on the principle that in the conduct of public business in Wales, the English and Welsh languages are of equal status. The Open University offers Welsh medium assessment, (including written assignments, examinations, projects and theses in all subject areas) to its students and provides assessment in accordance with the student’s linguistic preference.  Wales was also where telephone tutorials were developed. Heddwyn Richards established a system in Wales whereby students used free-standing loudspeaker telephones. After press reports of this, the GPO which ran the phone system, complained but later a concession was granted. It was in recognition of the importance of all the nations that the Vice-Chancellor John Daniel paid tribute to his Welsh roots and chose to be installed in Cardiff in 1990. In 2018 OU student research on Welsh History became available online. This research was conducted by students studying the Open University module, ‘The Making of Welsh History’. Today the OU operates from Cardiff and across the country as the leading provider of part-time undergraduate higher education and supported distance learning. There are 7000 students and 300 Associate Lecturers.

In the Betty Boothroyd Library on the Walton Hall campus there is a nod towards the importance of the Welsh language on the window. See image and video discussion.

There are two buildings which have been named after Jennie Lee on the Walton Hall campus. A library which she opened, now demolished and a building which is the home of the educational technologists at the OU. Jennie Lee House, Edinburgh, is where the OU in Scotland is based. Despite this recognition by the OU itself, sometimes Jennie Lee has been eclipsed. A recent article by Pete Dorey, Vol 29, no 2 2015, in the journal Contemporary British History about the foundation of the OU was entitled ‘”Well, Harold insists on having it!”The political struggle to establish the Open University, 1965-67’. The first line of the abstract reads ‘The establishment of The Open University has been widely lauded as Harold Wilson’s most successful policy achievement and his enduring legacy, a view with which Wilson himself concurred’.

One of the myths about the OU is that it has a single founding father, Harold Wilson. Promoted by Wilson himself who told a story, many times, of jotting down the idea just before settling down to that Great British institution, Sunday lunch in East 1963. The dominant narrative is of the Great Man and his swift creation, between 1963 when he penned the idea and its opening in 1969. There are precedents for such myths in many origins stories. It was clothed in classical garb by David Sewart, onetime Director of Student Services and Professor in Distance Education at the OU. He felt that the OU was ‘like Athena springing fully grown and fully armed from the head of Zeus’; it ‘appeared to have no mother and never to have had the opportunity to have been an adolescent, let alone a child’.

This categorisation of the OU as Harold Wilson’s ‘pet scheme’ (as The Times called it) marginalises the depth of its roots in the traditions of part-time education for adults, developed from the eighteenth century, correspondence courses, associated with the rapid industrialisation of the nineteenth century and on university extension initiatives, which started in the 1870s. It has also developed ideas derived from sandwich courses, summer schools, radio and television broadcasts, for which there were precedents in the twentieth century. It also marginalises the role of Jennie Lee, the OU’s ‘midwife’, to use a term employed by MSP Claire Baker. The sentence in Contemporary British History written by Pete Dorey and quoted above, goes on to say that the policy of having an Open University was ‘was mostly drafted and developed by Jennie Lee’. Dorey also adds that ‘The Open University only became established due to Lee’s dogged determination and tenacity’

In 1963, Wilson then Leader of the Labour Party, in opposition called for a university of the air. He didn’t fill in the details and, after the General Election of 1964, he was busy being Prime Minister. He handed the brief to a Labour MP who had over 20 years of experience of the Commons: Jennie Lee.

On the campaign trail in Bristol in 1943, where Jennie Lee was defeated, and Cannock which she represented 1945-70.

She became Britain’s first Arts Minister in the Labour government of 1964. She was 60, widowed for four years and fearless. She seized responsibility of making an idea of ‘a university of the air’ into a reality. Keeping well clear of the civil servants who dealt with other universities, it was she who decided on the form the new institution would take. In the face of opposition she developed a tiny sketch into a complete university. As she said to her senior civil servant, Ralph Toomey, in 1967, before the OU had opened, when its future was uncertain: ‘that little bastard that I have hugged to my bosom and cherished, that all the others have tried to kill off,will thrive’. She was able to do this because she had a clear idea of what she wanted – a ‘great independent university’ based on something like the Scottish system of higher education. A coalminer’s daughter who had received a bursary to study at Edinburgh University during the 1926 strike which impoverished her community she determined to beat the established order at its own game, to ‘outsnob the snobs’, as she put it. Her late spouse, Aneurin Bevan, had become a miner on leaving elementary school and had received little formal education, though he noted in 1952 how he valued ‘superior educational opportunities’. She mentioned him when she spoke of the origins of the Open University, recalling how they both knew ‘that there were people in the mining villages who left school at 14 or 15 who had first-class intellects’. This may have led her to create an advisory committee which did not include representatives from the principal university providers of adult education. In addition, she maintained control. She not only created but chaired the committee.

There were plenty of sceptics. Many Conservatives largely hated it. The BBC had long produced educational materials and was unimpressed by this upstart. Whitehall was also snooty and the press largely agreed. Within the Higher Education sector several critics argued that the money should be spent elsewhere. Jennie Lee produced a White Paper before the 1966 general election. Wilson recalled her contribution when the Cabinet met at Chequers 50 years ago just prior to March 1966 election. He said:

At the end of the afternoon anybody was free to speak on anything. Jennie got up and made a passionate speech about the University of the Air. She said the greatest creation of the previous Labour government was Nye’s National Health Service but that now we were engaged on an operation which would make just as much difference to the country. We were all impressed. She was a tigress.

Her Feb 1966 White Paper, ‘A University of the Air’ made it clear that “There can be no question of offering to students a makeshift project inferior in quality to other universities. That would defeat its whole purpose”. She got it into the manifesto, Labour won the election in March and, returned to office, she steered the proposed OU past the sterling crisis, past tax increases, past credit restraints & the prices and incomes standstill and towards her friend, Lord Goodman. He produced a set of figures for the cost of the OU which were a massive underestimate. The OU’s first Vice Chancellor called it ‘perhaps a fortunate accident’. Perhaps. Or perhaps it was an astute political move.

What today would derail a Minister – rudeness to colleagues, indifference to her Secretary of State, visible contempt for the department in which she was located – were her strengths. She didn’t care if civil servants, or colleagues, were offended, or wouldn’t work with her or didn’t trust her. She wasn’t building a career. She wanted an Open University. It was Jennie who decided that the OU would offer degrees, would be open to all, even the unqualified and would operate independently, separately, and with the highest academic standards. Adult education should be more than what she called ‘dowdy and mouldy… old-fashioned night schools … hard benches’. She knew that Adult Education was, as the OU’s first Vice-Chancellor, another Scot called Walter Perry, put it, ‘the patch on the backside of our educational trousers’. In 1965 she told the Commons: ’I am not interested in having a poor man’s university of the air, which is the sort of thing which one gets if nothing else is within our reach. We should set our sights higher than that.’

In Walton Hall there is a painting of Jennie Lee. She is portrayed as being in many places at once, including in the Commons, at the hustings and attending a degree ceremony. This is how it should be for, as the Founding Chancellor said when opening the OU, ‘This University has no cloisters – a word meaning closed. Hardly even shall we have a campus… the University will be disembodied’. The OU is everywhere around us and, being without its own body, it needs our bodies.

Not merely to conceive, but actually to make happen a university which sought to match the standards of the best in the sector but had no admission requirements, which attempted to employ print, correspondence and television in a way which transcended the potential of each, which made a reality of reaching every kind of learner in every corner of the United Kingdom, required a vast act of faith and a bloody-minded determination.