Primrose Kitten

The term Red Brick University is a little snobbery and elitism but not in the way that you think. Work out what all these terms mean. What is Red Brick? What is Russell Group? Are they worth it? So, first of all, we need a little bit of a history lesson.

The first university was Oxford this was established in 1096 which is like a crazy long time ago. Followed not very shortly afterward, after an argument by Cambridge in 1209. A few more in Scotland and in Northern Ireland were established over the next couple hundred years but not very many until we hit the industrial revolution and the introduction of compulsory education. And then between 1900 and 1909, we get six new universities all at once. These were Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield, Bristol. And they were build using ubiquitous red bricks of the time. Hence the name. They were set up with teaching the skills of in-demand at the time. So engineering, science, things that were needed for the industrial revolution. And their admission requirements were much more broad, much more open than the admissions of Oxford and Cambridge. They still only admitted men but it wasn't a collegiate system, and they were much more open to people of different backgrounds and different religions. And the old school universities didn't like this one little bit. They looked down at these new sticks universities that opened up. And they coined the term Red Brick as kind of like the derogatory sneery word they used to describe them. Made They were set up around the same time so like the first half 1900's but not in that initial nine-year period. Red Brick Universities don't have like and official group or anything. It's just a random name to talk about individual universities that were set up in a period. So like the first half of the 1900's. It's not like the Russell group which is an official club. They have a website. You can look at the website. Red Brick Universities is just like, a general colloquial dirty name for a small group of universities. And the term Red Brick changed from being something sneery to being something good in about 1960's. Because in the 1960's a large number of new universities were set up. These were given the term Plate Glass Universities because of the style of architecture the very, very modern 1960's style of architecture that they were predominantly built extensively. And then later in 1992, there was a large or a massive, massive increase in the number of universities. Where loads of Polytechnical Colleges or Polytechnics turned from being Polytechnics into universities. So then the term Red Brick came to determine kind of like this old guard of universities the ones that are around for the type of a while, the old ones. But all it means it's universities that were set up between 1900's and like 1950. Plate Glass universities were set up in the 1960 and like, to 1990. And then from onwards, you got lots of the old Polytechnics turning into universities. There are no advantages to going to a Red Brick university. It just means you're going to an old university but not a really, really old university.