Council for National Academic Awards

[2] The CNAA's Latin motto, as it appears on its coat of arms, is: Lauream qui Meruit Ferat: this can be translated as 'let whoever earns the laurel bear it'.

When the CNAA was wound up, the British government asked the Open University to continue the work of awarding degrees in the remaining non-university institutions.

Above all, the CNAA saw itself as preserving a comparability at the national level with degree level awards in universities, a feature which can be seen as having both positive and negative aspects: positive in that it preserved a formal "parity of esteem" between the awards of the two parts of the binary system (such as retaining the common currency of the undergraduate degree for entry to postgraduate study), but other scholars[5][incomplete short citation] viewed it as negative because it encouraged an "academicism" in the new sector and slowed an acceptance of the transformations required finally to break the boundaries of the old, "elite" system.

In the event, the polytechnics were associated with many innovations, including women's studies, the academic study of communications and media, sandwich degrees, advanced engineering degrees in all functional specialities, and the rise of management and business studies; not least, they were much more responsive than older institutions in providing for the admission of non-standard students from technical colleges, advanced apprenticeships and other sources.

Hoods were a gold-yellow panama, with a silk lining: turquoise for bachelors’; white for masters’; turquoise with a white facing for a MEng; maroon for a PhD; cream damask for higher doctors.