Until the nineteenth century there were only two successful long-term university establishments in England and five in Scotland (including two in Aberdeen, see below).
Earliest royal charter, sometimes referred to as the Magna Carta of the university, 1244.
[5] No new universities were successfully founded in England or Scotland after 1600 until the nineteenth century, although the eighteenth century saw the establishment of a number of dissenting academies, medical schools such as St George's (1733) and the London Hospital Medical College (1785), and the Royal Veterinary College (1791).
[30] [31] These universities were distinguished by being non-collegiate (and thus, at the time, non-residential) institutions founded as university colleges that admitted men without reference to religion and concentrated on imparting to their students "real-world" skills, often linked to engineering.
The passage of the Further and Higher Education Act 1992 allowed all polytechnics and Scottish central institutions to become universities and award their own degrees rather than degrees governed by the Council for National Academic Awards (CNAA).
Thirty-eight (including institutions later merged) took up the offer immediately, nearly doubling the number universities again from 46 to 84 (and 89 by 1994).
These were university colleges and other higher education institutions that had gained degree awarding powers since 1992 rather than being granted them on the break up of the CNAA.
In 2004, the requirement that institutes gain research degree awarding powers before they could gain university status was dropped in England and Wales (but not in Scotland or Northern Ireland),[104] although they were still required to have 4000 full-time equivalent students, with 3000 on degree courses.
[109] New guidance for England issued in September 2015 replaces the requirement for 750 students to be studying degree courses with a requirement that 55% of students are studying on degree courses.
The Office for Students (OfS) was created by the Higher Education and Research Act 2017 and took over responsibility for approving university title in England in 2018.
It originally operated a system of affiliated institutions with two registers: one (controlled by the government) of institutions allowed to submit students for examination for Arts and Law degrees, and a second (controlled by the university) of institutions allowed to submit students for medical degrees.
Apart from being allowed to submit students for London examinations, there was no connection between the affiliated colleges and the university.
[29] In 1858, the affiliation system was abandoned for Arts and Law degrees, with these being opened to anyone willing to travel to London for the examinations.
In the first two cases, the federal university merged with one of its colleges when it broke up (a process still ongoing as of July 2018 for Wales) while in the other three cases, where the university had previously existed as a non-federal body, it simply reverted to that status.
From August 2017 the two institutions have been functionally integrated although a legal merger has not (as of July 2018) been finalised.
This table contains universities that were officially recognised but were dissolved either by merging, splitting or just closing down.
These are not considered UK universities and are not recognised as degree-awarding bodies by the British government.