During the recent general election campaign, Labour said surprisingly little about skills, and virtually nothing about lifelong learning. Hardly any reference was made to either of the two in their Manifesto.
Of course, their flagship policy – the creation of Skills England – featured prominently and it will surely have a major impact as gatekeeper of a reformed apprenticeship system, allowing employers the flexibility to use levy funding to invest in alternative forms of training for workforce development.
But what about lifelong education?
The Conservatives placed great emphasis on the need to stimulate adult education, and embed a culture of through-life training to meet the changing needs of the labour market to address skills gaps and shortages, and to drive productivity. Two major pieces of legislation were passed - the Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022 and the Lifelong Learning (Higher Education Fee Limits) Act 2023 – to enable this “skills revolution”.
Yet here we are, getting ever closer to the target date for implementation of the Lifelong Learning Entitlement during the 2025/26 academic year, wondering how it will sit alongside the other elements of a reformed tertiary education system.
In a fringe meeting at the Labour Party conference, Skills Minister Jacqui Smith at last broke the Government’s silence on the future of the LLE, by declaring - in the context of remarks about the need to widen access to HE - that it “will have an important role”. However, the Minister gave no details of whether it will be reformed in any way, and politely ducked a question about how it might interact with the Growth and Skills Levy.
This is not a complete surprise, since a decision about how to progress with this major initiative is far from straightforward. The technical preparations needed to adapt the Student Loan system to the LLE are already well advanced, and radically re-engineering core elements may be judged as an unnecessary extra cost on top of the time and money that has already been spent on its development. And the clock is ticking: universities are already making preparations and investing resources in anticipation that students will start applying for LLE courses based on the current rules in less than 12 months' time.
The economic imperatives that drove the focus on lifelong learning have not gone away; nor have the challenges faced by countless working adults stuck in career cul-de-sacs who need better access to higher skills training to make progress and improve their earnings position. The Government is well aware of this and has said so, loudly and repeatedly. The planned reform of the levy system won’t be enough to address these needs; we need the LLE as well. But our view is that the policy in its current form is deeply flawed, and it may well be prudent to delay its implementation further to allow time to get it right.
Since our inception in 2021 - initially as a Commission - the Lifelong Education Institute has consistently argued that while we support its intentions, the LLE needs significant enhancement to make it effective.
Our concerns were set out in our first report “The Pathway to Lifelong Education” (October 2021) and we made ten recommendations on how it should be improved. While we were pleased that our recommendation to remove restrictions on access for those with equivalent qualifications (ELQ) was adopted by the then Conservative Government, there was much left to be desired. That hasn’t stopped us from continuing to advocate them and producing a series of reports to broaden and deepen the evidence base behind them.
In our view, the LLE has three major problems:
Firstly, it relies on adults taking out student loans.
All the evidence from multiple reports – including the Higher Education Short Course trial run by the Office for Students in 2022/23 – shows that working adults are highly loan-averse. We have recent experience of this: the response to the offer of Advanced Learner Loans at Level 3 over the past few years has been lukewarm, to say the least. In sharp contrast to school leavers applying for university, adults have far greater existing financial commitments and those on lower incomes are particularly reluctant to incur thousands of pounds worth of debt.
Secondly, only higher-level courses are in scope, from level 4 (first year university equivalent) upwards.
While there is a strong case for prioritising workforce skills at this level, there is an equally pressing need to improve skills at all levels. The chronic shortage of pathways for working adults to climb the qualifications ladder from basic to higher skills effectively excludes the millions who are trapped in low-skill, low-paid jobs.
Thirdly, there is no system for students to accumulate qualifications in bite-size chunks or to transfer the learning credits they gain from one provider to another.
While a majority of observers agree that modular, stackable units of study are the best way to provide part-time learners with courses they can fit round work and family commitments, there is currently no credit accumulation and transfer framework to enable this.
Two of our reports, “The Role of Microcredentials in Modular Learning” (June 2022) and “Making Lifelong Education Work: Skills Accounts for Bite-Size Learning” (March 2024) have set out the rationale for this approach and suggested in detail how this could be done in practice. Realistically, although there is a case for a national system to be developed, most adult learners tend to not move around the country or between HEIs, so implementing a digital skills account at regional or sub-regional level may well be the most pragmatic solution.
Fixing these three problems would, in our view, make the LLE a game-changer in England’s skills system. And it would go with the grain of Labour thinking: the influential report in 2023 of the Council of Skills Advisers led by Lord David Blunkett is positive in addressing all three issues.
That report recommends the introduction of “Learning and Skills Passports…as part of an incremental and modular approach”. It proposes that these should work in conjunction with Individual Learning Accounts, which would enable adult students to be funded through a mix of loans, grants, and bursaries. It also suggests a statutory “Right to Retrain” for all adults, including those in the low-skill, insecure roles typical of the “gig” economy.
With the new Government already embarking on a radical re-shaping of the post-16 funding and regulatory landscape, it is difficult to predict if, how, and when these ideas might be implemented. We’ve already said goodbye to IfATE and the ESFA, while the OfS is being repurposed.
But it is now possible to envisage the Student Loans Company being transformed into a Student Accounts Company that manages not only higher education loans but also a system of Individual Learning Accounts, covering all adult learners. This would need to be accompanied by a national Credit Accumulation and Transfer body, perhaps under the auspices of the Quality Assurance Agency. And with the increased flexibilities of the Growth & Skills Levy, it is also easier to imagine the development of a co-investment system that funds adult learners through a blend of individual, employer, and government contributions.
All this would require further months of planning and design, not to mention new legislation. But a long-term solution is needed to the long-term problem of underinvestment in adult skills, which has led to decreasing career opportunities for individuals, chronic skills shortages for employers, and low economic productivity across many industry sectors.
A robust system of Lifelong Education is not just a “nice to have” for a modern society, but an essential component of a prosperous, socially mobile, aspirational country. For this reason the LEI is keen to see the new Labour government clearly signalling its commitment to a broader and deeper Lifelong Learning Entitlement.
With the right reforms it’s perfectly possible to envisage a well-designed LLE system working in harmony with the new institutional architecture already under construction. Or to put this more strongly, it’s hard to see the LLE thriving unless it is redesigned to fit in with the new skills ecosystem Labour is building.
Comentarios