DfE permanent secretary, Susan Acland-Hood recently acknowledged significant hurdles along the way to the first delivery of Level 4 and 5 courses via the newly remaned Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE) in 2025. One of these is the establishment of a third registration category by the higher education regulator, the Office for Students (OfS) which providers and awarders of short courses or modules will require to be eligible for funding via the LLE.
To be ready for delivery in autumn 2025, the OfS will need to publish the new regulations for this category and set up a process for providers to apply for registration. Providers relying on this registration will need to have completed the process well ahead of launching courses so that they can confidently advertise their programmes. Many will be holding back on planning provision until some outline of the regulatory requirements are available.
However, Awarding Organisations (AOs) are already well placed to act as the conduit between students and education providers to assure quality and standards. Instead of – or as well as – registering providers for LLE provision through OfS, explicitly endorsing the existing role of AOs could open up LLE-powered provision rapidly. It would also negate any additional regulatory burden in time for the launch in 2025. After all, they are already held to account by Ofsted and IfATE for the quality of provision through FE colleges and other centres.
This model is already successful for regulating arguably higher-stakes assessments such as GCSEs and A Levels and could expedite the approval process for the OfS’s new ‘third category’ of providers. This could particularly benefit smaller and specialist providers who might resist the demands of additional regulatory burden.
