We welcome today’s release of the Government response to last year’s Lifelong Loan Entitlement consultation. The Skills and Post-16 Education Act brought about a radical shake-up of lifelong learning in the UK tertiary education sector. The LLE was one of its flagship measures, yet many key questions remained about the details of how lifelong learning finance would work in practice. The Act placed significant responsibility on further and higher education providers to upskill and retrain UK workers, to meet the UK’s skills needs in key sectors, and bolster growth in every part of the country. Today’s announcement will help provide greater clarity to the tertiary education sector as it moves to meet this expectation.
We are pleased to see that student finance across levels 4–6 will be unified, as we recommended in our response to the LLE consultation. This is a key stepping-stone towards a more comprehensive integration of tertiary education, which is a central plank of our mission as we evolve into the Lifelong Education Institute. Every learner must be able to use the freedom of choice that modular learning offers to mix and match courses from the whole spectrum of options: academic and technical, full-time and part-time, microcredentials and multi-year degrees. Harmonising the application and access points for tertiary learning finance helps smooth the path for learners to transition seamlessly from one qualification to the next. Level 7 and 8 course funding should be included in this as well, including postgraduate loans for master’s degrees, to complete the top-to-bottom integration of tertiary education.
We are gratified that the Government is removing the restrictions on financing Equivalent or Lower Qualifications. This is a move that we have called for since our inaugural report, to help people of all ages and stages of their lives and careers return to learning. We understand the rationale for starting the phase-in of modular funding with level 4–5 Higher Technical Qualifications, to boost the UK’s competitiveness in this area. But it is important that the later extension to other level 4–6 courses must be accompanied by detailed support and guidance for tertiary education providers as they carry out the modularisation of their existing teaching provision.
