One of the many things that appear to be missing from the Lifelong Loan Entitlement (LLE) debate is the fact that the higher education sector puts on an awful lot of short courses already.
According to the most recent (2021-22) year of HESA HE-BCI data, some 3,282,792 days of continuing professional development (CPD) and continuing education (CE) were delivered by higher education providers in England – bringing with them a cool £570m of income.
The official definition of CPD is: “Training programmes for learners already in work who are undertaking the course for purposes of professional development, up-skilling, workforce development”. Continuing Education refers to provision where the students are not taking the course as a part of their employment.
This, to be clear, is not always provision that offers higher education credit – and may (in the numerical measures at least, for provision below higher education level income is not returned) reach below the first year undergraduate level (L4) in content.
