It is just over three years since then Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced his intention to create a new flexible loan system, equivalent to four years of study, to replace the current student finance arrangements.
The 2025 target date for the introduction of this new Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE) was confirmed several months later in the Skills for Jobs White Paper.
Since that announcement, the UK has had two more Prime Ministers, four more education secretaries, and two additional universities ministers but the LLE has avoided becoming a casualty of this ministerial churn and, to their credit, officials in the Department for Education (DfE) have stuck resolutely to the ambitious time scale that the government set for them to completely up-end the funding of tertiary education.
However, their approach, which can perhaps best be described as “work it out as we go along”, is storing up problems for the future.
