With a General Election on the horizon, Former Shadow Minister for Higher and Further Education and Skills (2015-19) and a co-founder of the Right to Learn campaign Gordon Marsden writes on the skills picture in England and examines steps a new Government could take to close persistant gaps.
A glass half full - or half empty? On the face of it, the Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE) and the Lifetime Skills Guarantee, yoked to the Bill that gained Royal Assent in September, ought to be positive news for universities, especially modern ones.
ELQs scrapped, a credit-driven system of student loans for modules and short courses with LLE flexibility for adult learners, some maintenance loans and a scattering of grants for some part-time students - ideas foreshadowed in the 2019 recommendations to the Labour Party from the Lifelong Learning Commission which as Shadow Minister I set up. The Right to Learn campaign, launched in December 2020, has grown out of the ethos of that commission, to combine social justice with lifelong learning to revive our economy, upskilling and reskilling for the challenges of the 2020s.
As always though, the devil is in the detail. If Labour wins the General Election, they will inherit at best a semi-skimmed Lifelong Learning Entitlement and Skills Guarantee and a hotchpotch in terms of who delivers what across England and across the UK. As well as Labour looking positively at the Blunkett Report from their Council of Skills Advisors, there are a number of asks for Labour in government which would make skills and lifelong learning genuinely three dimensional outcomes.
