Bringing together funding for traditional three-year degrees and lifelong learning in the same system will be “confusing, messy and unhelpful”, according to an expert.
Discussing plans in England to establish a new system of student finance that will offer adults access to up to four years’ worth of loan funding on a flexible basis, Jonathan Michie, professor of innovation and knowledge exchange at the University of Oxford, said it would have been better to have created a new pot of money to try to revive adult education.
“What they [the government] should have done is what all the commissions who have looked at this over the past few years have advised, which is [to] create a separate lifelong learning entitlement where you are given a pot of money when you are 21, [which is] topped up when you are 30, topped up when you are 40, etc,” he told Times Higher Education’s THE Campus Live event in Liverpool.
“[It should be] a genuine entitlement quite separate from the funding for the three-year degree. The fact it is meshed together has just made it confusing, messy and unhelpful.”
