Creating successful short courses for the new Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE) requires “significant thought”, not just an “unbundling” of existing provision, English sector leaders have said after a trial of the new initiative failed to attract students.
Universities were unable to launch four in five courses planned for the Office for Students’ (OfS) pilot scheme due to insufficient demand, an evaluation report published earlier this month found, and Jonathan Michie, chair of the Universities Association for Lifelong Learning (UALL), said there should now be a sector-wide conversation on where the LLE went from here, before its planned launch in 2025.
Among the key findings of the report was that teams in charge of creating the short courses found gaining institutional approval and developing content were more complex than had been envisaged.
It had been assumed that institutions would fairly easily be able to take elements of their existing provision and repackage it as standalone options.
