2.22: England’s Lifelong Learning Entitlement

Hi there. I’m Alex Usher and this is the World of Higher Education podcast.

Over the past 25 years few countries have monkeyed around with tuition fees and student loans to the extent that the United Kingdom – or more specifically, England – has done. From free tuition in 1997 to income-tested fees of up to 1000 pounds in 1998, to 3000 pounds in 2006, to an absolutely stonking 9,000 pounds in 2012, England’s public higher education system is arguably the most fee-dependent in the entire world. Except, confusingly, because these loans have such generous write-off provisions, the government is still contributing huge sums to universities, it does so indirectly though writing off loans taken out to pay tuition fees. This is why the UK is the only country in the world where people can say – without irony – that the way to get public funding into universities is to raise fees, a sentence which makes zero sense to anyone outside the country.

However, these fee loans – in common with most loan systems outside North America – have had a limited market. They tend to be used only by full-time undergraduate students, mostly leaving out part-time students and students either above or below the undergraduate level. And so, a few years ago, the current government, thinking that this system was too restrictive and wanting to use a financial tool to get institutions to focus more on short-term credentials, began touting the idea of a “lifelong learning entitlement” that individuals could use to find the equivalent of four full years of study at any level, and in addition to use them for very small quantums of learning such as micro-credentials.

This is a big conceptual shift, and the present Conservative government, which is on its fifth Prime Minister in eight years and is generally considered to be the most somnambular in modern history, is hardly known for its ability to convert difficult policy ideas into workable policy processes. So while the idea is intriguing, it’s not yet clear that it will actually be implemented.

With us to discuss all of this is David Kernohan, Deputy Editor of the website WonkHE, which is as close to a sister organization to Higher Education Strategy Associates as exists anywhere on the globe, David, more than anyone, has been tracking the development of the Lifelong Learning Entitlement since it was a wee nugget of a policy notion. He tells us about how the policy has changed over time, what recent pilot projects tell us about the policy’s chances for success are and – crucially – gives us some odds on the likelihood of this policy ever seeing the light of day given the number of still-unanswered questions on policy details and the upcoming UK elections.

But enough from me, let’s listen to David.

Alex Usher (AU): David, just to start us off, can you explain the student support system that currently exists in England, the one that came into effect in 2012 as a result of the Brown review?

David Kernohan (DK): It's probably easier to start with the way it is right now. In England, students borrow and pay tuition fees of up to 9, 250 pounds a year. This loan is then repaid once the student graduates. It's an income contingent repayment of 9% of income over a threshold and there's currently no interest charged on that. The loan is completely written off after 40 years, which is basically when your average undergraduate turns about 60-61 and thinks about retiring. Students also have access to a means tested maintenance loan, which is based on parental income, and that's a similar maximum annual value per year paid off on the same terms. You mentioned the Brown review that actually recommended uncapped fees and a series of variable loan rates to create a price-based market, and it also recommended maintenance grants, which we had for a bit, but they were scrapped in 2016.

AU: Who has access to this funding? Is it all students or is it just a subset of students like full-time students or undergraduate students?

DK: The system is primarily based around full-time undergraduate students. They have access for funding of up to four years of full-time study provided that they have not previously done any study that's been funded by the government. There is a parallel allocation for part time students which goes right down to an intensity of 0.25 of full-time. They can borrow up to 6,935 pounds a year in fees currently, and they can also access maintenance loans in certain circumstances. There's offers for postgraduate students. That's a single loan of up to 12,167 pounds. It's paid direct to the students, and they can use it for course fees and or living costs. There's also a similar doctoral loan for PhD candidates of up to 28k, which is used in the same way and is paid off in the same way.

AU: It sounds to me like it's a slightly different application process. So, the graduate loans are not fully integrated?

DK: They're not completely integrated. You have to re-apply. If you do an undergraduate and then a postgraduate, you apply for the postgraduate loans. But, all of the repayments happen through the same system, which is effectively through the taxation system.

AU: To my understanding, none of this is available to students who are taking courses below the undergraduate level. You have a system of levels that we don't have in Canada, but levels 4 and 5 and 6. None of that is available?

DK: No, it is available for other undergraduate qualifications that are not the traditional three-year degree, probably the most common of them at the moment is what is called foundation degree. You can also, on occasion, get an allocation towards what's called a foundation year, which is a year of study before you start your undergraduate. That would technically be at level three, which is sub-undergraduate level, but in practice is counted as and is funded as undergraduate.

AU: Now, just before COVID, the government published a review called the Augar review, and one of the recommendations was a lifelong learning entitlement. What did Augar mean by this?

DK: The Augar review was more properly the independent panel report of a panel chaired by Sir Philip Augar of the post-18 review of education and funding conducted by the department for education. This was instigated back in 2017 by Theresa May, who is one of many people that have been prime minister of this country in recent years. It was published on the 30th of May 2019. To quote directly from the report “the introduction of a lifelong learning loan allowance to be used at a higher technical and degree level at any stage of an adult's career for full and part time students.” So, this was to encourage retraining and flexible learning. They recommended that this should be available in modules or modular short course study as we'll get into. They also wanted to see transfer between different institutions. They wanted to get rid of an idea that's been in UK funding, particularly English funding for a long time, the idea that you cannot get funding to do a qualification at the same level of a qualification that you already have, that's called ELQ, equivalent level qualifications. So, they also said, and this is notable, this is a direct quote again “given the complexity of any new arrangements, the government should assure itself that delivery partners have the capacity and capability to deliver a secure and stable platform before implementing these changes.”

AU: So, at that point, they were thinking this was several years off. We're five years on from that review now. The next stage of this process… and I love that the UK has such a detailed process for these things, because in Canada, this all happens behind closed doors. There was a white paper released in January 2021 which called for lifetime skills guarantee within which a lifelong learning entitlement was embedded. Was there a difference between what Augar proposed in 2019 and what the government proposed in 2021?

DK: The 2021 white paper that was the Skills for Jobs white paper. It was one of the first things released by the Boris Johnson administration. He was another of these individuals that was at some point Prime Minister of our country in recent times. This didn't really add much, it was still at a very vague level. It did encourage expansion in the levels of qualifications like level four and level five, sub-degree programs, particularly something called the higher technical qualifications. It kicked off this short course pilot, which we will get to with a trial of the lifelong loan entitlement systems. But, the rest of it was going to be subject to a further consultation, which was called a technical consultation, which is obviously the kind of title that makes my eyes light up. The technical consultation itself that came in February 2022, a long wait. There's still a lot that was undecided. We did add to this in the response that we got in March 2023 to that 2022 consultation. There's now an expectation that there will be access to maintenance loans alongside the fee loans for people doing these short courses. The whole thing was renamed the Lifelong Learning Entitlement, primarily because that's what everybody was calling it anyway. It clarified that it would be available to all adults who had not already had four-years of higher education fee loan funding or for older learners who had a degree, four-years of study. So, the idea there basically being everybody in the UK has got an allocation of four years of undergraduate style funding. They could use that basically whenever and wherever they wanted to do a series of short courses or a longer course. This would also be available pro rata to people who already had degrees. Something that caused a little bit of problem is that quite a lot of people have done degrees that lasted for four years ever, there's quite a few of them in the UK. Some people had done a foundation year and then a degree. Some people had failed their first year and had to retake it like me. Some people had studied in Scotland where pretty much all undergraduate quarters are four years. All of these people would not be eligible for any of this lifelong learning entitlement at all.

AU: How was this proposal received within the higher and further education sectors themselves? Were they excited about it? Was there trepidation? What was the reaction?

DK: The standard report response of the UK higher education sector to anything is pretty much mild disbelief followed by intensive technical quibbling. So, this was largely what we got. There were lots of questions as to how this would work in practice. The assumption that these short courses, which are increasingly became the primary focus of what the government was talking about, the idea that a person could say lose their job/get laid off, and then go and do a short course in something that allowed them to get a new job that became what they were pushing for. There was lots of concern in universities that either you can have short vocational courses, which is something universities do a lot of and do quite well OR you could have courses that articulated back into a longer qualification. So, the idea was these short courses, you could collect up the credits and then you could exchange them for a degree of some point that made some kind of pedagogic sense to somebody somewhere. They weren't entirely clear how that was going to happen.

AU: A part of the issue here is, what's the transition from the old system to the new system? All these new expansions, I take it, are not supposed to sit alongside the existing system that comes from 2012. It's meant to replace it entirely, right? That's a big shift.

DK: A huge shift and I don't think a lot of people in our sector have really caught on to. The assumption is that the three-year undergraduate degree will still reign supreme and that students will do three years of full-time undergraduate study at the same overall price. We've not talked about pricing yet, but the idea is that price of each of these shorter courses would be pro rata against the cost of a full undergraduate degree. There's a lack of understanding I would say that everything is going to go through this system supposedly from 2025. It also replaces another system called advanced learner loans, which is what you would use to do level four and above qualifications, so qualifications that are roughly the same level of undergraduate study that were not within the higher education system. There's some further education stuff. There's some vocational stuff. The example that I normally give is vocational training for accountancy, which in the UK you tend to do outside of a university and then you complete a professional qualification. You could in the past, get these advanced learner loans to support you in doing that. This will now also come through the lifelong learning entitlement. The whole thing is going to look like it's personal lifelong learning entitlement account. This being 2024, there's going to be personalized recommendations and other user facing kind of nudges that they've not actually said AI but they probably mean that.

AU: David, a lot has been made, but the ability of this new system to be flexible and support students taking these single courses. You and others have pointed out, this is a pretty tall ask because some of the definitions of courses and modules are not very tight. Is that a fair way to put it? that they're not standard? How small a unit of learning can this program actually fund? When we talk micro credentials, how micro are we talking? How big of a challenge technically is it going to be to make this a reality?

DK: The UK standard for an academic credit is a nominal 10 hours of study. This includes personal study, as well as the stuff you get in the classroom and such 10 hours of learning effort. The legislation that underpins parts of this talks about a minimum of 30 credits of study. In UK terms, that's equivalent to roughly two undergraduate modules which is about 1/3 of what you would expect to do on a standard undergraduate year. I know in North America, what we call modules, you call courses. So, it’s roughly equivalent to two courses. There's a stipulation that this needs to make sense as a standalone unit of study. So, you can't just grab two random modules and shoehorn them together. But it also, as I say, has to articulate into a longer traditional qualification as needed. So, a student could do a bunch of these and then say “actually, I've got 360 credits worth of learning. I can have myself an undergraduate honours degree” and then claim that. Another complication here is that your credit is good anywhere, any institution in the system This is something which has always been nominally true, but in practice in the UK, it doesn't happen very often and there's not really a lot of articulation between different universities. You would think the government would be like, “okay, we need to design and administer a credit transfer framework to make this work” but they've not done this. They expect one will spontaneously happen and occasionally speak at kind of meetings of vice chancellors and encourage them to do that. In terms of an institution itself, it's obviously going to create a load of problems. I don't think you can take a standard module on an undergraduate degree and just immediately turn that into an early qualification, you're going to have to revamp it, repurpose it. You have to think as well about what student support needs in this context. As an undergraduate student, you get access to the library and library skills, you've got access to counseling and mental health support, access to careers advice. How much of this would be applicable to a person who's doing 30 credits as opposed to a person that's doing 360? How do you deal with the kind of pastoral side of things as well? That's another issue that's not been bottomed out. If we go up a level, there's also huge challenges in terms of regulation and data. Everything we have at the moment from your application you do via UCAS to getting the financing student loans company, even to the way the Office to Student regulates courses via outcomes measures in terms of if you continue on the course, if you complete it, and if you go on somewhere good afterwards, that's all going to need to be rethought to fit these short courses in. We don't really have any indication of that thought starting. We're overdue a number of consultations on this. I think probably most fundamental, there are questions about the level of student demand for this kind of course.

AU: That brings us to the next question which is about this pilot project that was rolled out which finished earlier this or late last year. It was a short course pilot. What was that and how did it go?

DK: This was a short course trial. It is meant to be a multiyear program. We just came to the finish of the first year. The Office of Students, which is our regulator in England and the Department for Education, spent around two million pounds in supporting providers to test whether they could actually deliver short courses to these specifications. These were live courses, so students actually could apply to them and there was loan funding available via an experimental iteration of the student. There was also a little bit of funding added for student maintenance bursaries. They started off saying there was going to be more than a hundred courses on offer and expected several thousand students to apply to these courses. This was to give information on the student experience in terms of the application process for the funding for the courses and in terms of the learning experience. In actual fact, just 17 of these courses ended up running across 10 providers. This was largely because the majority of courses didn't actually recruit any students at all. There was a total of 125 students that actually participated in this pilot. Half of these were outside of the LLE system anyway because their employers were paying participation through a pre-existing agreement. Of the remainder, just 41 students actually took out the fee loan and just 11 students took out of the bursary. This was hardly bringing endorsement for the level of demand for this kind of finance to do this kind of courses. It was really quite shockingly low. There were questions in Parliament, there were articles on WonkHE, and elsewhere. In terms of who was actually doing this, if you remember the policy intention, it was basically to support mid-career changes for people who hadn't previously accessed and were maybe from deprived backgrounds. In actual fact, it turned out four out of five students on these courses already had a degree before taking the course. Around four out of five again were in full time employment at the start and at the end of the course. This includes a lot of the ones where the employer paid, and 40 percent of these were under 30. That was a little bit surprising to a few people who thought that the former steel workers and coal miners are industrial heartland were going to be the ones that would benefit.

AU: Sticking with the theme of flexibility, one of the ways these days most learners are trying to be flexible is taking more courses online or remotely. Is distance education and distance learning included in this package or not?

DK: Yes and no. Yes, it's available in the loan package. For the fees, I believe there’s not maintenance support currently planned to be involved for students that are studying online. So, you could borrow for your fees, but if you needed to cut down your working hours so you could focus on your course, there was no funding to support you doing that.

AU: It's 2024. This program is supposed to be ready by 2025. We're less than 18 months away from the start line. Seems to me there's a lot of details still to be firmed up. How confident is everyone that this is going to launch on time or is there a possibility of delay?

DK: There is a huge possibility of delay, I think. Even the idea initially was to launch everything in 2025. In practice, only a handful of modules are going to be on the system from 2025. Most of the university offers would be there by 2027. But even before we get there, as we say, we've got a bunch of consultations to be done and decisions to be taken. We know there are huge technical problems up at the student loans company. Theirs systems from actually managing student loan allocation payment enrolment are legacy shall we say. There is a huge technical debt up there they need to address. Their board has heard a number of concerns that stuff is not going to be ready in time. The issue of the demand for these short courses, there's just not any evidence. There's been little bits of polling. Nobody's identified any evidence and if it doesn't see the existing short course offer from universities, which is largely non-credit bearing, but it's directly linked to employer skill needs. That has always been reasonably popular and there's always been a demand for that. There's always obviously been the demand for traditional full-time undergraduate courses. We don't know about the demand for this stuff. This means that providers are less likely to invest in preparing stuff. As I said above, there's lots of stuff to do on regulation. We need to address a lot of issues. If we're going to talk about outcomes, if we're going to talk about a continuation, what does continuation of course mean if you're doing 30 credits? Nobody seems to know. We don't know quite how we're going to bring in the advanced stand alone stuff. There's a consultation due on that. Then of course we've got a general election later this year, we expect. Although the government and the opposition are broadly in agreement about the principles of lifelong learning and the idea they want to support more of it, there's not really been a firm commitment to this from the opposition as regards the current plans. If they do get into power which is, at the moment, looking at the polls expected, there's a lot of other aspects of the UK education system that need to be urgently addressed before you get to doing something like this.

AU: How do you personally evaluate the program's chance for success? If we have this conversation again in five- or 10-years’ time, what do you think the consensus will be about the lifelong learning entitlement? Will it still exist? Will it have changed higher education provision or improved access, or is it going to be a damn squib?

DK: I honestly don't feel like the work has been done on the demand for this stuff. Even if we had all of the rest of the pieces in place, which we don't, the fact that it's been developed basically on the hope that there are lots of people out there looking to borrow money to do short courses at universities and other places, the evidence is just not there. And because the evidence is not there, because demand is so shaky, I think universities are less likely to invest in this. Especially in the time of the extreme funding crunch that they're feeling now. I would say that this will be delayed immediately after the election, and then it'll just be one of these things that we could theoretically go back to, but we never actually do. That would be my reckoning.

AU: David, thanks so much for joining us today.

DK: You're very welcome. Thank you for having me, Alex.

AU: And that’s all the time we have for today. It just remains for me to thank your excellent producers Tiffany MacLennan and Sam Pufek and you the listener for joining in. If you have any questions or suggestions for future podcasts please do not hesitate to get in touch with us at podcast at higher ed strategy dot com. Join us next week when we will be joined by Maria Yudkevich, a professor higher education at the University of Haifa in Israel, who will be with us to talk about a century’s worth of history of higher education in Russia one of the world’s most-malleable but least-understood systems of higher education. Bye for now.