Four in five courses fail to launch as low demand hampers pilot

Insufficient demand meant that just 17 of the 96 short courses developed as part of a pilot scheme intended to test the Westminster government’s new lifelong learning entitlement (LLE) were able to launch, according to an evaluation report.

Providers were only able to enrol a fraction of the 2,000 students intended to take part in the trial, with just 125 participating in total and only 41 of them applying for and obtaining new bespoke student loans to support their studies.

The “higher education short course trial” was launched by the Office for Students (OfS) in autumn 2021, with providers invited to adapt their existing degree programmes to offer stand-alone courses in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), education, digital innovation and healthcare and helping to meet the skills needs for net zero.

A total of 22 providers proposed 96 new courses and shared £2 million in funding to develop them in time to commence delivery from autumn 2022, a report prepared by the Careers Research and Advisory Centre of behalf of the OfS says.

However, only 10 of the providers were able to actually launch courses, with the rest unable to run because “demand from students was insufficient”.

The report says that 240 applications in total were reported, leading to 125 enrolments across the 17 courses.

“This extent of participation was far below the aspirations of project teams in their proposals, when over 2,000 enrolments were envisaged across over 100 courses,” it says.

The findings bring into question the viability of the LLE – scheduled to launch in 2025 – which will see the student finance system revamped to allow adults to access to up to four years worth of loan funding on a flexible basis.

Low demand in the pilot study was attributed to “a lack of time to promote and market the courses, a lack of understanding of which prospective students to market the courses to and a lack of understanding about the content and benefits of short courses”.

Two providers waived all fees and two others were forced to open up applications to staff members to ensure courses had a sufficient intake, the report states.

Over half the courses had intakes of five or fewer students. Half of all the students who enrolled were individual applicants who paid fees and half were employees of partner businesses, undertaking courses as continuing professional development (CPD) activity.

The majority were aged between 26 and 40 with a quarter in the 41 and over category. Most were from the UK, were white and already had degrees, the report says. 

Those who did apply for funding said that without it they would have not been able to participate, but some criticised the loan application process as being cumbersome with a long turnaround time.

The lack of participation hampered the ability of the consultants to evaluate the success of the courses. Student experience was reported to be broadly positive, but providers encountered issues with obtaining institutional approval and developing content, which was said to be “more complex” than simply converting pre-existing modules.

Courses were most commonly delivered via blocks of in-person teaching followed by remote online learning.

“The lack of a systematic framework for credit transfer and accumulation was a serious weakness in the current offer,” the report says, flagging an issue that has been repeatedly highlighted by university leaders.

None of the providers taking part were able to “assure prospective students strongly about the value of the credits that would arise from studying their short course, whether they could be accumulated with subsequent course credit to build towards a degree qualification, and especially if credits could be transferred to and recognised by another provider”.

tom.williams@timeshighereducation.com