Lifelong learning ‘needs bespoke courses, not repackaged degrees’

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.

Professor Michie, also president of Kellogg College, Oxford, said it shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone that university administration and processes were set up to deal with degrees.

He said it “raised the bigger question of this whole new agenda, about whether it was sensible to mangle everything together in the first place”, but said he feared it was “too late”, given that both major political parties had indicated they would implement the changes regardless of who won the next election.

Alex Bols, deputy chief executive of GuildHE, said the trial had demonstrated that “it is not simply a case of unbundling existing courses; it requires significant thought to develop the course structure, content and delivery approaches to make this relevant to a new audience”.

“This means that the current cost assumptions that the Department for Education are currently working to are unrealistic,” he added.

GuildHE – which represents smaller and specialist institutions – had long been supportive of a credit-based funding system that offered more flexibility to students, Dr Bols said.

“However, the OfS short-course trial demonstrates that, while universities are keen to offer these courses, there is much more work to do to generate demand and trust in short courses,” he said.

“To make the LLE successful, the DfE and universities and colleges will need to clearly communicate the value and benefit of bite-sized chunks of learning to both potential students and also employers.”

Professor Michie said he felt the trial had demonstrated “there just isn’t an appetite for people who have families and debts to take on more loans” and that many felt they shouldn’t have to take on debt for a course that was focused on training them in a skill needed for their careers.

“The consultation around this has been inadequate and there needs to be another consultation to get an informed consensus on where it goes from here,” he said.

“The danger is the current government and maybe an incoming Labour government as well won’t do that, and will just go with the flow and introduce it anyway; and if no one is interested and takes up the loans, that is the universities’ problem.”

Dr Bols said it was “too early to make a final judgement about market need” and more could be done to improve engagement with part-time learners – but, he said, “with the current cost-of-living crisis and other societal pressures, it may be that learners are simply more risk-averse right now”.

tom.williams@timeshighereducation.com