Lifelong Learning: “University of the Air” White Paper

(Limited Text - Ministerial Extracts only)

Tuesday 16th June 2026 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Josh MacAlister)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Desmond. I start by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Southport (Patrick Hurley) on securing this very timely debate and on the characteristically thoughtful case he made. I also give credit to the hon. Member for South Antrim (Robin Swann), a graduate of the Open University himself, who reminded us of the analogue age of VCRs and the magic of Sir David Attenborough.

I also thank the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) for highlighting the genuine inclusivity of the Open University from its inception. He was also right to highlight the importance of prisoner education. Although it is not within my area of responsibility, I am very passionate about it, and I believe that the Open University and other providers have a really important role to play, given the captive nature of the audience and the chance for prison to be a place where people can genuinely turn their lives around.

I want to answer the question about UCAS before I turn to the wider debate. The Open University chooses to manage applications directly, partly because of the need for flexibility beyond the normal academic cycle, but information about OU courses, including modular courses, is available on the UCAS website.

I am keen not to get drawn too far away from the topic of the Open University, but I will respond in short to the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Windsor (Jack Rankin), who raised issues regarding level 7 apprenticeships. This is an area simply of disagreement on policy and on where the resources that sit behind the apprenticeships levy—which is now the growth and skills levy—should rest. I am really keen, as is the Education Secretary, for those resources to be targeted very much at those who might not have taken the university path and for those entry-level apprenticeship routes to be funded to the max. That is why that policy decision was made. I stand by it and believe it was the right decision on balance for the use of those resources.

My hon. Friend the Member for Southport speaks in this debate not just as an advocate for lifelong learning but as living proof of its potential. As he spoke about movingly, his example is of someone who enrolled with the OU at the age of 30, and five years later emerged with both an undergraduate degree and a master’s degree to their name. That, for me, is the Open University’s mission in a nutshell—not a makeshift second chance, but a genuinely world-class route to opportunity for people who were not on academic pathways at the age of 18. That is why his advocacy carries such weight. In Southport, he has carried that conviction into the community at the heart of his constituency, championing the learning festival that took place in the town last year and being a strong advocate for improving educational opportunities more broadly. I have been lobbied many times about school buildings by him, so I can attest to that.

As my hon. Friend explained, it will be 60 years ago next February since another Labour Minister, Jennie Lee, published the White Paper, “A University of the Air”. She did so in the face of immense scepticism. Whitehall was snooty, the press was cynical and much of the establishment argued that the money should be spent elsewhere, but Jennie Lee was, in Harold Wilson’s words, “a tigress”. At a famous Cabinet meeting at Chequers just before the 1966 election, she argued that while the national health service was the greatest creation of the post-war Labour Government, the “University of the Air” would make

“just as much difference to the country.”

The White Paper made a radical argument that higher education should be open to all, regardless of background or prior qualifications, that learning should be flexible, rigorous and lifelong, and that new technology would carry academic excellence far beyond the walls of traditional institutions. Jennie Lee won that argument, and 60 years on, every part of that vision—open access, flexibility and technology in service of excellence—reads less like history and more like a description of the task that sits in front of us today.

The Open University, the institution founded as a consequence of that White Paper, is today the largest academic institution in the UK, with students in all 650 parliamentary constituencies. Since 1969, it has taught more than 2.5 million students worldwide. Three quarters of its undergraduates arrive with no previous higher education qualifications. The open door that Jennie Lee promised is still open.

In the last five years alone, more than 15,000 people who began studying without any A-levels have earned higher education qualifications through the Open University. Two thirds of its students are working while they study. It is learning that fits around life—not the other way around. The OU was never second best: at the last assessment, 82% of its research impact was rated world leading or internationally excellent, and last year it was awarded gold—the highest ranking—in the teaching excellence framework.

[Jim Shannon]

We all, including the Minister, recognise that the Open University reaches out to those who are perhaps isolated and lonely. It gives them an opportunity to focus their attention on a degree, thereby giving them hope for the future. That is sometimes underestimated, but it is critical.

[Josh MacAlister]

I completely agree. I will turn now to the Government’s actions, which will take the Open University to its next chapter, so that those opportunities are spread even more across our great country.

Last October, we published the “Post-16 education and skills” White Paper. There is a powerful alignment between the Open University’s mission to widen access and our own vision, set out in that White Paper, for a world-leading skills system that breaks down barriers to opportunity. The strategy in the White Paper is the blueprint for delivering our new target for two thirds of young people to be participating in higher-level learning—academic, technical or apprenticeships. We are determined to break the damaging link between background and success, and we want more people from all backgrounds to be able to access higher education as part of that.

As part of our reforms, the lifelong learning entitlement —a policy from the previous Government that I am very pleased we are continuing, with cross-party support—represents one of the most significant student finance reforms in a generation. For the first time, it establishes a single, flexible funding system covering levels 4 to 6 across further and higher education, enabling people to learn, upskill and retrain throughout their working lives.

The rationale for the entitlement is clear. More than a third of vacancies go unfilled due to skills shortages, and around 80% of the 2030 workforce are already in employment. However, the current system was largely designed for younger, full-time students and lacks the flexibility that adults in work need. The LLE will expand access to higher-quality, flexible education and training, promote learner mobility and ensure that providers can respond to the needs of learners, employers and the wider economy.

Sixty years ago, a White Paper of just a few pages was dismissed as vague, insubstantial and impractical. Today, the institution it created has taught more than 2 million people, with my hon. Friend the Member for Southport among them. That is the test that Jennie Lee set us: not whether an idea is convenient, but whether it changes lives. She insisted that there could be no question of offering students a makeshift project, inferior in quality to other universities. Sixty years on, that standard still binds us.

From January next year funding will, for the first time, follow the learner, module by module, at any stage of life. Our ambition that two thirds of young people reach higher-level learning is matched by an entitlement that lasts to 60, because opportunity should not have a closing date. Jennie Lee’s revolution was to say that the door to education should never close behind someone. The task of the next 60 years is to hold that door open wider still, in Southport and in every community like it. When our learners thrive, our country thrives.

[Sir Desmond Swayne (in the Chair)]

Patrick Hurley, you have two minutes to wind up.