Lifelong Learning (Higher Education Fee Limits) Bill

Lord Rees of Ludlow Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 19th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rees of Ludlow (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a member of Cambridge University. Along with other speakers, I welcome the introduction of the LLE and hope that what is now proposed is just the first step towards creating an expanded and more flexible support system, spanning further and higher education. My comments will focus first on level 6 courses—traditional bachelor’s degrees. I will then venture brief thoughts on broader structural changes.

University campuses were silent and deserted during the peak of Covid-19. Two cohorts of students had a really rotten experience. Life has been gradually restored, but nobody expects full reversion to the old normal—nor should we wish for it. Lessons learned in the crisis should energise and accelerate some much-needed reforms of the whole post-18 education sector.

Most students are of course between 18 and 21, undergoing three or four years of full-time, generally residential education and studying a curriculum that is too narrow, even for the minority who aspire to professional or academic careers. This basic structure has prevailed since the 19th century, but universities have vastly expanded and now encompass about 50% of young people.

Post-18 education needs to be much more flexible and open, as fast-changing lifestyles offer new opportunities for both work and leisure, and technology offers new channels and opportunities. The system should offer everyone the opportunity to enter or re-enter, maybe part-time or online, at any stage in their lives. This path could become smoother, indeed routine, if there is a system of credits and modules that is respected and recognised across the whole system of further and higher education, thereby allowing transfers. Many will still pursue a traditional undergraduate course, using up their entitlement all in one go, but it is a real plus if they can instead choose to use the LLE à la carte—year by year or by a succession of modules at any stage in life.

Students who embark on a degree course but realise that it is not right for them or who have personal hardship should be enabled to leave early with dignity, with credits that formally record what they have accomplished. They should not be disparaged as wastage: they should make the positive claim that “I had two years of college and have an entitlement to return and upgrade later”. Indeed, the overwhelming focus on a degree needs revision. There is nothing magic about the attainment threshold that is reached after three or four years.

Another thing is that it would improve social mobility if universities, such as my own, whose entry bar is dauntingly high were to reserve a fraction of their places for students who do not come directly from school. They could thereby offer a second chance to those who were disadvantaged at 18 but have caught up by earning two years’ worth of credits at other institutions or online. Such students could then advance to degree level in two further years.

It is a sad fact that the worst educational inequalities are imprinted earlier in life in the pre-school years and during school education. It will be a long slog to ensure that high-quality teaching at school is available across the full geographical and social spectrum. However, promoting lifelong and part-time learning, with flexible assessment, would go some way to offering more support to those whose deprivations start in infancy and lead to barriers that become harder to surmount and to exclusions that offer no second chances.

What about the courses themselves? There is now, post pandemic, more experience of online and remote teaching. We can learn especially from institutions that had already spearheaded innovations pre pandemic, above all the Open University, and let us not forget Arizona State University in the US. We must hope, incidentally, that there is a sympathetic government response to the Open University’s well-based concerns that current proposals do not offer support to mature learners based a substantial distance away.

Purely online courses, the so-called MOOCs, have had an ambivalent reception. As stand-alone courses without complementary contacts with a real tutor, they are probably satisfactory only for level 7 vocational courses aimed at motivated mature learners studying part time. These courses should be eligible for support, but there will surely be a demand for vocational courses to develop skills at levels 4 and 5. These would open up an expanded role for new providers, many of them online, that do not possess the infrastructure of a regional college. There would then of course be a crucial need to ensure quality control via Ofqual. Indeed, it might be optimal for these courses to be overseen on a national scale by relevant professional organisations.

Accreditation and assessment of individual students is going to be challenge, and perhaps the Minister will say how this will be addressed. It is a challenge especially because traditional continuous assessment in non-practical subjects has been scuppered by the advent of ChatGPT and its successors. It should be possible for a student to be tested by some kind of examination board without having followed any particular course, rather as you can now take an A-level wherever or however you have been taught.

Although we must prioritise the case for the relevant skills and the economic situation in the UK, let us not focus too much on them. We heard about STEM, but we must also have STEAM, where A stands for the arts. Let us also not focus too much on the earnings boost engendered by courses. For instance, if advanced study enables a creative artist to become proficient enough to make a living by following his or her avocation, that is surely valuable even if they barely earn a living wage.

Finally, let us hope that the lifelong learning initiative does indeed promote what it aims to do, and that universities and other bodies are incentivised to release content. They should release content—excellent lectures, for instance—that are not just part of a course but can be watched free online in this country and around the world by those seeking education for its own sake and not for vocational reasons. In a society with vast technological change, the aims should be to widen people’s horizons and spread knowledge of UK culture, so that the life chances of young people are not constrained by what they have achieved or failed to achieve by the age of 21.