Lifelong Learning (Higher Education Fee Limits) Bill

Lord Stevens of Birmingham Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 19th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevens of Birmingham (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as an honorary fellow of Balliol and as the incoming chair of Cancer Research UK, one of the country’s largest independent scientific funders of British universities.

Compared with other major countries, and indeed with our own past, Britain’s economic performance since the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 has been problematic. On productivity and growth, we have essentially been treading water for the last decade. If, like me, you buy the argument that this is partly because investment in skills has been neglected, you will see the Bill as a small but constructive piece of the jigsaw. As the Minister said, most of the British workforce of the 2030s is already in work today.

I judge that this is a sensible, technical Bill, but the question is: will it actually be impactful in the real world? There we have to acknowledge uncertainty. The Government’s impact assessment says that

“it is too early to confidently predict the likely response of providers and learners to the introduction of LLE fee limits and the impact on provision, choice, and take-up”.

That is true, but I suggest that beneficial impact will likely need five further actions: two on the demand side, as it were—to widen eligibility for lifelong learning support—and three on the supply side, to widen educational provision.

On the demand side, I am afraid that there are some early signs that the proposed approach to lifelong learning fee support may struggle to attract many people. As I understand it, the Department for Education and OFS short courses trial has so far advanced loans to only 37 people looking for new skills or career changes. As David Kernohan has pointed out, slightly mischievously, this is rather fewer than the number of MPs who will leave at the next election, looking for new skills and career changes.

I ask the Minister to keep an open mind on two things on the demand for the lifelong learning support. First, as we have just heard, can she reconsider the prohibition on maintenance support for those studying by distance learning? For a person bringing up children while in low-paid employment, who may have missed out on university the first time around, the biggest cost of undertaking more educational study is the opportunity cost of being out of the labour market. Distance learning is obviously a way of helping to square that circle. To me at least, it seems that access to maintenance support should depend on the personal circumstances of the learner, not the mode of tuition.

Secondly, I ask the Minister to consider allowing more flexibility in the minimum number of credits that qualify for the new lifelong learning loan. I note that 30 credits, which has been discussed, is the equivalent of perhaps 10 hours a week of study for 30 weeks a year, which may be too big a chunk to bite off for the type of adult learner we are looking to encourage through this mechanism. It is possible that 10 or 15 credits may be a better option for some. We all understand the complex interaction between employer-supported short courses and those that people pay for directly themselves, but it seems to me that at this stage of the legislation we need more flexibility.

Even assuming that those two points on the demand side can be addressed, on the supply side I suggest that, to expand educational provision in new ways, there are at least three further elements that will have to be in place for the Bill to fulfil its potential. Here I depart slightly from the last two speeches in that I do not criticise the Government for not putting all this detail in the Bill on this occasion. It seems to me that we will have to be flexible and agile as we go, so locking ourselves in through a whole load of specified tramlines as to how this will work would probably be a mistake at this stage. However, that does not mean that these further three questions on the supply side do not need answering, and I hope that the Minister will be able to do so.

First, we have to question whether the likely allowed tuition revenue per credit will be sufficient to cover universities’ costs, and hence whether universities, FE providers and other educational providers will respond by making available these new courses. Figures released last month by the Office for Students suggest that the higher education sector’s spending on educating undergraduate home students exceeded income. It made a loss of £955 million; in other words, it covered only about 95p on every £1 of its costs. There is no reason to think that these modular courses will be cheaper on average; in fact, it may be the reverse. So if these courses will be loss-making, why do the Government think that educational providers will choose to expand their lifelong learning modular options, where marginal costs exceed marginal revenues?

This gets to the question of whether or not, as the Minister said in her opening speech, it should be the case that modules are priced according to the number of credits, without regard to the underlying marginal cost of offering those programmes. We all understand that this is a can of worms. The appearance and reality gap between tuition fees and the revenues—the sticker price versus the way in which university finances operate for the current undergraduate system—will begin to come under great pressure, if you allow that kind of marginal pricing through this route. But if you do not, it is not obvious that educational providers will respond in the way that the Government want.

Secondly, on educational provision, in some fields of study for modular learning to work there will need to be an agreed sequence of study. Can the Minister confirm how the Government envisage these pathways being established? How do the Government envisage the recognition of credits across institutions working so that they are transferable; in other words, who will shape the new provision for lifelong learners?

Thirdly, I urge the Government to use this as an opportunity to be more radical in creating new routes into some of the professions. The policy summary note accompanying the Bill says, incredibly disappointingly:

“There are some courses (such as nursing) which are not well suited to a credit-based system and will be treated as non-credit-bearing for fee limit purposes”.


Can the Minister explain why that should be the case, when we now have great flexibility—as a consequence of not being tied to a set of European regulations—to ensure that we design more flexible routes into nursing, still as a graduate profession? For mid-career switchers thinking about moving into nursing, the ability to do so in a modular way will probably be essential for more people to make that transition—as will the possibility to create ladders of opportunity for those working in social care, who wish to get a health professional qualification.

Just to be clear, I am not arguing that we should replace the current undergraduate nursing routes. I am arguing that they should be supplemented, and to rule out nursing ex cathedra from the very flexibilities that have been discussed today seems a mistake.

In summary, this is a welcome and sensible Bill but, to have a beneficial real-world impact, on the demand side, it will need to provide more support and flexibility for potential learners and, on the supply side, considerable action will be needed to stimulate appropriate new educational options with perhaps a degree of radicalism not yet evident in the Government’s current proposals.