Lifelong Learning

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

Thursday 6th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Knight, for securing this debate. I declare an interest as an employed academic at King’s College London. It is gratifying that so many of us want to speak even though we have only four minutes. But there is a slightly gloomy hinterland, which is that people like us have been talking about the importance of lifelong learning for a very long time, and meanwhile adult education spending and numbers are going down, part-time and adult HE numbers are down, and higher education provision in further education is down. So there is a lot to do.

Because I have only three minutes left, I will concentrate on the higher education, higher skills end of things, rather than the literacy, numeracy and ESL provision that makes up a very large part of current adult education.

I was a member of the Augar review, and our number one recommendation was the LLE—lifelong learning entitlement—about which the noble Lord, Lord Knight, spoke so eloquently. I still believe that this is a hugely important reform. It was a big relief, and enormously gratifying in the years before the last election, to have cross-party support and to have that support reiterated by the present Government. I have a slight worry that everybody is so busy thinking about how to reform it before we start, that five years from now we might still be talking about what the ideal structure would be. I urge the Government to get on with it, because until we try it, we will not find out what works and what does not.

Having said that, I will suggest a couple of things that could do with some attention and which are not to do with the design of the LLE, but more to do with the structure and supply of opportunities in the institutional landscape. If you look at a number of other countries that are not so different from us—Canada, Australia and the United States are obvious examples—there has been a significant increase in recent years in the number of people doing short but relatively high-level, what we would probably call level 4, courses in vocational areas. That has been possible because of the institutional structures as well as the funding mechanisms. Those countries basically all have systems not unlike ours in that it is a combination of state support and people paying fees, with more or less well-developed income-contingent back-up.

That teaches us that we have to look at the structures and incentives for our institutions to supply lifelong opportunities and not just at the demand that might be generated by making adult student funding more flexible. Whether or not we manage to transform our provision will be about demand and supply, but you cannot just wait for the demand to appear. You have to have incentives to provide the sorts of courses that people want.

There is a huge amount of talk about modules. My sense is that short courses and one-year courses are probably just as important, but we will not find out until we go out there. I would like to flag one recommendation of the Augar review that got nowhere, which was that institutions should be strongly encouraged, if not required, by the regulator to offer higher certificates and higher diplomas rather than treating anything other than a full degree as an exit award that is only really offered if you fail. For some reason that never got anywhere. I have never understood why the DfE did not like it, but somehow it did not and it never went anywhere. I would like to lob it back in.

What I would really like to ask the Minister—but I know she cannot tell me—is when will the regs be laid for the LLE to be activated? When will the roadshows start? Since I cannot get an answer to that, can she assure us that the DfE is considering structures as well as the structure of the lending?