Lifelong Learning: “University of the Air” White Paper

Ian Sollom Excerpts

Tuesday 16th June 2026 Westminster Hall

[Ian Sollom (St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Desmond. I congratulate the hon. Member for Southport (Patrick Hurley) on securing the debate. I know that he is a passionate advocate and champion of the OU. I welcome the opportunity to speak on a subject that, frankly, deserves far more attention.

Opening access to education, rewarding hard work and helping everyone to fulfil their potential are aims that sit at the heart of the Liberal Democrat vision for a free and fair society. Our predecessors were wholeheartedly supportive of the spirit behind the 1966 White Paper and we continue to be so. It is right that we mark its 60th anniversary by celebrating the work that it set in motion.

In my constituency there are currently 240 Open University students: 210 undergraduates and 30 postgraduates. Nearly half of those undergraduates started their studies under the age of 30 and over a quarter declare a disability. That tells us something about how OU study fits around life. It is not a story that is unique to my patch. Nationally, 19% of OU students live in the most economically disadvantaged areas of the country, nearly 70% are already in work when they begin studying, and three in four arrive with no previous higher education qualification at all. That is a testament to the access mission that the OU embodies.

In preparing for this debate, I enjoyed revisiting the 1966 White Paper, its proposals and the debates that led up to it. Hindsight is, of course, a wonderful thing but after reading one Member dismiss the idea as an “inflated concept” in a 1965 debate, I could not help but reflect, 60 years later, that the OU has comprehensively answered that objection, becoming a much-loved national institution.

It has also been interesting to reflect on the world of adult education at the time. The White Paper was explicit that the university would sit alongside a wider ecosystem of provision, not replace it. The Government of the day promised to make full use of

“existing agencies, such as the Extra-Mural Departments of Universities, the Workers’ Educational Association…and local education authorities.”

In fact, the White Paper returns to that point twice. The vision was plural: a national broadcasting university—at the time—working hand in hand with local night classes, adult education centres and further education colleges, each reinforcing the other.

The Open University itself has remained admirably faithful to that founding outward-facing instinct. It partners with institutions that lack their own degree-awarding powers, validating their programmes, and a high proportion of its graduates stay in their local area, contributing to the local economy. Five years after graduating, more than nine in 10 OU graduates still live in the postcode area where they studied, which I believe is precisely the kind of locally rooted impact hoped for by the authors of the White Paper.

What has perhaps not survived so well is the other half of the 1966 vision—the local ecosystem that the OU was meant to complement. Public funding for adult skills and community learning has fallen sharply since its peak in the early 2000s. Spending on classroom-based adult education specifically has fallen by about two thirds over that period, and the number of publicly funded classroom-based further education courses taken by adults in England has dropped from 5.4 million in 2004-05 to just 1.7 million last year, which is a fall of about 70%. Of course, that is not the OU’s doing, and further education colleges still do excellent work within a narrower remit, but the wider tapestry of provision that the White Paper authors assumed would sit alongside a “University of the Air” has thinned out considerably since.

Even the OU is feeling the strain of operating in that emptier landscape. Its own accounts for the last financial year show an accounting deficit of £27 million, which was brought back into a small underlying operating surplus only through a sustained programme of costs reduction, including the loss, sadly, of over 300 full-time equivalent roles last year. That should be seen less as a reflection on the OU, and more as a reflection on a much deeper structural problem. The part-time higher education market in England has been shrinking for years, and the OU, even as the strongest player in that market, cannot grow the pool of adult learners on its own. That is a job for Government policy, not for one institution’s marketing budget.

That is exactly why the choice of funding mechanism matters so much for mature and returning learners. The lifelong learning entitlement that the Government are bringing forward is a welcome step in the right direction, but the evidence consistently shows that loans are not a strong enough incentive on their own to get more people from that group into education or training. Financial anxiety is already one of the biggest barriers preventing people from returning to study. Older learners are understandably more risk averse than 18-year-olds, and asking someone to take on the very debt they are trying to avoid to access more flexible and modular learning is not necessarily the answer.

Instead, we Liberal Democrats have long called for grants of between £5,000 and £10,000 to be made available to people at key stages throughout their life to support retraining and reskilling. To ensure that that funding is well spent, we would pair it with good guidance on the options available and make sure that it is usable across a wide range of institutions, from local further education colleges to national universities and, of course, the OU.

I hope the Minister, hearing praise from across the Chamber for the OU’s success in reaching learners of all ages, will give serious thought to that proposal for the long term, because it will matter more, not less, as time goes on. The world of work is changing fast, and maintaining a highly skilled, productive economy will require us to continually invest in our most precious resource—people.

Learning cannot be a cost to be minimised once an initial education ends. The OU’s own record bears out the difference that can be made: it is ranked third nationally for graduate employability, and it has innovative schemes such as the virtual internships programme, which was built specifically for distance learners who could never have accessed an internship through conventional routes. That is what lifelong learning looks like when it works, but it cannot fall to one institution. Perhaps the most important insight from the White Paper is that no single institution, however innovative, can deliver lifelong learning alone. That responsibility sits with Government, who have their own opportunity to address that.

Last October’s “Post-16 education and skills” White Paper restated the Government’s ambitions for the lifelong learning entitlement, which is due to come into force in January 2027. However, the secondary legislation and implementation detail that will determine whether it actually reaches risk-averse adult learners, rather than just the 18-year-olds who the loan model already works for, remain outstanding. I therefore hope that the Minister can set out not just the date for that detail but whether the detail will include any role, or ambition, for grants alongside loans. It would be fitting for the anniversary that we are celebrating today to be marked by such a step forward in adult education.