Tag: Entitlement

  • From policy to practice: preparing for the Lifelong Learning Entitlement

    From policy to practice: preparing for the Lifelong Learning Entitlement

    This blog was kindly authored by Mark Jones, Executive Vice President – Education, TechnologyOne.

    Having worked with higher education institutions globally for three decades, I’ve seen policy-driven transformation succeed and fail. The difference comes down to whether institutions treat fundamental change as a strategic and commercial opportunity, or merely as a compliance burden.

    Across UK universities, conversations are increasingly centred on what the Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE) will mean in practice. The LLE fundamentally restructures how higher education is funded and accessed. Learners will be able to study modular provision at levels 4 to 6 in government-prioritised subjects, pay for individual credits, accumulate learning over decades, and transfer credits between providers.

    The policy intent – making higher education more accessible – is clear. For institutions built around three-year undergraduate programmes, delivering on that requires more than administrative adjustment. It demands a rethink of curriculum design, digital systems, academic regulations and student support models.

    A technology inflection point

    The LLE is more than a policy change. It represents a technology inflection point for higher education. For years, institutions have made incremental adjustments to systems designed for cohort-based, September-to-June academic cycles. The LLE exposes the limitations of those systems.

    Institutions will need to track lifetime credit accumulation across multiple providers, process granular payments that may be months or years apart, verify external prerequisites in real-time, and maintain learning relationships that span decades rather than discrete degree programmes.

    This creates space for innovation. The challenge is not simply to adapt existing platforms, but to reimagine student record systems, finance integration, and learner engagement from the ground up. The technologies that enable personalised digital experiences in sectors such as media streaming or retail banking offer relevant models. International developments – for example, micro-credentials in Australia – provide both cautionary tales and promising precedents.

    The question shifts from ‘How do we make current systems cope?’ to ‘What would we build if we designed for modular, lifelong, multi-provider learning from the outset?’

    The market waiting to be served

    The demand signals are clear. UCAS 2025 data shows UK mature acceptances (aged 21+) have declined 3.3% to 106,120, with steeper drops among those aged 30 and over. Meanwhile, 31% of UK 18-year-olds now intend to live at home while studying (89,510 students, up 6.9% from 2024), driven by affordability constraints.

    The Post-16 education and skills white paper explicitly recognises the need for workforce upskilling at scale. Career transitions require targeted learning rather than full degrees and learners need options that fit alongside work and caring responsibilities.

    The technology enabling this market – flexible enrolment, credit portability, lifetime learner accounts – represents a fundamental refresh of how higher education operates digitally. The LLE removes the policy barriers. The remaining question is whether institutions can build the infrastructure to deliver on the opportunity.

    The curriculum challenge that unlocks it

    Serving this market demands more than breaking degrees into smaller units. Each module must function as both a standalone learning experience and as a component that can stack with credits from other providers. Prerequisites must enable learners to navigate pathways independently. Assessment models must work for twelve-week episodes rather than three-year relationships.

    Academic regulations designed for continuous programmes need to adapt to episodic engagement over decades. Student services built around sustained relationships must be reimagined for twelve-week presences. These aren’t minor adjustments; they’re fundamental policy framework redesigns.

    Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) becomes central rather than peripheral. The issue is not whether institutions can scale existing processes, but whether they can reimagine how learning is valued when it originates elsewhere.

    Timeline realism

    LLE applications open in September 2026. For institutions targeting January 2027 launches, timelines are extremely tight. Across the sector, universities are planning phased September 2027 launches with limited subject scope, rather than ambitious early rollouts that risk operational failure.

    Institutions making meaningful progress are treating LLE as a strategic transformation requiring executive vision. They are testing actual workflows, allocating dedicated resources, and making deliberate scope decisions that acknowledge building capability takes time. Importantly, they’re approaching LLE as an opportunity, not just an obligation.

    The transformation ahead

    The LLE creates space for institutions to rethink digital infrastructure fundamentally rather than incrementally. The most successful technology transformations occur when external pressure aligns with internal ambition – when ’we have to change’ meets ‘here’s what we could build’.

    Institutions approaching this purely as a compliance exercise experience compressed timelines and onerous requirements. Those that view it as an innovation catalyst find that it justifies investments in modern, integrated platforms that have been deferred for years. It enables a more ambitious question: ‘What would a student system designed for lifelong, modular, multi-provider learning actually look like?’

    The opportunity to serve learners historically excluded from higher education is genuine. So too is the opportunity to modernise infrastructure that has struggled under incremental adaptation. The sector’s challenge is translating policy ambition into operational reality for institutions, students, and the communities higher education serves. Those that thrive will be the ones that treat the LLE as permission to innovate, not just an obligation to comply.

    These implementation challenges and more will be explored at TechnologyOne Showcase London on 25 February at HERE & NOW at Outernet, featuring an executive panel with voices from UCISA, ARC, HEPI, SUMS, and institutional leaders discussing how governance, culture, technology, and commercial strategies need to adapt to this new policy landscape. Register for TechnologyOne Showcase here.

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  • Could the Lifelong Learning Entitlement usher in a new era of skills-based curriculum?

    Could the Lifelong Learning Entitlement usher in a new era of skills-based curriculum?

    As it stands the Lifelong Learning Entitlement mostly represents a reorganisation of higher education funding and systems for quite a lot of short term operational pain and very little payoff.

    But for institutions prepared to play the long game, it could represent a real shift in how higher education is configured and how it integrates with the labour market.

    That doesn’t just mean taking existing courses that were designed for three years of intensive study and breaking them up into constituent parts – though in some cases the ability to do that could offer a lifeline for students needing to earn before they can learn. The larger prize on offer is courses that are actively designed for the contemporary labour market, in which the building blocks of the curriculum are skills and work-related competences, rather than academic knowledge.

    Let’s acknowledge from the outset the false dichotomy – knowledge requires skills to acquire and apply it, and skills require a structured context of knowledge to be meaningful and applicable. But the “skills-based curriculum” is gaining traction around the world for a reason: primarily to address a perceived demand among students and employers for learning that is practical and applied, and that prepares students to succeed in the contemporary labour market, which requires a complex mix of technical and interpersonal skills. It promises more than the embedding of in-demand skills into a traditional academic curriculum; skills-based curriculum centres work-based skills as the primary learning outcome.

    Opportunities and risks

    One corollary is that the learning itself becomes more hands-on, project-based, active, and collaborative, in order to foster those skills. Students are very clear from the outset what they are learning to do and what the workplace application will be. As some employers turn to skills-based hiring practices, graduates can readily match their experience to employers’ expectations and demonstrate, with evidence, their competences, reducing the need for a long tail of additional experience to supplement the degree certificate in the name of “employability.”.The focus on authentic learning environments and assessments also goes some way towards AI-proofing the curriculum: AI can be deployed authentically in workplace-relevant ways, not used as a shortcut to evidencing thought.

    This all sounds fantastic and straightforward, even hyper-efficient. The relevance to the LLE’s intention of a more flexible, stackable HE model lies both in the notional desirability of education oriented towards work and employment, and in the efficiency and transparency of the relationship between skills developed through education, and work.

    But there are risks, too, for both providers and students. In the absence of any kind of agreed national (or global) taxonomy of skills, that could allow for a body of practice to develop around the pedagogies and environments that demonstrably allow students to develop them, any provider may claim to offer something “skills-based” with little in the way of evidence or robust quality assurance. In an open market, students may be drawn in by the promise of work-readiness, only to discover that their learning adds up to very little. Skills England has in the last few weeks published a new UK standard skills classification that addresses the first problem; the second remains open for solutions.

    The market for such provision in the UK remains untested; the current premise of the LLE rests on the assumption that existing programmes can be disaggregated meaningfully into modules that simultaneously offer something of value as a short course of study, while also contributing towards a larger qualification. While this may be true in some cases, it certainly will not readily apply to all. Introducing skills as a core outcome, while it may work quite well for a module or short course, opens up the question of which aggregated sets of skills can be said to be meaningful in a journey towards a substantive qualification. This is a significant challenge for higher education as it is currently configured, going far beyond the merely functional and operational, touching on the core purposes and processes of higher education and the need to manage carefully the consequences of bringing “skills” to the forefront of higher education pedagogy.

    More prosaically, all this active, authentic learning doesn’t come cheap, and it requires a strong relationship with employers to deliver, raising questions about whether it is possible to develop a high-quality skills-based offer at scale. And that’s before you start questioning what the regulatory implications might be.

    These risks are only risks, not insuperable obstacles – UK HE providers, such as the London Interdisciplinary School, have adopted a “skills first” model of higher education without incident. While appetite within the sector to develop a more skills-focused offer is variable, there are institutions – such as Kingston University – that have developed an explicitly skills-focused element to complement existing programmes, and others that are interested in the potential for reconfiguring or extending their offer around skills, especially in light of the creation of Skills England and the prospect of a more systematic approach to meeting national skills needs.

    What needs to be true

    But for this model to become more widely embedded across higher education providers, and to realise the potential of the LLE to facilitate innovation in curriculum content as well as delivery, some things that are not currently true will need to become so. At the Festival of Higher Education, together with Ellucian colleagues, we hosted a private round table discussion exploring what a student journey through a more skills-based, “stackable” offer might need to look like.

    Not everything needs to be done collaboratively all the time, but there are moments in which there can be greater strategic advantage in collective innovation than in being the first mover, and significant higher education innovation could be one of them. Working collectively creates greater security both for institutions and students that the offer is well thought through and robustly quality assured, and that it will be legible to prospective students seeking to explore their choices, and have credibility in the labour market. Pooling risks in this way could help to reduce the stakes in making the decision to roll out a novel kind of provision, and potentially allow for some sharing of start-up costs.

    One area that is lacking is better market intelligence – the assumption that there is a sustainable demand for shorter and stackable higher education courses remains unproven, and some investment in exploring the nature of that demand would help institutions to tailor their offer more effectively rather than spinning up provision that is at high risk of failure either because it does not recruit or because it does not adequately meet the needs of the people who are attracted to it on principle.

    In the domain of core learning and teaching there is a need for exploration of the pedagogic frameworks and approaches that can support a high-quality and academically robust skills-based offer. Some degree of consistency in approach to building pathways through programmes designed around skills could offer an alternative to reliance on credit as the currency that notionally allows for portability between providers and in practice is very hard to implement. Retaining student choice and the possibility of personalisation is typically important to students and providers alike, so there is a flexibility imperative there that it would be hard to tackle as an individual provider.

    Accessing this type of higher education, in this way, opens up the question of reimagining the “student experience” and the underpinning systems that can enable institutions to manage it. Students will need clarity about access to work – through placement, internships or joint provision with employers – the relationship between work, learning and skills development, and ultimately who is responsible for their experience. Access to services will need to be tailored to the student, and both students and providers will need to accurately keep track of modules completed, and skills acquired, and when.

    Curriculum management systems will need to allow students to chart their way through a particular pathway and register for modules, while incorporating guardrails to avoid students choosing pathways that add up to, in the words of one attendee, a “smorgasbord of nonsense.” Support for students in mapping or curating their chosen pathways will need to be built in from their very first module, and they would need to be able to request and access a “transcript” that details their skills at the point of completion of any module.

    Skills-based curriculum needn’t be stackable and stackable higher education needn’t be skills-based, but there is clear potential for synergies between the two. Just as skills-based curriculum is unlikely to replace traditional knowledge-based curriculum wholesale, modular study is unlikely to replace the full-time experience. That doesn’t rule out the possibility of significant change though.

    Opinion is divided as to whether the LLE will enable higher education growth through innovation and access to new demand, function to create some ease and flex in a system that will enhance access to those who find engaging with the current system a struggle, or neither (or something else as-yet-unanticipated). But as higher education institutions consider the future, growth and access seem like the right targets to be aiming for. Skills-based curriculum, if developed strategically and thoughtfully, avoiding “innovation theatre,” could be helpful in both cases.

    This article is published in association with Ellucian. Take a glimpse at the technology supporting the future of lifelong learning here.

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  • How removing funding disparities for ‘disruptor institutions’ could help fulfil the ambition of the Lifelong Learning Entitlement

    How removing funding disparities for ‘disruptor institutions’ could help fulfil the ambition of the Lifelong Learning Entitlement

    • Professor Harriet Dunbar-Morris is Pro Vice-Chancellor Academic and Provost at The University of Buckingham.

    Whilst we are still waiting for the government to decide on the operationalisation of the future direction of the Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE), it is easy to agree that providing all new learners with a tuition fee loan entitlement to the equivalent of four years of post-18 education to use up to the age of 60 is a good thing in principle.

    In recent articles, Professor Deborah Johnston and Rose Stephenson have both presented useful positions and summaries on the status quo. For the University of Buckingham, the merits of the LLE are clear, but it is the relationship between the LLE and courses of different lengths that is central to our concern.

    At Buckingham, we take pride in our unique approach to education. As a disruptor institution and the only private university in the UK with a Royal Charter, we emphasise our small and independent nature. Our distinctive positioning has enabled us to create a unique learning environment. We have successfully developed ‘accelerated degrees’, including our flagship degree models: the two-year undergraduate degree and the four-and-a-half-year undergraduate medical degree.

    Where other institutions have a long summer holiday, at Buckingham we have a fourth term – the same amount of classroom time over a whole degree as in other universities, but a term in the summer which means that students can enter the labour market a year earlier and incur a year’s less accommodation and living expenses as well. 

    Alternatively, in three years, our students at Buckingham can undertake two qualifications: a foundation plus an undergraduate or an undergraduate plus a postgraduate degree. The year’s shape also more closely resembles the world of work and therefore ably prepares students more authentically for their future careers. We know this approach is working, and adds value. We are in the Top 10 for Graduate Prospects (outcomes) and:

    • 92% of our graduates agree their current activity is meaningful (sector 85%).
    • 88% of our graduates feel their current activity fits with their future plans (sector 78%).
    • 83% of our graduates say they are using what they learn while studying (sector 69%).
    • 97% of our graduates are in work or study (sector 89%).
    • 72% of our graduates are in full-time employment (sector 61%).

    Buckingham has been a beacon for accelerated degrees to help students achieve their degrees in a shorter period and get out into the workplace or onto further study sooner. We can also see this model allowing students to interrupt their studies and take their degrees in shorter chunks (each of our terms, for example), which would be possible with the LLE framework once it is implemented. However, there is a fundamental unfairness facing Buckingham and others that needs to be addressed.

    To understand this issue, we must first delve into the technical world of registering with the Office for Students (OfS), the regulator for higher education in England. Providers of higher education can (although not at the moment as new registrations are paused) register with the OfS under two categories:

    1) Approved (fee cap)

      Providers in the Approved (fee cap) category can only charge up to the fee cap of £9,250 (2024/25) / £9,535 (2025/26) for full-time students. Students can take out a tuition fee loan to cover their entire fee (for undergraduate courses). Approved (fee cap) providers can also access teaching and research grant funding. Most institutions are in this category.

      2) Approved

      Providers in the Approved category, which includes Buckingham, can charge tuition fees above the cap. However, students at these institutions can only access tuition fee loans up to the lower limit (£6,355 per annum for three-year programmes and £7,625 per annum for two-year programmes). Any additional fees charged need to be covered privately. Further, these institutions cannot access teaching and research grants.

      Because of our category of registration, students can only get the fee loan for the accelerated (two-year) degree programmes at the lower fee loan limit. Our students study for more of the year, and in each of their two years, yet they are entitled to less of a loan each year to support their learning, meaning that through the current category of registration they are discriminated against, even though our accelerated degrees are clearly better for getting students into the workforce and for the skills agenda being pushed by the new Labour government.

      What is also grossly unfair is that despite approved providers being unable to access direct government funding for learning and teaching, research, or capital activity, they remain subject to nearly every aspect of OfS regulation. One exception is the Access and Participation Plan (although we still produce an Access Statement). Yet, re-stating the above, students at approved category institutions cannot benefit from a full loan for the studying they do.

      So, as the government considers how to support the skills agenda and deliver on skills shortages, here at Buckingham we make a request on behalf of the sector and the potential students: implement the LLE and remove the disparities.

      We are calling for one of two developments:

      • A government review to address tuition fee loan eligibility (tied to current categorisations). Why should students be disadvantaged for the loan they can apply for by the category of their institution’s registration? In The University of Buckingham’s case, we have a TEF, we meet OfS requirements, and we even directly support the government’s desire to get students into work faster. Should it not be £9,250 (or now £9,535 from 2025/26) for all?
      • If not that, a change to loans for the credits studied will allow the students studying in that fourth term with us at Buckingham, and completing in two years, to be able to seek loans for the full amount of their two years of full-time study. The point here is that the implementation of the LLE means that the loan is for the credit instead, so this inequity is removed. All students can get a loan for the credit they study. Our students then would, as a bonus, gain the credit quicker, as they would study over two years.

      Most students, due to the cost of living and other responsibilities, should now be considered part-time students, and we need to consider ways to help them fit their lives around their studies – something we certainly pride ourselves on. To support those who also need to work during their intensive studies, we timetable differently and teach differently. Ultimately this is about helping every one of our students to study more effectively (and in a shorter timescale), and as presented in The University of Buckingham’s Strategic Plan 2023-28, supporting our students by embedding employability and entrepreneurship within the curriculum.

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