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.
