The Lifelong Loan Entitlement (LLE) is part of the UK Government’s reforms to post-18 education and training in England. It will offer students a loan equivalent to four years’ worth of tuition fees (currently £37,000), which can be used flexibly over their working lives. This can be used to pay for short courses, modules or full courses at colleges or universities.
The Open University’s Vice-Chancellor, Professor Tim Blackman, has written the foreword to a new paper from the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI), Does the Lifelong Loan Entitlement meet its own objectives? which considers if the LLE is likely to meet its own ambitions.
Professor Tim Blackman, Vice-Chancellor of The Open University, said:
“The development of the Lifelong Loan Entitlement is a positive step for lifelong participation in higher education. It has tremendous potential to drive productivity and growth and address inequalities across the country. However, the LLE will not be able to spread the benefits of post-18 education over a working lifetime, as well as across a wider social spectrum, if students studying full-time and often residential undergraduate degrees continue to receive such a large share of the student support available and use up all their entitlement on one qualification often before they even start their careers.
“The continuing exclusion of most distance learning students from maintenance loans in England will also mean that the LLE will not be able to reach out to the people it needs to reach if it is to have a transformative effect. These students, who often need the flexibility of distance learning, are often bringing up children, in low-paid employment and either did not go to university straight after school or were unable to complete their studies. Many have maintenance costs.
“The LLE is a very welcome policy development and this HEPI Policy Note is timely in highlighting how it can be further developed to achieve the ambitions we all want it to achieve’.
Rose Stephenson, Director of Policy and Advocacy of the Higher Education Policy Institute and author of the report, said:
“The LLE is an exciting piece of policy. It will streamline funding access for technical and academic courses across colleges and universities. It will also allow learners to study in a modular fashion. These modules can be standalone, or built into a longer course, although the mechanism and restrictions of these modular degrees are unclear.
“However, by setting the minimum course size at 30 credits, the LLE fails to improve financial support for part-time learners. The exclusion of distance learners from maintenance loans also risks holding higher education out of reach from the learners the Government would most like to target. Without changes, this policy risks being a molehill, rather than the educational mountain it has the potential to be.”
The report published by the Higher Education Policy Institute can be found online.
