In 2024, Instructure convened a Commission of higher education and lifelong learning experts to assess emerging policies related to skills development, including the Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE) and the Growth and Skills Levy (GSL). These policies aim to reform how education and training are funded and delivered to provide flexibility to learners and ensure the UK’s workforce remains competitive. This report provides a detailed analysis of these policies, addressing how they may be implemented to reflect the new Labour Government’s priorities.
Key findings
- The Lifelong Learning Entitlement and the Growth and Skills Levy risk being implemented as two stand- alone policies. Urgent consideration is needed on how these two policies will overlap and interact.
- These policies span the higher and further education sectors. Understanding the intertwining nature of these sectors is essential to the successful implementation of these policies.
- Existing regulatory metrics, particularly continuation and progression will impede provision at the modular level and therefore new measures for evaluating modular outcomes are needed.
Recommendations
- The Office for Students (OfS) should continue to consider how modular learning can be regulated appropriately without undue regulatory burden. This new regulatory framework should be developed in close collaboration with the sector. The OfS should also work closely with other further and higher education regulators to prevent regulatory overlap or contradiction.
- Develop a clear, easy-to-use and widely communicated mechanism for building qualifications between the LLE and GSL pathways. This function may sit with the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) which has committed to ‘working with the sector to establish a verified qualification and credit account’.
- The Department for Education (DfE) should consider developing a mechanism for employers to fund modular learning in the academic pathway, allowing the learner both to self-fund and be employer- funded through their modular learning journey.
- Encourage the awarding of ‘exit’ qualifications at Levels 4 and 5 during undergraduate degree study and the use of these as stepping stones to further study.