Will the LLE become an opportunity universities fail to pursue?
Are UK universities in managed decline? Reports persist of universities reducing their workforce, cutting courses and in some cases closing departments, which diminishes the breadth of subjects they offer.
Then there is the bottom line. A recent Office for Students (OfS) report highlighted that 124 higher education providers face a deficit in 2025-26. Last but not least is the government levy on international student fee income. We now know how this is going to be implemented and although the sector isn’t facing the worst possible scenario, it’s still not great.
Even in what appears to be a dire context, institutions have choices. Clearly, if you have reduced income and increased expenditure you need to look to balance the scales. However, there is a delicate balance between actions that increase the likelihood of remaining perpetually smaller and poorer, and those that enable you to grow income and pursue opportunities.
It is far easier to quantify costs but much harder to consider the opportunity costs of being cautious and pursuing cost cutting exclusively. My worry is that too few UK universities are striking the right balance between managing costs and looking to increase income, or that when they do attempt this their efforts are safe and formulaic.
Whatever you think about the Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE), it presents an opportunity. No more, no less. And in a period when the overall mood music is depressing, windows of opportunity should be welcomed and possibilities for growing the sector explored.
However, I fear that some of the genuine concerns and challenges that the LLE presents have made some people lose sight of this. There are some well-publicised and some less visible challenges, but I think a few have become slightly overblown.
Demand is more complex than the proof we seek
One of the biggest question marks people place over the LLE is demand. Is there demand to study modules at levels 4 to 6 from undergraduate degrees? The more I’ve thought about this, the more I think it is misguided. It is impossible to prove demand in advance for something that does not currently exist in any meaningful or widespread way.
This type of thinking also fails to recognise that demand is sophisticated. It is not either there or not there, and it cannot be comprehensively proven by past data alone. There was no demand for smartphones before they came on the scene, or for myriad other things. Equally, demand can change depending on how times change, how things are positioned and marketed, and various other factors.
I think one of the reasons this has become such a prominent question is the culture around higher education. I worry that the sector has become too data obsessed and has fallen into the trap of believing that quantitative data from the past has a high validity in predicting what will happen in the future. This is perhaps heightened by the current climate, where people are seeking comfort and validation that they think numbers can provide. But if you are doing anything new, there is never going to be sufficient evidence from the past to justify it.
Some of the practices of the larger consultancies in the sector also fuel misguided views, and I have witnessed all manner of slop around projections, predictions and data more widely. These practices and attitudes remind me of something I heard recently, which was that more fiction has been written in Microsoft Excel than in Microsoft Word. At times, our attitudes towards quantitative data mean it becomes either a comforting decision-making placebo or a form of modern-day palm reading.
Marketing and demand generation really matter for the LLE
This mentality gets to the heart of some flawed thinking that has surrounded the LLE, particularly in relation to marketing. I have previously written about the LLE trial that was conducted a couple of years ago. The long and the short of it was that it was pretty disastrous, not least because the Office for Students (OfS) decided in its wisdom that universities could not use the funding provided for marketing.
Just let that sink in. Imagine you are a business putting a new product into the market aimed at a new audience and you are not given the chance to market it fully. Would that genuinely prove demand for your new product? I will let you reach your own conclusion on that, but like a lot of what the OfS does, the mind boggles.
If modules, which are essentially the course product that the LLE is promoting, are to succeed, there will need to be significant marketing and demand-generation activity. This is something the government and the regulator need to better understand, not least because there are unique hurdles involved.
One of those is category ambiguity. A degree is a category, a master’s is a category, an apprenticeship is a category, but the type of provision supported by the LLE does not neatly map onto a widely understood course category. There will therefore be a need to develop this into a category that people can grasp and understand. The government should also look to support this category-level promotion if it wants this approach to succeed.
The opportunity that the LLE may present will stand little chance of being grasped or properly tested if there is no awareness, understanding or clear value proposition among potential audiences. There is therefore an onus on universities, but also on the government, to support this.
Fixing short course foundations for the LLE
There are other challenges that unbundled module provision presents, and these challenges are clear when looking at shorter course provision across the UK HE sector in aggregate. Having carried out a significant amount of work and research on the short course market in recent years, there are obvious issues. In general, this is an underdeveloped and operationally immature area of the sector, and some fundamentals need to be fixed.
The first is the need for more compelling short course propositions that appeal to prospective students. The way the LLE is currently configured means that modules are extracted from degrees rather than developed from the ground up, so there is a risk of falling into the trap of merely presenting what amounts to a bland set of electives, rather than compelling standalone options. There will need to be a much more appealing presentation of modules than “Fluid Mechanics 2” or “Statistics”.
Other issues around short course provision will need to be addressed for opportunities to be grasped, and two of these I would describe as clarity and certainty. In respect of clarity, too often short course pages lack sufficient detail, and many pale in comparison with the course pages for degrees. Whilst it is understandable that more effort and priority are placed on degrees, there also needs to be a decent and well-presented level of detail for shorter courses so that prospective students can properly assess them and they are given a decent chance to succeed.
The other issue is related and concerns certainty. In aggregate, there is too much ambiguity around short course provision. There are many examples where questions such as, When will the course run? How much does it cost? How will it be delivered? How regularly does it run? What does it involve and what are the time commitments? Who teaches it? are not adequately answered, if answered at all.
Uncertainty and, in some cases, a lack of an obvious route to gain answers to these questions is an absolute killer for interest and enrolments. More than that, it presents a significant reputational risk, as it conveys a message that this provision is low priority, that you are half-hearted about it, or worse, organisationally disorganised and incompetent. The good news is that it is not difficult to address these uncertainties.
One last thing that needs addressing sector-wide are the processes, resources and systems that sit behind shorter forms of provision. The sector needs to move towards having the foundations and infrastructure in place for prospective students to enquire, apply, pay, enrol and start their studies in a frictionless manner. Some universities are making good progress in this direction, but in aggregate the sector is not well set up for this, and signing up for a short course can still sometimes feel like buying tickets for am-dram at a local community centre.
Are credit transfer debates obscuring LLE opportunities?
Along with questions of demand, the most commonly cited obstacle to the LLE is credit transfer or the lack of it. Although solving this would be advantageous, I think the issue is somewhat overblown. But this reflects how the sector as a whole is often more inclined to find problems than to pursue opportunities.
The converse of the credit transfer conundrum is student lifetime value, something I have seen no one discuss in relation to the LLE. There have long been questions about how effectively universities foster student loyalty to the extent that students return to study again and again. I have to confess that if I were a university leader pursuing the opportunities the LLE presents, I would want to use it as a vehicle to support student lifetime value.
I know the sector is currently metaphorically practicing its kissing on posters with collaborative slogans such as “working together for tomorrow”, but through the LLE I would want to serve students so well that they return to my institution again and again and again over their lifetimes. We seem to have lost sight of the fact that the LLE has the potential to foster student loyalty and, to put it crudely, repeat custom.
Online learning's importance to future LLE opportunities
There are also other challenges to credit transfer that seem to be neglected in the debate, and one relates to geography and modality. Imagine, if you will, a credit transfer utopia and I am a student based in, say, Leicester. I study my first LLE-funded module at my local university, but the next module I want to study is at a university in the North East. In that instance, am I going to relocate for a 30-credit module? Am I going to pay for regular travel to attend the course
There has been little discussion of mobility and in-person attendance challenges even if credit transfer itself was not a barrier. At this point, call me Clinton Baptiste, but I can say with a degree of certainty that I can read your mind. But what about online learning you say? If modules are offered online, then this is not as big a barrier.
All well and good, but the current guidance for the LLE clearly states that only designated online distance courses will be supported. There are no such caveats for courses offered in other ways. Online courses are therefore treated differently, and it is not clear how many will meet the criteria for designation or what that criteria will be.
This is, on one hand, absurd, but on the other sadly predictable. There is an inherited weirdness towards online distance learning in government and among those involved in these policies and decisions. I can’t really explain it, but it feels as though these are the same people who think remote working is inherently unproductive, who probably refer to the Open University as an e-university, and who still print out their boarding passes on A4 paper.
To an extent, the discriminatory approach to online education is also at odds with the government’s push for providers to deepen differentiation and specialisation. If specialisms are more widely distributed, then the geographical barriers of in-person delivery are likely to hinder access to modules and, from an institutional perspective, limit enrolment opportunities.
In order not to miss out on the opportunities that unbundled module provision presents, these courses need to be accessible and not tied to a specific campus or location. Given it is debatable how early the wider sector will engage with this, those institutions that pursue these opportunities sooner may have greater scope to advocate for and help shape the LLE into something better.
What do universities risk by not pursuing opportunities?
There are clearly issues and challenges with the LLE, and I have outlined some of them here. There are also challenges that are, in my opinion, overstated. But I want to return to the idea of opportunity. If universities simply retrench and focus exclusively on optimising what they already do, they commit themselves to a path that either maintains the status quo or leads to contraction.
There has to be some bandwidth given to exploration and to pursuing opportunities that might not only lead to growth but, through their pursuit, enable wider improvements and change. The LLE is an opportunity space that should be considered.
The pursuit might be messy, and I do not think it will be possible for most institutions to have all their ducks in a row, or everything they need in advance. It is also not difficult to examine the LLE policy and its implementation and pick holes in it, but I do not think what we see now is what it will ultimately evolve into.
The most helpful way for institutions to view this is arguably as an impetus to move towards offering and developing shorter forms of provision and student audience development. In these challenging times, it presents an opportunity to pursue growth rather than simply optimising for a shrinking sector.
