Despite many questions surrounding tertiary education being up in the air recently, there is one area of policy development which appears to have been etched in stone since the moment it was announced.
The Lifelong Loan Entitlement (LLE) has the potential to revolutionise lifelong learning by allowing learners to take out tuition loans for shorter stand-alone qualifications – including Higher National Certificates (HNCs) or Higher Technical Qualifications (HTQs).
If the qualification is part of an educational pathway, this would enable a learner to study a Level 4 course in the full knowledge that they have the option to return to higher education to up-skill or re-skill with a Level 5 or 6 qualification later on.
It would also create a radically more flexible approach to skills development, whereby learners could collect a basket of qualifications relevant to their needs rather than working on a linear progression to degree level study.
A learner might, for example, undertake a second Level 4 course later in their career rather than automatically progressing…
