My Lords, I now turn to Amendment 3, tabled by the noble Baronesses, Lady Twycross, Lady Thornton and Lady Wilcox of Newport, and the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett. This amendment would require the Secretary of State to publish an annual review of the operation of the provisions of this Act and specifies several areas that the review must cover, including learner uptake, access to higher education and financial sustainability in tertiary education more broadly.
As mentioned in relation to Amendments 2 and 4, the Government published an impact assessment upon the introduction of this Bill in February and an extensive impact assessment of the lifelong loan entitlement more broadly in March. The Government intend to publish an updated impact assessment covering all aspects of the LLE, including the measures in this Bill, when regulations are laid.
There will be continued scrutiny of the Bill and the LLE via existing parliamentary accountability mechanisms, for example post-legislative scrutiny and the Education Select Committee. In addition, there are already systems by which the areas mentioned in this amendment are monitored. I will take each area in turn to provide reassurances as to the existing work being undertaken in these areas and the mechanisms in place for review.
In relation to the point from the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, about three to five years, I was speaking specifically about post-legislative scrutiny. It is in the Cabinet Office guidance from 2008—a period that I imagine the noble Baroness might support. Obviously, as I have just listed, there are a number of other mechanisms for scrutiny.
The amendment lists a number of areas relating to uptake. I want to take this opportunity to refer noble Lords to the publications produced by the Higher Education Statistics Agency, which will continue to
include data on learner uptake and enrolments. For example, the Higher Education Statistics Agency website allows anyone to view information about higher education student enrolments broken down by year, level of study, higher education provider, subject, mode of study and more. High-level national results are also published in its annual statistical bulletin.
Regarding uptake of modular and part-time study, the Government expect to see a shift in how, what and when people study as the LLE provides support for alternatives to full-time study. For example, Universities UK polling in 2020 on modular study indicated that 82% of prospective students polled who were either unemployed, at risk of unemployment or looking to learn a new skill would be keen to study individual modules of a university degree.
Turning to access, tackling inequality in higher education is a central part of the Office for Students’ mission. The OfS shares information through its access and participation data dashboard, which allows it and the public, alongside registered universities and colleges, to identify gaps between groups. The OfS also maintains an equality of opportunity risk register, which identifies key sector-level risks to equality of opportunity in higher education and highlights the student groups that are most affected by each one.
The Government recognise the importance of supporting access, which is why maintenance loans will be available for all eligible courses and modules that require in-person attendance under the LLE, as will targeted support grants such as the disabled students’ allowance and the childcare grant. The impact assessment published alongside this Bill notes that learners who will particularly benefit from the introduction of fee limits for short courses and modules are more likely to be older, female, from ethnic minority backgrounds or from lower socioeconomic groups.
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The noble Baroness, Lady Twycross, was critical of the Government’s recent announcements on higher education reform and focused purely on salary. Let me just remind the House that the issues we are looking at include the continuation of students from one year to the next and the completion of courses as well as graduate-level salaries. The focus is very much on courses, but the question that we all need to ask is this: why does the same qualification at different institutions result in very different continuation and completion levels as well as very different salary levels? I know that the noble Baroness agrees with me here, but it is exactly those disadvantaged students who need to know which institutions are the ones where courses do not lead to the kind of outcomes that we would all hope for them.
Regarding employer spending on lifelong learning, employers are at the heart of the Government’s reforms that seek to improve the prestige, profile and uptake of high-quality technical education at levels 4 and 5. The lifelong loan entitlement will not substantively change the balance between workplace training and loan-funded study. It will sit alongside the opportunities afforded through apprenticeships and employer skills funding, meaning that people will have a wider choice in how and when they study to acquire new skills. The department
will continue to engage closely with stakeholders, including employers, as part of the development and delivery of its reforms.
Regarding the financial sustainability of the tertiary education sector, which was also raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, this Bill’s impact assessment notes that providers may see increased tuition fee revenue if the LLE encourages more people to engage with lifelong education. As is currently the case, providers will be free to assess the potential profitability of any course however they see fit and will offer only those that they see as beneficial to their institution. The Higher Education Statistics Agency collects and publishes finance data from English HE providers as part of its annual financial return. The data includes the income and expenditure of higher education providers, key financial indicators and change over time.
With regard to skills gaps, the Government made clear in their response to the LLE consultation that they will take a phased approach to modular funding, focusing on higher technical courses that have the clearest employer value or where they address skills gaps to support learners into jobs that employers need. It is important to note that fee limits are not in themselves a means to address skills gaps; they are there to ensure that students have affordable access to HE provision provided by those higher education providers that receive government funding to support course delivery.
I turn now to timings. The proposal to review with no end date, as this amendment seeks to do, would be an undue and disproportionate burden. In addition, introducing ongoing reviews into primary legislation before policies have been fully implemented or had sufficient time to bed in would be of limited, if any, value.
I reiterate that it is unlikely that the fee limit provisions in this Bill will, in themselves, have substantial impacts on, for example, employer spending on lifelong learning or skills gaps in the UK. These and other impacts must be considered in the context of the LLE as a whole and not through the narrow lens of a single policy issue.
I want to return to the points raised by the noble Lord, Lord Watson of Invergowrie. I will write to him about the T-level point but I want to quote from the conclusion of the Permanent Secretary’s report. She writes:
“As accounting officer for the Department for Education, I have considered this assessment against the 4 accounting officer standards, and I am satisfied that the LLE programme meets the standards of managing public money and accords with the generally understood principles of public life, represents good value for money for the Exchequer as a whole, and is feasible to deliver (with significant delivery challenges to meet the 2025 launch)”.
I think that she is still saying that it is feasible. However, it is a major programme, and any major programme would have significant challenges in that regard.
For these reasons, although the department understands the sentiment behind this amendment, it would be unnecessary and burdensome as there will be mechanisms in place to provide such a review. Therefore, the Government cannot accept it.