LLE Short Course Trial and Future Short Course Provision
By Professor Lisa Stansbie, Pro Vice Chancellor Education, Culture and Society, University of Worcester and Catriona Robinson, Head of The Institute of Education, University of Worcester
The recent announcement from the Education Secretary in November 2024 outlined the new government’s package to support the stability of the Higher Education sector and specifically included a proposal to transform “...the student finance system which will expand access to high-quality, flexible education and training for adults throughout their working lives.” The announcement also included a timeline of the academic year 2026/27 for the commencement of the LLE (Lifelong Learning Entitlement), with the statement suggesting the program will address the skills gaps needed for the government's growth agenda. We are expecting to see more detail in 2025 on how LLE 2027 will work in practice and there is a lot of work to be done, including the development of legislation alongside detail on how the qualification gateway will work with a new system of modular funding. In the November 2024 announcement it suggests the DfE will work at ‘pace’ liaising with Student Loans Company and Office for Students.
As Higher Education institutions grapple with evolving demands, which include the need to diversify their income and offer flexible learning opportunities to widen accessibility, understanding how short courses align with these needs is beneficial. This article uses insights gathered from the LLE short course trial to consider how ready higher education institutions might be for the proposed 2026/27 launch and if LLE really is the right approach to widen access and address regional skills gaps.
This article explores our university’s experience of the short course trial and considers the future of short courses, considering the obstacles institutions need to overcome in order to improve access to learning, and meet the needs of their region.
Learning from the Short Course Trial
The national short course trial was announced by OfS in August 2021 with a challenge competition and successful providers launching courses in September 2022. It aimed to target more than 2000 students with 100 short courses.
The University of Worcester was one of the 22 higher education institutions involved in the trial. Our experience revealed a reduced picture of student demand for the LLE short courses we offered, which reflected the national picture across providers. Nationally student enrolment numbers were much lower than anticipated, as evidenced in the application to enrolment numbers with 125 students enrolled with courses against an initial pool of 240 applications. In total, providers developed 96 courses of which 17 ran.
For the University of Worcester, a total of 16 courses were approved but only two of these courses attracted sufficient interest to launch successfully and each ran with 12 students each. These two courses were niche specialist education-related subjects, Autism and Complex Needs (Level 5) Endorsed by the Autism Education Trust and Therapeutic Approaches to Children Experiencing Adversity (Level 5). In feedback from students who studied on these courses, they stated that such specialised courses were valuable for their Continuing Professional Development (CPD) in their existing sector of education, as almost all students were already in employment as schoolteachers. This reflects the findings of the final LLE evaluation report where it noted that across the providers in the trial, 4 out of 5 students who finally took up a short course already had a degree and 80% were already in employment. It was clear from Worcester’s experience that bespoke courses aimed at gaps in professional development were the most attractive. The ‘bite-sized’ intensive, short structure of modules was indeed the attractive part, rather than an ability to collect or ‘stack’ modules. It could be said that this same demand could have easily been fulfilled by a CPD Short Course, rather than an LLE specific one.
Marketing and Timing
There are key factors that impacted on the difficult recruitment picture for LLE courses nationally during the trial and these have been widely publicised. The major issue that impacted enrolment numbers were the delays in providing critical information about fee loans. This point should not be underestimated in terms of its significance. The most difficult communications piece about LLE is the “loan”. The notion of adult learners (who are the target demographic for LLE) who are possibly entering Higher Education for the first time, being attracted to a system with the term “loan” in it, is a hard sell in marketing terms as cited by Patrick Thomas back in 2022. A consideration for the 2027 LLE could include clear explanation of the detail of this finance package and direct evidence of how particular courses can lead to possible future employment opportunities and align with local skills gaps and vacancies. The sector is good at telling the alumni stories of undergraduates and highlighting the value of a university education and the marketing of LLE needs to do the same.
Partnerships and Accreditation
Building strong partnerships with employers is essential for the success of short courses. At the University of Worcester existing collaborations with employer partners, particularly in multi-academy trusts and schools, were beneficial in the development stages of the courses. However, during the LLE pilot's tight timeframe this did impact on some partners' ability to engage fully, so for future provision involving existing partners early on would be a key priority. In a future LLE (and indeed most CPD) additional accreditation and endorsements are attractive to learners and employers. In our experience, our students fed back that partnering with the Autism Education Trust course is one of the many things that attracted them specifically to our courses.
The obvious gap with the LLE proposal as it was in the trial, is Level 7. Anecdotally and from student feedback there appears to be greater interest in Level 7 (postgraduate) courses, particularly among career changers and mature students. Offering advanced postgraduate short courses could attract a broader audience and better meet the needs of professional learners and employers.
Reconfiguring Course Design and Administration
Developing short courses that meet LLE requirements, requires a departure from traditional course design. The University of Worcester leveraged its existing 30-credit module system to create short courses, but as we know, module sizes can vary immensely across the sector. The existing module sizes at Worcester facilitated a quicker development and approval process, that other institutions may not have had as they grappled to develop 30 credit offerings.
The 30-credit minimum threshold for short courses posed challenges in our experience, particularly in communicating the value and structure of credits to prospective students. Many students were unfamiliar with the credit system and its implications and uses in higher education. If there is to be a future re-designed system that is aimed at “stacking” credits toward a full qualification, the sector needs to do work collaboratively on how we communicate externally what credits are and how they could build toward a qualification.
Higher Education institutions have a myriad of administration systems that each institution uses for different elements of the student life cycle and any academic that has moved between institutions will tell you that institutions don't necessarily use the same systems either. In our own experience retrofitting LLE students, their courses and finance into an existing system was difficult and largely relied on manual processes creating further administrative burden, which with higher volumes of students would not have been possible. If a future LLE is to succeed there needs to be a consideration of streamlining systems.
Quality Assurance
The trial highlighted the need to speed up internal quality assurance processes to accommodate the rapid development of short courses. Maintaining standards while accelerating approval timelines is a delicate balance that institutions grappled with during the trial. Rolling out LLE for January 2027 is also tight. Assuming that during 2025 we are expecting confirmation of the refreshed LLE systems, Higher Education Providers (HEPs) will have around 18 months to design, approve and market courses. However, if this is achieved at scale, it would signal welcome agility in the sector and if HEPs are to be responsive to local and regional demands that can fluctuate, then internal processes need to be flexible.
When we consider the LLE ‘basket’ approach to modules, designed so that learners can stack toward a larger qualification the timeframe for stacking to achieve full qualification may not be appropriate for addressing regional skills gaps. Stacking is a long-term commitment from the learner, so options to achieve bitesize qualifications alongside stacking might be more attractive to a wide range of learners and employment sectors.
In the recently 2024 updated government overview of LLE there is a bold statement around changing the student finance system to “...support mobility between institutions”. Do we know if the ‘target market’ is likely to want to study at different institutions? In terms of fulfilling regional skills gaps we can imagine in large metropolitan cities with more than one HEP who offer a distinctive different set of modules that this idea of portability could work, but in areas such as Worcester, with one University it is perhaps less likely that students would be attracted to ‘porting’ their qualifications to another region, unless their qualification is entirely online. There is also, of course, the mammoth undertaking of developing a framework of credit transfer across institutions and a general move toward the sector working more collaboratively together, which has been extremely difficult in the last few decades of the marketisation of Higher Education and competition.
Delivery Models
We did find that location wasn’t important in our trial, it was more reputation of our Institute of Education that led students to us. From the University of Worcester’s trial it was clear that flexibility was the main priority for learners and this isn’t surprising when we consider the demographic of adult learners who often have complex competing demands on their time and also, as we discovered in our trial, may already be in full time employment. Each of the Worcester courses started with an in-person conference followed by weekly evening online sessions. Here blended approaches worked successfully for our teachers who were already in full-time employment. It also resulted in a wide geographical reach, with learners from as far afield as Jersey. If LLE is seen as the future model to deliver regional skills gaps, this needs consideration as the uptake might not be necessarily from local regions as mentioned above.
Conclusion
With a new timeline for LLE announced, is it feasible to have a robust offer ready for January 2027? It is obvious that those providers involved in the trial, will be better placed to respond to the new timeframe, even if they had courses which did not run. In the current sector with administrative burden at an all-time high, priorities for institutions may be pointed in a different direction. It is likely there are many institutions who would not have the capacity to embrace the upcoming rollout of LLE, unless they had already been in the trial.
It was clear, nationally from the trial, that there is a lack of understanding and visibility of the short courses and perhaps a national campaign is needed to raise awareness. In our experience our ongoing engagement with partners has highlighted they (largely in the education/schools sector) have a demand for CPD versions of courses that do not require assessment or award of credit, offering more flexible, cost-effective option for professional development where employers can expand the skillset of their existing employees.
For universities to be anchor institutions in their region, they need better connections to employers, all levels of education providers and their regional community residents. Short courses can be gateways into higher education, but they need to answer the regions needs and that may mean doing things differently, changing systems and importantly collaborating. The LLE aligns with Labours mission to break down barriers to opportunity via access to education. However, access to opportunities clearly needs to be broader and more flexible than just LLE. The government announcement in September 2024 around the Growth and Skills Levy, certainly looks like a more flexible approach to the apprenticeship levy, targeting those already in employment. For those not employed we need to review what barriers are in place for them to access higher education and this is not an easy issue, particularly around the perception of Universities and their purpose. However, a good start may be rethinking finance systems, communications and clarity on the benefits of courses and flexible study options (Just a few small changes then!).
