Will the Lifelong Learning Entitlement ever become a reality?

Nuclear fusion offers the tantalising prospect of being a potentially limitless source of clean and self-sustaining energy, but, as the old joke goes, nuclear fusion is always 30 years away, and has been for decades.

I’m starting to get the same feeling about the Lifelong Learning Entitlement, or LLE, which was first floated back in 2019 as a new way of funding Further and Higher Education courses in England.

But the LLE took years to develop and it wasn’t until 2022 that the Conservative government launched a consultation on how the LLE should operate, and even then its planned introduction was not until September 2025.

In April this year the LLE was delayed until January 2026, and now in the Labour Government’s Budget on October 30th it was confirmed that the LLE’s first funded courses won’t start until January 2027 at the earliest.

So what do we know about the LLE and what it is trying to achieve? Could it be a big deal for students, colleges and universities, or is it just likely to be a distraction? And is there is a risk that the LLE goes down the same road as nuclear fusion by always being a few years away but never quite being made a reality?

My guests are Dr Kate Wicklow, Director of Policy & Strategy at GuildHE, a membership body in the Higher Education sector, and George Ryan, an Associate Director at the consultancy Public First.

CLICK HERE TO BROWSE OUR PODCAST BACK CATALOGUE

FOLLOW US ON TWITTER / X