The lifelong learning entitlement (LLE) promises to reshape how people study and train throughout their lives, while creating both opportunities and challenges for the institutions that support them.
But universities face growing budgetary pressures and colleges are increasingly stretched. The UK has not built a system truly connecting these proud but separate sectors, although the wish of greater collaboration has been articulated by successive policymakers.
With key questions over the LLE still unresolved, the case for regional collaboration between HE and FE has never been clearer. Amid constrained resources and rising expectations, such collaboration is essential to build resilience, clarity, and collective strength across post-16 education.
Colleges in Greater Manchester and Lancashire have already shown what can be achieved when provision is coordinated, and across England FE has often led the way in developing strong local groups.
Initiatives such as the Institutes of Technology are an attempt of bringing FE and HE providers closer together on specific skills shortages in a regional context – often aligned to local skills improvement plans (LSIPs). However, as the Lifelong Education Institute’s Mapping the Course report highlights, this maturity has been largely confined to FE.
Universities have too often been peripheral to regional skills structures, pulled by national funding models and international priorities. The challenge now is to bring HE into the centre of regional planning. By aligning universities with colleges, training providers, employers and civic leaders, we can move from isolated initiatives to skills systems coherent for learners and sustainable for providers.
The North East illustrates the need. The region has lived through successive waves of reform – training and enterprise councils, regional development agencies, local enterprise partnerships and LSIPs. Each produced some successes, but too many were swept away before they could mature. Our report calls this “hyper-active incrementalism”: constant change that fragments rather than unifies. Long-term collaboration could break that cycle.
One benefit is resilience. With finances under strain across the post-16 system, duplication is hard to justify. By pooling facilities and expertise, institutions can deliver more while spending less. The Northern Accelerator, a collaboration of North East universities, has more than tripled annual spinouts, showing what can be achieved by sharing investment and expertise. The same approach can support teaching and training.
A second benefit is clarity. For the LLE to succeed, learners must be able to build credits with confidence that their achievements will be recognised. There are debates about how far learners will move between providers, and concerns about student finance, but the principle of stackable, portable credit is essential. A national framework, ideally UK-wide, must underpin this, with regional consortia adding practical tools such as skills passports and badging to give assurance to learners and employers.
The third benefit is influence. Employers already have regional chambers of commerce and employer representative bodies to speak collectively, and employees have regional branches of employee representative bodies. Education would gain from their own collective voice, ‘a chamber of learning’ – a regional forum where schools, colleges and universities can speak with one regional voice in order to shape skills strategy with Skills England and combined authorities.
These ideas are already in practice and visible across the North East. Newcastle University together with regional education providers, including Newcastle College Group and Education Partnership North East, are reskilling oil and gas sector engineers for roles in offshore wind and battery technology. Newcastle University is also the HE partner in the North East Institute of Technology (NEIoT), working with colleges and employers such as Nissan and Esh Group. The Institute of Electrification and Sustainable Advanced Manufacturing utilised these partners in creating clear pathways from T Levels to degree apprenticeships. With New College Durham, we are developing the National Battery Training and Skills Academy, preparing a workforce for one of the region’s fastest-growing sectors. Through an agreement with Northumbria University and local colleges, we are aligning skills and health initiatives at city level. And through Universities for North East England, the five universities are working together to strengthen their civic role and connect research, innovation as well as education and skills programmes to regional priorities.
These partnerships show that collaboration does not have to be confined to just signing agreements between providers. Employers can – and have to – be active partners, co-designing curricula, creating demand and co-investing in talent. Policymakers, too, play a role in setting conditions that allow education and business to plan together for the long term.
The establishment of regional education partnerships can help formalise this approach to collaboration within existing governance arrangements and advise, guide and inform skills development.
The LLE will be complex, and implementation not straightforward. Demand is uncertain, the Student Loans Company will need to adapt, and the government must intensify engagement with providers. Collaboration cannot remove these challenges. However, it can make the system easier to navigate, more coherent for employers and more efficient in its use of resources.
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