Higher Education
Bill
“Reforms to education will help every child fulfil their
potential wherever they live, raising standards and improving the
quality of schools and higher education.”
The purpose of the Bill is to:
● Ensure that our post-18 education system promotes real social
mobility, helping students onto pathways in which they can excel,
and is financially sustainable. This will help support people get
the skills they need to meet their career aspirations and to help
grow the economy.
The main benefits of the Bill would be:
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● Ensuring people are supported to get the skills they
need throughout their life. The Bill will enable the
introduction of the Lifelong Loan Entitlement, a new and
flexible way of providing loan support for post-18 study.
This will provide individuals with a loan entitlement
equivalent to four years of post-18 education (£37,000 in
today’s fees) that they can use over their lifetime for a
wider range of studies, including shorter and technical
courses.
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● Fulfilling the manifesto commitment to tackle
uncontrolled growth of low-quality courses.
The main elements of the Bill are:
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● Ensuring that appropriate fee limits can be applied
more flexibly to higher education study within the Lifelong
Loan Entitlement and that they can be effectively regulated.
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● Subject to the conclusion of the higher education
reform consultation:
o setting minimum qualification requirements for a person living
in England to be eligible to get student finance support to enter
higher education, helping to ensure students can pursue the best
post-18 education and training options for them by taking
pathways through which they can excel; and
o fulfilling the manifesto commitment to tackle uncontrolled
growth of low- quality courses by taking specific powers to
control numbers of students entering higher education at specific
providers in England.
Territorial extent and application
● The Bill will extend and apply in the main to England and
Wales, with some provisions extending across the UK.
Key facts
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● We have four universities in the global top ten. Our
powerhouses of research have led the world in vaccine
discovery and produced a Nobel prize winner each year for the
last two decades on average. Two thirds of British start-ups
valued at $1 billion or over were founded by graduates of
British universities. Last year, 18 year olds from
disadvantaged backgrounds were 82 per cent more likely to go
to university than in 2010.
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● The current student finance system does not
incentivise or offer a clear route for an adult to undertake
higher learning flexibly over their lifetime. A 2018 survey
found around 24 per cent of the population had considered
part-time higher education in the last ten years but had not
enrolled. The main reasons for this were financial concerns
(tuition fee costs were cited by 44 per cent of respondents).
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● Our skills system has been very efficient at
producing graduates but there is still a need to ensure
people get the quality technical skills that employers want.
Data shows that only four per cent of young people achieve a
qualification at higher technical level by the age of 25
compared to the 33 per cent who get a degree or above.
Moreover, only 66 per cent of working-age graduates (not
including postgraduates) were in high-skilled employment in
2020.
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● Data from the Office for Students shows that students
who enter higher education with lower prior attainment are
more likely to drop out. For example, students entering with
A level grades of DDD have a drop-out rate of 6.7 per cent
compared with a drop out rate of 4.7 for students entering
with A level grades of CCC.
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● There are some higher education courses where
outcomes are unacceptably low, leading to bad outcomes for
students and taxpayers. In 2021 the Office for Students found
that at 25 higher education providers fewer than half of the
students who began a degree could expect to finish it and
move on to professional employment or further study.
