A written ministerial statement from Josh MacAlister draws our attention to the newly-published draft Lifelong Learning (Fee Limits) Regulations 2026.
Alongside the draft of the statutory instrument (complete with two schedules), we also benefit from an explanatory memorandum, impact assessment, and equality analysis. This is affirmative secondary legislation, there will be a vote in both houses.
This release represents the first of three draft statutory instruments in a planned package – the other two being the forthcoming Lifelong Learning (Student Support) (Amendment of Fees and Awards etc) Regulations, and the Education (Student Loans) (Repayment) (Amendments for Lifelong Learning) Regulations. We get drafts of those, plus draft explanatory memoranda. Both are negative statutory instruments (no vote in parliament, but will not be introduced until the fee limit regulations have been passed.
For what it is worth, we also get official Department for Education guidance on standardised transcripts for Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE) modules.
Previously in LLE policy development
The Lifelong Learning Entitlement (once the Lifelong Loan Entitlement) is a Johnson-era attempt to allow learners to access higher education courses shorter than the traditional one-year granularity by opening up tuition fee loan eligibility to these shorter periods of study. You can trace it right back to Philip Augar’s proposals for a “lifelong learning loan allowance.”
The rationale then was that people may need to access higher education (level 4-6) learning opportunities and qualifications at many points throughout their working lives, but that the traditional system funding for three-year honours degrees was constraining market innovation in this area. Something the plans have never dealt with is the availability of existing short courses leading to credits or qualifications at this level (from universities, colleges, and others), and the high demand for very practical high-level courses that do not bear credit.
The plans are also stymied by two questionable design choices. While the idea of stackable, transferable, credit is a good one – restricting the LLE to courses that already explicitly ties in to an existing longer qualification is potentially unhelpful in the design of learning opportunities aimed at mature returning students looking to update their skills. And the availability of student loan style finance is not universally attractive: some fear that the availability of a government loan dissuades employers from paying for training at this level, others note that “loans” of whatever sort are less attractive to mature learners with other financial responsibilities.
Initially slated to start in 2025, the Lifelong Learning Entitlement will open to applications from September 2026, for courses starting in 2027. To start with, the offer is not large: restricted to courses in subject areas where the government has a strategic interest, and predicated on providers taking supply side risks to meet a very uncertain demand (two pilots of the scheme have not been popular with learners).
Plumbing
Developing the LLE required a new piece of primary legislation – the Lifelong Learning (Higher Education Fee Limit) Act 2023, which has only just been commenced. This allows for ministers to set fees on a per-credit basis (rather than per year), and provides for exceptions where it didn’t make sense to split courses into credit bearing chunks (thinks like medicine and nursing) or where course structures are just a bit weird (architecture, engineering with intercalated masters).
Parallel to this, there has been policy decision making around eligibility for maintenance loans (yes, pro-rata, unless you are studying online) and on eligibility for funding for existing graduates (broadly four years minus the amount of state-supported undergraduate higher education you have done). The more recent crop of secondary legislation operationalises much of these previous decisions, and roles over appropriate pieces of existing legislations (eligibility for fee and maintenance loans) to the new system.
While the Department for Education has been willing and even, sporadically, able to design a funding system it has been less engaged on the non-funding end of things. It still hasn’t come up with a meaningful outcomes-based quality assurance mechanism, so has – in effect – repurposed TEF (the summary of some random student outcome data, survey responses, and a word document your Dean of Students wrote over a long weekend a few years back) to act as an institutional level marker of confidence in quality assurance processes of the sort we used to have before the days of the Office for Students.
But there is one glaring omission to these implementation plans – very little has been done to support the aim of transferable credit. Allowing students to build up an undergraduate degree gradually via study at multiple providers is an exercise in administration rather than a funding system consideration. Instead of a fully worked out system of credit transfer we get the vaguest “will this do” set of transcript requirements.
DK rants about student identifiers (again)
You would expect any kind of training to include a certificate that includes the name and date of birth of the learner, contact details for the provider, the title of the course and what it was designed to connect to, and the data of completion. And that, in a nutshell, is the transcript requirement. Providers may optionally include descriptions of learning outcomes, and may optionally link a learner to their Universal Learner Number (ULN) but if they don’t fancy it, that’s fine.
The latter is a massive missed opportunity. If a part of the thinking of the LLE is to allow learners to make informed choices about their future educational and training needs this requires them to have an understanding of what education, training, and experience they have already. The ULN was designed to centralise these records and support learners in planning their next steps, but despite existing and being pervasively used around the non-HE parts of the tertiary system (aged 16 and up) there has never been any attempt to mandate its use in higher education: where other identifiers (UCAS numbers, various numbers from SLC, provider-specific identifiers, and a number that HESA had to invent because there wasn’t a suitable identifier).
The LLE instead attempts to achieve an overview of a student’s learning journey through the Student Loans Company customer number, which simply links to records of what portion of someone’s entitlement has been spent and what remains. There’s no attempt to capture what has been studied, or how it meshes with experiences, career goals, or non-LLE funded qualifications. The parallel transcript approach simply replicates elements the existing degree transcript model (this is how UCL does it for example) while removing enough information to make the system incompatible with Bologna requirements (which themselves were designed to facilitate an international system of academic credit transfer that is now established and usable pretty much everywhere in Europe other than the UK).
Secondary considerations
Right, let’s read some draft statutory instruments.
The Lifelong Learning (Fee Limits) Regulations 2026
(draft legislation, explanatory memorandum, impact assessment, equalities assessment)
Remember how the Lifelong Learning (Higher Education Fee Limits) Act 2023 allows ministers to set fees on a by-credit rather than by-year basis? This is where those fees are set (and where existing rules on student eligibility are ported over).
To be clear, there are no surprises – the already published 2026-27 fee caps (£9,790 is the higher level amount) apply, and a credit (for the purpose of calculating fees for shorter courses) will be one one-hundred and twentieth of that amount, because a standard full time academic year on an undergraduate degree has 120 credits.
Fun with fractions
Annoyingly, the regulations stop short of actually defining the cost of an individual credit: if you already have your calculator out you will know that it is £81.583 recurring.
Or is it? The explanatory memorandum has it as £81.58, so by that reckoning 120 credits comes to £9,789.60 – the missing 40p is unaccounted for. As note 21 to the draft instrument points out:
This approach is necessary because calculating the fee limit using decimal places before a per-credit limit is applied (using the steps provided for in paragraph 1D or 1E of Schedule 2 to the 2017 Act) would lead to a different outcome due to the decimal place needing to be rounded too soon.
The legislation developed to allow ministers to specify a per credit price is not being used to specify a per credit price. Technically.
Quality differential
That’s not to say the regulations are short on prices. For each of two study years there are higher and basic amounts for normal (or higher rate foundation year) study, other foundation year study, sandwich placement years, and study abroad years. We also get “floor amounts” for both higher and basic rates – which are the fees chargeable where a provider does not currently have a high level quality rating in TEF (technically a “section 25” scheme), and which have historically applied to providers that have no TEF at all.
You’ll doubtless recall that ministers have been recently making noise about linking fee levels to TEF awards on a more granular basis – the impact of this draft instrument means for next two academic years at least the fee difference is at most about £265 per student.
Credit where it is due
Away from the money for a moment, arguably the most interesting point in these regulations is section 9(2)(b) which puts into English law for the first time the idea that a single academic credit is equivalent to ten notional learning hours. As the memorandum spells out “This aligns with existing sector practice and helps ensure the size of a credit is consistent across the sector.” It should have been in primary legislation – any future government could amend this statement without debate in parliament or consultation.
Section 9(3) deals with the courses that do not disaggregate into credits – midwifery, nursing, dentistry, medicine, veterinary science, teacher training. We also get a list of standard maximum credits per year for common types of provision. If you think back to the 2023 Act there was an option to fund whole years of provision rather than bother with credits – and on the face of it these regulations seem to demand that all but the exceptions above are funded by credit.
That’s not what the memorandum says:
However, full courses will not be required to have credits attached. For any full course without credits attached for which the provider charges a learner, the course year is assigned a default number of credits
Quite how this will be managed is unclear.
Foot off the accelerator
In practical terms the only change from current funding is that the cost of accelerated degrees have lost their subsidy – it costs £11,750 per year to study on an accelerated course currently, while under the new system the cost will be £14,685. Accelerated degrees – where students study an honours degree in two years by working through the summer – were pushed heavily by Jo Johnson but never really became popular with providers or students (there are just 228 on offer for 2026-27, mostly at specialist providers and the University of Buckingham, and the impact assessment notes that only around 3,800 students take up accelerated degrees.
Deep impact
The impact assessment suggests that, as of October 2025, 141 higher education providers had an interest in delivering LLE short course provision – as of this month we know that 130 have successfully applied for permission to do so. What I was really looking for, and have been looking for since the idea of the LLE was first postulated, is evidence of learner demand – it is noted that:
It is not possible to monetise the impact of increased modular and short course demand as a direct result of the fee limits regulation, due to the lack of attributable causality between the regulation in isolation and demand for modular and short courses
But DfE reckons that the LLE will create £1bn in social benefit. The equalities impact goes big on loan availability and a capped cost as a way of making lifelong learning available to those who would not otherwise be able to afford it. It cites the Adult Participation in Learning Survey from last year to note that non-learners report a variety of barriers preventing their participation, which extend far beyond the availability of funding that LLE offers.
The Education (Student Loans) (Repayment) (Amendments for Lifelong Learning) Regulations 2026
(draft legislation, explanatory memorandum)
As students begin to borrow tuition fee and maintenance loans via the LLE there will be some small technical changes to Plan 5 repayment rules. The big difference is the timing of the statutory repayment due date (SRDD) – currently part time students are able to begin loan repayments on the earlier of 6 April after completion/termination or 6 April following the fourth anniversary of the course start date. This means that part-time students on low intensity study patterns may begin repayment before they have completed their course (provided they earn more than the repayment threshold).
The LLE does not treat part-time students any differently than their full-time peers. A credit is a credit, and everyone is eligible to start repayments on 6 April following completion/termination. It is not a change that affects many learners, but it makes the whole system a little bit more sensible.
The Lifelong Learning (Student Support) (Amendment of Fees and Awards etc.) Regulations 2026
(draft legislation, explanatory memorandum)
This is the instrument that deals with eligibility for student fee loans and maintenance loans. There are no changes for students on traditional undergraduate courses. For students studying in other patterns (a single module, or lower intensity than full-time) the first test is whether they are on a designated course – which will now include courses specifically recognised as LLE provision, allowing for the transfer of advanced learner loan (ALL) provision to the LLE funding regime, and those on the “module approved subject and provider list” which sets out the subject areas and providers eligible to offer modular provision via LLE.
Student eligibility (in terms of immigration status and so forth) lasts for a “course year” – 12 months after the first day of the month in which a course begins. This is a change from the current position, which refers to the academic year: and is a long overdue recognition that not every course starts in the autumn.
These regulations also cover the monetary lifetime fee loan limit for each student – the equivalent of 480 credits or four full time years of undergraduate study – and define the “residual entitlement” available to existing graduates. This allowance must be drawn down before the student’s 60th birthday, can only be drawn down in chunks of 30 credits or larger, and use cannot exceed 180 credits in a year (1 August to 31 July). Above and beyond this limit, there are additional entitlements allowing students to complete longer courses they may be studying, resit modules under certain circumstances, and to study certain defined courses of particular interest to the government.
Living costs are provided for via a single loan, targeted at in-attendence study (there are some exceptions for disabled students, but no exceptions for weekend learning or distance learning) and at meaningful volumes of learning (at least 30 credits in a given year). This is allocated pro-rata based on credits and intensity, with measures to deal with edge cases like overlapping courses.
And one final point of note: any course starting before 1 January 2027 is on the legacy (current) funding rules for Plan 5, any course starting after that is on the new (LLE) rules. Even if someone starting in autumn 2026 needs to repeat a year, they stay on the old funding system.
Now what?
If you were wondering about the absence of HE-specific legislation in the King’s Speech, this may quench your appetite. The main instrument, as an affirmative resolution, needs to be debated in both houses of parliament: and it will not be forgotten that the skeletal nature of the Lifelong Learning (Higher Education Fee Limit) Act means that it is the first and only time that most LLE arrangements will face parliamentary scrutiny.
This is not, to be clear, a good way to make laws or design higher education funding systems. These rules could have been improved by the primary legislation scrutiny process – but parliament has not had this chance.
As an affirmative resolution the action – such as it is – will take place, hopefully, in a pre-legislative technical scrutiny by the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments. In the Commons the main debate will likely be held in a Delegated Legislation Committee and will be followed by a formal vote of approval on the floor of the house without debate. In the Lords scrutiny by the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee is followed by a short debate in the chamber (sometimes while sitting as a Grand Committee).
The last time the House of Commons failed to pass an affirmative instrument was in 1978 (the Dock Labour Scheme, for when this comes up in a pub quiz.) In the House of Lords, peers still speak of the time they delayed tax credit changes in 2015.
