Baroness Jacqui Smith - Minister for Lifelong Learning?

Reflections on our Annual Conference

By all accounts, our recent Annual Conference, Lifelong Learning 2025, was a roaring success, maybe because it seemed to capture the Post-16 zeitgeist so well. It was, for example, striking to hear loudly and clearly Skills Minister Jacqui Smith endorsed the concept of lifelong education as a key pillar of the Government’s agenda in her keynote speech, declaring “our ambition is to embed a culture of lifelong learning”.

Lifelong education is not just a passing fashion or “flavour of the month” trend. As Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott’s demonstrate in their excellent book, “The 100-Year Life” (Bloomsbury, 2016), with people now routinely living into their late eighties across the developed world we are moving away from what they describe as a “three-stage view of life…a first stage of education, followed by a career, and then retirement”, where there are only two transitions, from education to employment and from employment to retirement. Instead, we are beginning to mix work, leisure and learning in new ways, for example taking career breaks, making career changes, retiring early, or postponing retirement until well past our sixties. This means that there are now multiple transition points in people’s lives, and therefore multiple reasons for wanting or needing to reskill and upskill ourselves.

If we are to avoid a scenario where an ageing population means a smaller and smaller proportion of working taxpayers subsidising a larger and larger population of economically inactive citizens, we have no option but to rethink our education and welfare systems.

The economic case for lifelong learning – the need to update and enhance workplace skills to keep up with technological change and raise economic growth and productivity -  is the one we hear most often, but there is nothing new in this argument. The rise of worker’s education during the Industrial Revolution was based on a similar rationale, as was the proliferation of Continuing Education departments at universities and of night classes for adults at FE colleges in the 1950s and 1960s. Ironically as we know,  the decisions over the past thirty years to invest heavily in early years education, to effectively raise the school leaving age to 18, and to massively expand university education for the young, have led to a decline in all forms of state subsidised adult education as an increasing proportion of funding is sucked into education for those up to the age of 21.For very good reasons we have as a nation chosen to pour money into education for the first phase of our ninety year life, so now face the dilemma of how best to fund the remaining seventy years. What should be the right balance to strike in sharing the costs of continuing education between individuals, employers, and the state?

The conference was an opportunity to discuss the many issues this re-balancing of the system brings with it. With so little public spending headroom, it’s currently feeling like a zero sum game – what we give to one part of the system we have to take from another. Jacqui Smith reaffirmed the government’s commitment to the Lifelong Learning Entitlement, and its determination to move away from unproductive competition to an ethos of collaboration and partnership. But she also restated the intention to radically prune Level 7 apprenticeships (not, she emphasised, Level 6 provision), defended the recent cut to adult education funding as painful but necessary, and warned of difficult decisions ahead.

She also gave little comfort to any in the HE sector hoping for immediate relief from financial pressures, though she promised once again that proposals for addressing the long term financial sustainability of HEIs would soon be put on the table. This is going to be a “something for something” deal, with more effective progress in widening access to HE almost certain to be at the heart of it. Our forthcoming event with Alun Francis, Chair of the Social Mobility Commission, is going to provide further clues to what this might look like in practice, given the Commission’s recent criticism of current efforts as inconsistent and lacking transparency (“Innovation Generation: next steps for social mobility”, SMC, Dec 2024).

The Conference’s thought-provoking panel sessions and the lively apprenticeships debate that followed, reflected in numerous ways the dilemmas involved in deciding how best to invest in a progressive system that enables lifelong learning. We had the benefit of several historians of UK skills policy amongst us, reminding us on more than one occasion of the many unsuccessful initiatives launched and abandoned by governments over the years and the danger of failing to learn the lessons from history and reinventing wheels that didn’t work in the first place.

Over the next few weeks we’ll be returning to look in more depth at all of these issues and continue a dialogue with a government which appears very open to working in partnership with us. Lauren Edwards MP, Co-chair of the Skills, Careers and Employment APPG, echoed the message from Jacqui Smith: “building a system that is both nimble and robust requires continuous dialogue between policymakers, education providers and businesses.” As we move towards a summer of major education and skills policy announcements much uncertainty remains, but the Conference signalled the dawn of a new era of lifelong education, with promising signs that we have a government, and certainly a Minister, committed to ushering it in.