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Require the Office for Students to increase access across all ages

Last updated 3 years ago

...and require the Office for Students to look at universities’ success in increasing access across all ages, not just young people entering full-time undergraduate degrees.

Conservative Party Manifesto 2019, p.37

Our verdict

  • This is a promise to require the higher education regulator, the Office for Students (OfS), to investigate the success of universities at attracting and enrolling students of all ages.  
  • The government’s guidance to the OfS in February 2021 asked it to help with developing the Lifelong Loan Entitlement to “support radically different, flexible arrangements” and emphasised that this would require “action from providers”.
  • The Lifelong Loan Entitlement, supported by the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill, is likely to lead to more mature students taking up university places, and because the government issued guidance to the OfS, this policy is ‘in progress’.

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