A week after the Labour Government’s first budget, it is clear that its first 100 days have left universities, further education colleges, and apprenticeship providers in England in a state of uncomfortable anticipation. So far, there has been fairly haphazard discussion of higher education fee increases, a rejigging of the apprenticeship levy to create a new growth and skills levy, and a lot of hopes, dreams, and competing agendas piled into the still relatively empty shell of the new body, Skills England. However, what has been noticeably absent is a clear and strategic vision for post-18 education and training.
The challenges are mounting. The financial pressures universities face have received a great deal of attention, and some universities are dangerously close to bankruptcy or are facing mergers and mass redundancies. When using the same indicators of financial health, many further education colleges are in an even more precarious financial state. This is exacerbated by the fact that the further education sector has been subject to near-constant policy churn and faces ongoing difficulties with staff recruitment and retention. At the same time, employer engagement in the process of skills formation is patchy and confused at best and employer investment in education and training has reached a record low. However, employers struggle with skills shortages and gaps and frequently argue that education and training fail to meet their skills demands.
All of this means that post-18 education and training is failing to live up to its potential for learners, society, and the economy. As emphasised by Bridget Phillipson in the foreword to the first report from the nascent Skills England: ‘We face a long list of challenges. We have a fragmented and confusing skills landscape that lets down learners, frustrates businesses, and holds back growth. However, while it is easy to list challenges, what we have not yet had is a real diagnosis of the root problems or a strategic narrative for improvement.
Therefore, in this initial contribution to the debate, we argue that many of the key challenges facing post-18 education and training in England are rooted in a shared key issue – sector-level governance lacking a joined-up approach to coordination of higher education, further education and research and innovation. We, therefore, argue for a holistic tertiary approach to post-18 education and training that: breaks down the policy silos around these sectors; places principles of sector and institutional-level collaboration at its core; operates through a creative tension between greater levels of central coordination, regional mechanisms of governance, and high levels of institutional autonomy and trust in professionals; and balances employer, economic and social needs, including social cohesion, alongside educational quality and learner experiences.
This is a big ask! It is an overarching vision. But, of course, the government must operate within the political and fiscal reality of the current context. Therefore, here we aim to show how a tertiary approach aligns with core current political priorities, establish the principles that sit behind a holistic tertiary strategy, and outline a small number of clear and relatively immediate next steps that could be taken to move towards a more efficient tertiary system and governance approach. This provides both an overarching strategic narrative and a pragmatic agenda that can feed into the comprehensive spending review in April 2025 and guide policy and spending for the next three years.
Priorities, Pressures and Definitions
Five missions are driving the Government’s budget and Comprehensive Spending Review preparations: increasing economic growth, improving the national health service, investing in the UK as a green energy superpower, making the country’s streets safer and providing educational opportunities for all.
These missions are crystallising into five priorities for post-18 education and training
- increasing access to education
- boosting economic growth and productivity
- encouraging greater civic engagement and enriching local skills
- improving institutional efficiency and
- enhancing students’ experiences.
The priorities are situated between contradictory pressures: demands for growth at a time of regional disparities, a skills crisis in an intensifying climate and nature emergency, the challenges of an ageing population, the potential and threats of artificial intelligence, and the urgent need for long term investment in a period of tight budgetary constraints. All of this takes place in a context where ministers are likely to see greater opportunity returns on investment in early years education and the Treasury is unlikely to associate all forms of higher education with improving productivity and economic growth.
Given this challenging environment, how can a tertiary approach better help to address these challenges and deliver on these five priorities? Firstly, we define a ‘tertiary education system’ not as an umbrella descriptor for all forms of post-compulsory education but as a political approach that deliberately and strategically brings together multiple existing sectors – further education, higher education, apprenticeships, adult education and even research and innovation – ensuring there is holistic and joined-up policy-making. Tertiary Education here emphasises a transition to a cross-sector system that combines principles of coordination, collaboration, and coherence across the post-compulsory education, training, research and innovation spaces. In England, this represents a shift from a previous focus on markets, competition and regulation as the core organising forces to a more managed approach rooted in systems, collaboration, and coordination.
With this as a starting point, we set out below how government priorities can be achieved through this kind of tertiary model by adopting four key principles.
Principles and practical next steps
Enhancing coordination within a tertiary education system
As the first report from Skills England demonstrates, the government aims to develop an approach to skills and economic growth that joins up the different streams of a nascent tertiary education system (that is, further and higher education, apprenticeships and adult learning). This is intended to better align the overall supply and demand for knowledge and skills and create more coherent pathways for learners through different levels and forms of tertiary education.
The traditional boundaries between adult learning, apprenticeship, further education and higher education have broken down over the last thirty years as individual institutions increasingly offer different forms of education under different forms of funding, reporting requirements and quality assurance expectations. Boundaries continue to blur, creating a confusing tapestry of programmes, qualifications, and educational formats for learners and employers alike. Meanwhile, hierarchies, inequalities and competitions are still prevalent across educational pathways and providers – such as between Pre and Post-92 universities, TVET (technical and vocational education and training) institutions, and further education colleges.
In this context, the development of a tertiary education system is partly simply a reflection of what is happening currently and a process of systematising existing practices. The concept of tertiary education can assist in cementing a systems approach that dials down the role of provider competition in a marketplace and dials up mutual cooperation and support as agreements are reached within linked organisations and federations of merged institutions about who does what for whom and when. It can also help to support consideration of the kind of education that is being offered across different providers and the role that these forms of education are expected to play in learner’s lives.
This, though, requires an overarching strategy to support a systems-based approach with collaboration and cooperation at its heart through a more hands-on model of coordination while also ensuring bottom-up models that drive institutional agency in the process of developing sector-wide synergies. In practical terms, this will likely require Skills England to demonstrate how it will influence universities as well as further education colleges and private training providers. This demands alignment with the regulations and funding conducted by the Office for Students (OfS) and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), collaboratively designed incentive structures, and increased funds allocated by regional mayors.
Practical action: We recommend that the legislation establishing Skills England should empower it to create an overarching strategy for tertiary education and establish the accountabilities with other agencies necessary to deliver this. This puts a joined-up approach at the centre of new post-18 thinking and will enable appropriate policy and governance structures to develop an approach rooted in greater levels of cross-sector tertiary coordination.
Overarching national standards, quality assurance and regulation
To maintain and enhance confidence among learners, employers and investors, tertiary education needs to be delivered within a framework of standards for understanding the knowledge and skills requirements of different jobs and career paths and how such knowledge and skills will benefit individuals in their wider lives. There also needs to be a shared understanding of the pathways between different types of qualifications. There are well-developed international standards used by states and regions in other parts of the world to structure their education and skills systems. England can learn from, adapt, and cohere with these arrangements as appropriate. That means occupational standards, qualification frameworks, credit structures, micro-credential arrangements and e-badging methods that align with the growing number of data management systems used by educational organisations and companies to reward, monitor and support learners at different stages of their lives and careers while ensuring that all such credits are educationally meaningful.
There is considerable learning from the preparations made for the Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE) that could inform this. However, this cannot be delivered through finance alone to learners. Greater incentives are needed to encourage more learners, educational institutions, and companies systematically to align with this way of working.
Practical action: We recommend that the planned reform of regulations governing the Apprenticeships Levy with a Growth and Skills Levy should be accompanied by a review of its coherence with other regulatory frameworks influencing tertiary education. This will ensure common definitions, shared goals and purposes, and common measurement of characteristics, progress and outcomes, and thereby joined-up incentives for learners, employers and educational institutions.
Regional coordination and integration of skills, research and innovation
The UK has one of the most centralised systems of government and finance among middle-high income countries despite pronounced regional disparities. Centralisation limits the ability of local authorities, businesses, and communities to develop sustainable regional economies and public services through planning and investment. The needs of the companies and communities in Sunderland are different from those of the people in Malvern. Despite the very clear evidence that centralised planning has failed in the UK (Davies, 2024; Dunt, 2024; Freeland, 2024; Innes, 2023), the Department for Education is currently attempting to manage 24,000 schools, 1,305 apprenticeship organisations, 453 higher education providers and 157 further education colleges from the DfE’s offices and a handful of executive agencies and non-departmental public bodies (NDPBs). This level of centralisation is untenable, particularly if a more coordinated approach is taken.
However, place-based education, training, research and innovation priorities would enable regions to take account of the needs of learners and local economies. Considering innovation as having a regional or geographic dimension amplifies the intrinsic role that diverse tertiary institutions play in the innovation process and the growth of innovation-related skills eco-systems, as well as the myriad intersecting interests and interdependencies they have with other public and policy domains. Critically, rather than adopting a reductive approach to the challenge of low productivity and economic growth, which all too often positions local skills as an economic panacea, leading to constant supply-side interventions and policy churn, real place-based coordination should take into account diverse educational needs of learners, the structure of institutions, the shape of the local economy and employer needs, and broader innovation. This has the potential to combine economic and social needs and agility within education and training through appropriate educational prioritisation.
Although the regional arrangements in England are at different stages of development, pilots and trials in the more developed Mayoral Combined Authorities can be used to establish a blueprint for further devolution in other regions as their systems of governance develop. Rather than start from scratch, these trials could build on the existing Local Skills Improvement Plans, expanding them to cover the full spectrum of tertiary education. That would mean including FE colleges and universities in ongoing dialogue with employers and civil society, nurturing the relationships necessary for a skills ecosystem where there is continuous identification and response to current and future educational needs.
Practical action: As a shift towards regionalisation, we recommend that the first trial should develop the LSIP within one or more MCA (Mayoral Combined Authority) areas into regional commissioning boards, which would agree on priorities for the investment of funding pooled from the OfS higher education strategic priorities grant, an element of UKRI funding and the single pots devolved to MCAs.
Improving learner access, experience and outcomes through a joined-up tertiary education model
To advance towards a fairer distribution of education and training opportunities across all forms of tertiary education, there is a need to centre learners’ needs and review the learning pathways that might bind together provision across institutions (schools, colleges and universities). We need to ensure that learning and qualifications are relevant to new and existing labour market opportunities, that knowledge and skill requirements keep up with changing technologies and their impact on work organisation and careers, and we need to build in transition points from learning to earning that make sense for the specific circumstances of the learner.
As the tertiary education system becomes more co-ordinated, institutions will need to review their curriculum offer and the teaching and learning practices to ensure that they are offering access to knowledge and skills that are relevant to learners’ lives. This may lead to significant changes to the form and scheduling of education offered by many institutions to meet the needs of increasingly diverse learners. However, making the changes needed over the next five to ten years will require more than just hopes and prayers. It will necessitate structured organisation development for universities, colleges and apprenticeship providers that are going to be part of a holistic tertiary system. This will mean governors and institutional leaders working with staff, students and other stakeholders to plan for changes to the curriculum and teaching and learning methods.
This will require a careful balance between central management, regional coordination, and institutional autonomy. Trust in professionals will be a key feature of this as well as ensuring that the policy structures enable constructive and collaborative conversations that prioritise regional rather than institutional agendas and needs. To facilitate this, it may be important to benchmark better practice across the UK (for example, the Tertiary Provision Pathfinders in the borders and North-East of Scotland piloted by the Scottish Funding Council) and compile case studies of what works most effectively, how changes were introduced and how they can be supported.
Practical action: We recommend that Skills England appoint a group of regional leads in partnership with OfS, UKRI, and, where appropriate, MCAs. These leads would be responsible for identifying priorities for investment in partnership with the commission boards identified above, as well as brokering the partnerships needed to address them. That would include identifying and communicating diverse learner pathways through different forms of tertiary education, which could be embedded within and financed by the piloting of a single access and participation plan for tertiary education across an MCA area.
Conclusion
Here, we have attempted to find a balance between the normative and pragmatic. It provides an overall strategic vision for a holistic post-18 tertiary education and research and innovation system, with greater but devolved coordination, while also developing some immediate policy actions. While a tertiary approach can play a crucial role in driving economic growth, supporting industrial strategy, and providing skills for a dynamic labour market, regional coordination must find a careful balance between extreme, top-down management, institutional autonomy, trust in educational professionals, and the agency and aspirations of individual students. Getting the balance right is essential for ensuring educational quality, fostering ambitious social goals and sustainable development, strengthening social cohesion and addressing key issues of productivity and economic growth.
