All the stuff with the Short Courses Trial and other evidence of very limited demand for the Lifelong Learning Entitlement (the availability of undergraduate style loans for short vocationally-focused credit bearing courses) has been making me thing about marketing for the LLE.

If it is to be a part, as promised by the last but one prime minister, of “building back better” then at some point we are going to need to tell people about these marvellous loans.

With this in mind I made a freedom of information request to the Department for Education – to ask them:

• What funds have been allocated to the promotion of the Lifelong Learning Entitlement (formerly the Lifelong Loan Entitlement) until the projected end of this parliament in November 2024?
• How much has been spent so far, and on what (please use general terms like “focus groups”, “surveys”, “marketing resource development”)?
• How much has been allocated annually for the promotion of the LLE from 2025 onwards?

During the 2022-23 and 2023-24 financial years (the latter of which comes to an end next month) the government allocated £160,000 on “communications research” (£57,720 of this was spent in 2022-23, with actual spend figures for 2023-24 to be confirmed) of this. This wasn’t marketing per se, more a way to:

better understand motivations and barriers in user audiences, and generate insights to underpin a logic model for communications intervention.

Which I’m reading as meaning “figuring out how to do effective comms”. You would expect that this would lead up to a grand comms effort ahead of the grand launch in 2025 (my email response confirms that this is still the plan), but I don’t know for sure because this commercial sensitive information is being withheld under Section 43 of the Freedom of Information Act. It seems that:

The release of the allocated funding for LLE promotions for the financial year 2024/25 would be likely to prejudice the commercial interests of the Department by adversely affecting its bargaining position during any future contractual negotiations, which could result in the less effective use of public money. It is therefore considered that it is not in the public interest to disclose the amount that has been allocated to fund promotion of the LLE in 2024/25, as this is not already publicly known and would be likely to be used by potential bidders to gain a competitive advantage if/when the Department tenders for communications services to promote the LLE.

What this tells us is that not only has DfE failed to set up comms arrangements for the launch, but (“if/when”) it hasn’t even decided whether or not it is going to promote the LLE at all.

To be scrupulously fair, the grand 2025 launch will be a bit of a damp squib. Advanced Learner Loans will be available through to 2027 (by which time it is hoped that the Office for Students will have figured out how to register the providers in question, as is required), and the only modular qualifications available via the LLE will be bits of the largely untried Higher Technical Qualifications launching through to 2025.

At the DfE end there is another technical consultation on modular study now planned for 2024, and two complicated bits of secondary legislation (including a very contentious one on fee limits) to pass.

And it is also not clear whether the Student Loans Company’s “sub-optimal core systems” will be up to a 2025 launch.

But the ultimate sucker punch is that we are currently staring down the barrel of a Jeremy Hunt budget where it looks like all non-schools DfE spending will be frozen or cut as part of an effort to magic up national insurance cuts. And the budget envelope for 2025-26 (when you’d really want to start ramping the comms up) won’t even be set until we have another spending review – good luck trying to procure that in advance. And of course, there’s the small matter of an election and (if the polls are to be believed) a change of government.