Prime Minister Boris Johnson has announced a new ‘Lifetime Skills Guarantee’. This will enable adults to be funded for their first Level 3 technical qualification if they do not already have one.

These fully-funded college courses, paid for by the National Skills Fund, will be available from April 2021. The list of eligible courses is expected to be published in October.

The announcement comes ahead of the forthcoming FE white paper and as part of a major speech on skills where the Prime Minister set out a range of measures to address “the nonsensical gulf” between academic education and skills training.

Other areas highlighted for reform include giving FE colleges access to the main student finance system for a specific list of technical courses, to end the “bias that propels young people into universities and away from technical education”.