The lifelong learning buffet needs nutritional oversight

I was very interested in this paper by Johnny Rich as he is a member of the Life Long Learning Commission. However, his approach concerns me and I believe it is overly influenced by a University perspective, creating a context favouring degrees and managed by those from a narrow / academic background. If "The idea is to give everyone roughly the same access to government-backed loans to pay for post-school education or professional development" then the Rich approach is too restrictive and the initiative will not achieve this goal. There should be no requirement for approved modules to be part of a "general degree" capped or uncapped. In my view, as long as the material studied using the loan is above level 3, that should be enough to justify funding. If the project is to develop in the context of level 4 to level 7 qualification equivalents it will fail to engage more than one million participants. Given that the cost of a full 3 year degree has a market value of over £30,000 it would also be too expensive for taxpayers to support. I cannot see many people aged 30 and above wanting to take on a loan of this size and if they did, I cannot see many wanting to pay it back within 10 years (with or without interest). To be sustainable, the loan scheme must not end up with the present 50% plus write off suffered by the current graduate loan scheme. The question of the cost of "courses" authorised for funding needs to be addressed now. The current under graduate course funding context of £9,500 needs to be scrapped. Different modules / subjects have different costs of delivery. The funding of apprenticeships is out in the open and ranges from around £1,500 (for a level 2 in sales / care) to over £30,000 for a level 7 in engineering. There must be a maximum loan amount specified for each individual taking out a loan and clarity over whether this amount will be the same for all borrowers. We must also break the mould of thinking in terms of a 360 credit target, or a total of guided learning hours, or insistence on incremental learning. To think of Life Long Learning on its own is not enough. We need to think in terms of Life Long Learning Loans.