A member of the Lib Dems has recently written this article. It makes good sense!

Jackie says:’As an employer, I know the value of apprenticeships, in work training, University education, and lifetime education (LE)
It is said that a child of 5 might have up to 40 different roles in her/his lifetime, and we need retraining to update ourselves with technology, and changing skills needs, not using the Universities just to learn about one subject in greater depth.
Have you retrained for a new career? How did you fund it? Let me know your views.’

Charles Lawley said:
The Liberal Democrats need to stop rowing about how we fund Higher Education (HE) and Further Education (FE) and start rowing about how we fund LE (Lifetime Education).
Whether this is a state-funded project or something we incentivise employers to fund or something that the individual has to pay for or a mixture of all three – this is a conversation we need to have. We need a population that is not just resilient to a (future) robot-dominated economy, but a population that thrives in it.

Today, retraining or gaining qualifications off of your own back costs time and money, which we don’t have. Some employers pay for training but there needs to be more regular topping up of people’s knowledge. A doctor doesn’t complete five years of medical training and then believe that the way they will perform their job will ever change from the point they graduate.

Established workers need to have the means available to them to completely retrain, as very few of us can expect an industry, let alone a job, for life. We’re on the cusp of the dawn of driverless vehicles. Taxi drivers, HGV drivers, bus drivers – all of these jobs are on the verge of being consigned to the history books, there needs to be provisions in place to soak up these millions who will be out of work.

There will always be a place for the Oxfords and Cambridges but we cannot kid ourselves that the current model, where the population stops learning in the first quarter of their lives prepares us for the final three quarters.

Only by owning the issue of Lifetime Education can we become the party that fights Trump and Corbyn’s hatred of human progress. The robots won’t take our jobs, but they will change what our jobs are. Let’s reform our tertiary education system to prepare us for the future and then we can all fall out about who pays for its fees.