Every September, universities perform an extraordinary feat of coordination.
Thousands of students arrive within a few weeks of one another. Timetables begin, accommodation fills, libraries extend their hours, student societies spring back into life, and teaching starts across hundreds of modules. There are good reasons universities work this way.
For most, particularly at undergraduate level, the academic year reflects the shape of their core business. Bringing large numbers of students into the institution at broadly the same time creates efficiencies in teaching, timetabling, assessment, staffing, student support, and the use of the estate. It also creates the cohort experience many students come to university for.
September is not the problem – the problem is that we are increasingly asking universities to deliver forms of education that do not naturally run to an academic year that begins in September. From January 2027, the lifelong learning entitlement (LLE) will make that tension much harder to ignore. Universities are going to need to run on two clocks.
The second clock
The first clock is familiar. Students arrive together, study broadly together and progress together. The infrastructure surrounding them has been built accordingly.
The second clock runs differently. Modular learners might enter at different points in the year, accumulate credit at different speeds and move in and out of learning.
Universities already have experience of this. Apprenticeships, professional development, short courses, online provision, and multiple-entry courses all operate, to varying degrees, outside a single September cycle.
The LLE takes that principle further. The interesting challenge is not simply whether universities can modularise curricula – we can, and we do – it’s whether the university surrounding that curriculum can operate on the same basis.
Registry processes, timetabling, assessment boards, and academic workload have all developed around periods of concentrated activity. If entry, teaching and assessment become more distributed, either those systems become more flexible or institutions create different processes for learners on the second clock. Then there is everything students experience outside the classroom.
Your July is their November
Imagine a modular learner whose period of study falls across the summer. What should they reasonably expect from the library? Careers and academic skills support? Wellbeing and disability services? Societies? Will there be somewhere open to buy lunch? And, for somebody who needs to be on campus, what does accommodation look like when the standard product assumes participation broadly aligned to an academic year?
The Department for Education’s own LLE guidance already asks providers to consider exactly this: academic support, accommodation, wellbeing, societies, and the impact of modular delivery on student services.
Nor does flexibility automatically mean that every service must operate identically 365 days a year. There are good reasons campuses look different in July and October. But government guidance is explicit that limits per credit for modules will not differ from those for full courses. If a student is consuming the same credit at a different point in the year, we need to become much more explicit about what surrounds that credit. And perhaps the answer isn’t always parity.
Off peak university ticket
What if a deliberately different university experience also came at a deliberately different price?
The LLE sets maximum per-credit fee limits; it does not require providers to charge them. There could conceivably be learners attracted to an “off peak” version of university: high-quality teaching and the support necessary to succeed, but a different package of wider services at quieter points in the year, priced accordingly.
For someone fitting a module around work or family commitments, the trade-off between a lower price and a more limited campus offer might be an attractive one.
That would require absolute clarity about what students are buying, and a lower price could never remove regulatory obligations around quality and support. We shouldn’t assume, either, that summer teaching is automatically cheaper simply because classrooms are available. But there is a meaningful difference between an inadvertently diminished experience at the same price and an intentionally different proposition at a different price.
Flexible higher education may need flexibility in the product as well as the timetable.
Who pays for the second clock?
Genuine year-round capability costs money. Additional enrolment and assessment cycles require capacity. Services operating across a longer year require staffing. New accommodation models, extended opening, and more flexible academic delivery do not appear simply because the curriculum has been modularised – and universities have good reason to hesitate before making that investment.
The government’s modular acceleration programme originally anticipated reaching up to 1,800 learners across the modules proposed by its selected providers. By July 2025, 352 learners had enrolled on the 50 modules that had begun delivery.
The LLE is a different proposition, not least because modular study will now sit within the mainstream student finance system, but nobody yet knows how large this market will become.
So universities face an awkward sequencing problem. It is reasonable to want evidence of demand before investing substantially in a second operating clock. But an emerging market also needs a sufficiently attractive experience for demand to develop.
For most universities, the first clock will continue to pay the bills. The second needs a business model.
We may know more than we think
Parts of higher education are already solving versions of this problem.
Universities with significant apprenticeship, professional education, online or multiple-entry provision have experience of year-round onboarding, different assessment rhythms and learner support outside the traditional cycle. Independent training providers and other parts of the skills system offer further examples of operating around employer and learner demand.
The question isn’t whether universities should become training providers, or whether the “September start” should disappear. It is which capabilities developed on the second clock can be scaled, which can share the infrastructure of the first, and which genuinely require something different.
The academic year will remain dominant for most universities because it still makes organisational and economic sense. The LLE doesn’t change that. But it does make the second clock harder to treat as a collection of exceptions.
The financial architecture is becoming modular, and the regulatory architecture is adapting to match. Universities can modularise curricula. The harder question is how much of the institution surrounding them needs to follow.
The challenge of the LLE isn’t simply whether universities can make learning modular. It’s whether the university can operate modularly too.