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Adults in England without an A-level or equivalent qualification will be offered a fully funded university course, the government announced.
The offer will be available from April and applies to courses offering “skills valued by employers.”
In a speech on Tuesday, the prime minister will say that in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the government cannot “save all jobs” but wants to help people find a new job.
Labor said the plans would not reverse the impact of “a decade of cuts.”
The government’s decision comes amid fears that unemployment will grow sharply.
The Office of Budget Responsibility has said that the unemployment rate could peak between 9.7% and 13.2% in the coming years. The most recent rate, from May to July, is 4.1%.
In his speech, Boris Johnson will say: “As the Chancellor has said, we cannot, unfortunately, save all jobs; what we can do is give people the skills to find and create new and better jobs.”
“We are transforming the foundations of the skills system so that everyone has the opportunity to train and retrain.”
The offer of courses for adults without an A-level will be paid for through the National Skills Fund, which will be completed with 2.5 billion pounds, the government said.
A full list of available courses will be announced next month.
The government added that it wants to make loans for higher education more flexible, with the aim of allowing people to “space” their learning throughout their lives rather than in blocks of three or four years, allowing them to study more part-time. .
He said the changes will be backed by investments in university buildings and facilities, which include more than £ 1.5 billion in equity funding.
More details will be set out in a white paper on education later in the year.
In other schemes, small businesses will be offered financial incentives to hire apprentices and £ 8 million will be spent on skills ‘boot camps’ in West Yorkshire, South West England, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire to cover sectors such as construction and engineering. .
This follows pilots in Greater Manchester and the West Midlands who focused on digital skills.
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And the government’s online skills toolkit, which currently provides digital and numerical skills training, will be expanded to include 62 additional courses.
Responding to the government’s action, Labor shadow education secretary Kate Green said: “A week ago, Labor called for a national retraining strategy appropriate to the crisis Britain is facing, but what the government is simply a combination of old overheated policies and won funding. ” It will be available until April.
“By then, many workers could have been out of work for almost a year, and conservatives still think they will need to borrow to get the training they will need to go back to work.”
He added that the plans would not give workers “the skills and support they need in the coming months.”
CBI CEO Dame Carolyn Fairbairn said: “The significant unemployment left in its wake by the coronavirus only accelerates the need for people to develop new skills and adapt to new ways of working.
“The Lifetime Skills Guarantee and Flexible Loans to Support Small Learning is a solid start, but to really change gears this must be supported by significant progress in the evolution of the learning rate at a rate flexible skills “.
The apprenticeship rate, introduced in 2017, takes 0.5% of the pay bill from top employers who have an annual pay bill of over £ 3 million, with the intention of using the money to upgrade skills and provide training.
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