It’s not just A Level students receiving their results. Are T Levels our best kept secret?

Results day is upon us. A time of mixed emotions – relief, anxiety and, hopefully, joy – for the thousands of young people (and their teachers) receiving the outcomes of their hard graft. One group worthy of singling out for praise is the 7,262 T Level students receiving results. In only the fourth year of results, these young people show enormous courage in taking on a (relatively) new qualification.  

As celebrities, entrepreneurs and leaders flock to social media to highlight the art of what is possible without the top (or even any) grades, it is also a season to reflect on whether we are serving these young people through these qualifications – what support and opportunities will they provide? Are they part of the arsenal or an anchor for a young person entering the next stage of their life?

The previous Government made it their mission to get to grips with the complicated post-16 qualifications landscape, vowing to ‘simplify’ the offer and make it easier to navigate by introducing T Levels – a technical qualification roughly equivalent to three A Levels, containing a 45-day industry placement. But something’s got to give, and at the same time, funding for courses that overlapped with T Levels or deemed to be ‘low quality’ would be removed.

A noble aim, but its delivery has provoked the ire of schools, colleges, think tanks, and even some awarding bodies that stand to benefit from these changes. You might think, with all the qualification reforms the vocational sector has seen and the lessons from the past, we might have cracked it by now.

Gold Standard

Vaunted as being the ‘gold standard’ in technical qualifications, doing away with other technical qualifications – the competition – is a sure-fire way to address concerns around low uptake and allow their new star to shine all the brighter. Cue years of fierce debate – with heavyweights like former Education Secretary, David Blunkett, on one side, calling for a pause and review of defunding, versus former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and T Level architect Lord Sainsbury arguing that such a move would be ‘calamitous and costly’.

So, it came as a relief to many providers when they received assurances last month from the new Government that the 134 qualifications due to lose funding in 2024 will continue to be available to teach in 2024/25. But, was the Labour Government right to allow alternatives to T Levels live on?

In short – and at least in the short-term – yes. T Levels are simply not well enough established to remove alternative qualifications for good.

Education’s ‘best-kept secret’

Far from being, in Brown’s words, education’s ‘best-kept secret’, our recent research into learners’ experiences of T Levels reveals a concerning shortcoming in the quality of these qualifications. Some of these challenges could be chalked up to their relative infancy (whether we excuse that, particularly given the number of qualification rollouts we have seen before, is another question). We heard accounts of a lack of textbooks, exam papers, teachers with subject-specific knowledge resulting in high turnover. Students were left feeling ‘apprehensive’ about their prospects after completing the course.

Students also reported being unhappy with the style of teaching and learning, explaining the course was largely theoretical with limited opportunities for practical work. This was not what they had been promised. Even the 45-day industry placement – the jewel in the T Level crown and a key ‘selling point’ for many of the Year 1 and 2 students we spoke to – were plagued with delays due to the limited pool of employers or lacking any relevance to the course content.

Brown is right to point out that awareness is low – over half of the public have never heard of T Levels, according to our exclusive polling conducted earlier this year. In 2022, T Levels attracted only 1% of 16–17-year-olds in full-time education.

With so much uncertainty, it doesn’t seem right that providers are being forced to forsake other qualifications, steering students on to T Levels, before they’ve had the chance to prove their value. We shouldn’t toy with young people’s prospects.

We shouldn’t toy with young people’s prospects

And it’s not just our research that suggests this, students have voted with their feet. 34% of the 2021/22 cohort withdrew from their course, compared to just 1 in 5 students on other large VTQs and 1 in 10 A Level students that same year (although it is good to see that the T Level drop out rate did fall slightly this year to 29%). Many of the concerns students shared with us were also echoed in Ofsted’s thematic review of T Levels last year.

This is not intended to be a denigration of T Levels; in fact, we are excited by their real potential to raise the prestige of technical skills. Those who do stay on the course to completion demonstrate achievement beyond the odds:  93% of the first T Levels cohort remained in study and work; 44% went on to higher education, and 40% to paid work. The unique 45-day industry placement, by far the most appealing element of the course, could be a really meaningful opportunity to level the playing field in helping more young people secure high-quality work experience, equip them with essential skills and make informed decisions about their next steps, all the while getting a good grounding through their classroom-based studies. In this way, T Levels offer something the public have a real appetite for – 84% of those we polled would support work experience being mandatory for young people aged 16-18.

Regardless of the potential benefits of T Levels, in their current form, they will never be the right choice for all students looking to pursue vocational education. Almost three quarters of the public want to see students given the ability to mix and match technical and academic subjects at 16-18 – something BTECs offered to a certain degree, and a baccalaureate-style system would ensure. But the chunkiness of T Levels force learners onto a single track, with no time to pursue other qualifications alongside. Supporters rightly point out that the depth and speciality of T Levels are important for raising the prestige of technical education, but we risk creating an unhelpful divide with academic qualifications, slowing progress towards achieving parity of esteem.

So, let’s keep T Levels as an option for those lucky few who are secure in their career choices at 16 – they have the potential to be first-class qualifications once they’ve outgrown their teething issues. But let’s think very carefully before we close off options open for everyone else.

Between October 2023 and May 2024, we visited 11 colleges across England, conducted 28 focus groups and 13 interviews with 210 T-Level students (Foundation Level, Year 1 and Year 2), and 24 teachers and staff supporting T Level students.

By Alice Gardner, CEO of the Edge Foundation