T Levels: Can They Succeed?
By Alp Yilmaz
People are increasingly scrutinising the UK’s education system, particularly higher education – are students getting their money’s worth? Much should be done to remove the stigma attached to vocational qualifications and the excessively high value society places on university education. In the past, polytechnics, categorically different to universities, were judged on their own merits and offered students vocational training. These institutions focused on offering courses in, for example, applied sciences and engineering until they were abolished in 1992 by the Further and Higher Education Act, implemented to end the binary divide between polytechnics and universities. We need a viable middle-ground between entering the job market after A Levels or trying to do so after university. Although not a grand-scale, structural reform of the education system, T Levels have the potential to offer some of the essentials that made polytechnics a viable and important choice for students – practical work experience and absence of high tuition fees.
T Levels are two-year courses where 20% of the teaching time is dedicated to industry placement. They offer post-GCSE students the opportunity to gain valuable industry experience, and potentially progress to (degree) apprenticeships, avoiding the burden of student loans. The scheme was introduced by the Department for Education in December 2018 and was launched formally in September 2020. T Level students, despite spending a fifth of their time in industry placement, can potentially gain the same UCAS tariff points as a student who achieves A*AA at A Level. The Department of Education wants to ensure students that they can still progress to university if they wish, and as such have stated on their website that 26 of the top 50 universities (according to The Guardian’s Best UK Universities 2022 rankings) have agreed to accept T Level students. This is a bonus for students who are still considering university education and is testament to the practicality and flexibility of T Levels in general.
Setting up T Levels was the first step – now, the government needs to ensure that the road ahead is clear for the scheme to succeed. Indeed, there is one most pressing obstacle – the dearth of employers who want to offer placements to T Level students. Engineering UK found that only 12% of manufacturing employers intend to offer T Level placements in 2023. However, this seems to be due to financial constraints rather than an inherently low interest in taking on apprentices. Recruiting T-Level students means dealing with paperwork and the responsibility of supervising the apprentices, costing time and resources for potential employers.
Currently, employers who want to hire apprentices must pay the Apprenticeship Levy, amounting to 0.5% of their annual bill, although this applies only to firms with more than a £3 million annual bill. The Levy was introduced in 2017 and is used to cover the training costs of apprentices. One way in which the government could deal with this is by introducing a direct lump sum payment for firms that agree to take on T Level students; this would not necessarily discard the Apprenticeship Levy, thereby requiring fewer time-consuming adjustments. The government urgently needs to address this bottleneck, and financial incentives are one way to solve this issue, directly responding to the financial concern of firms.
While some may criticise the cost of offering these financial incentives, arguably the benefits to the economy of having a higher-skilled and productive workforce should outweigh this concern. Although the divide between polytechnics and universities has been abolished, there remains the need for a ‘middle ground’ between finding work with no applied training or waiting until after university, a costly endeavour for many students. T Levels have very large polytechnic-shaped shoes to fill, and so the government should take incentivising employers to offer apprenticeships very seriously.
T Levels, if properly implemented, can transform the prospects of many students better suited to practical and vocational rather than traditional university education. Our education system needs to offer everyone a fulfilling future, where whichever path one chooses is respectable and rewarding. T Levels have the potential to fill in the gap left by polytechnics, although the government needs to urgently identify and address bottlenecks to ensure the successful delivery of the scheme.