No need to dilute T Level placements – just fund them properly

The government’s recent solution to the T Level placement shortage was to let learners complete all 315 hours from home, across unlimited employers.
I understand the logic. But I also think it treats the wrong problem, and I say that as an employer who hosts placements and wants T Levels to succeed.
The barrier in most places is not that in-person placements are too demanding. It is that hosting one costs money small businesses don’t have. Loosen the definition of a placement and you protect the take-up figures while quietly hollowing out the thing that made T Levels worth building: real experience of a real workplace.
We host four business T Level students from East Sussex College, now 150 hours in, and it has been genuinely excellent. We’re a marketing agency, in an industry where only 35 per cent of working professionals pass a basic skills test, according to a 2026 Ipsos study.
Our own experience of hiring graduates and even mid-weights is that salary expectations arrive fully formed and the skills don’t. It takes six months to get someone to billable work, at which point a network agency with deeper pockets hires them away.
My assessment as someone who lectures on MBA programmes at some of the country’s leading business schools is that our T Level students are already outperforming those graduates. They will finish with real experience, skills to match, no debt, and without leaving their hometown for London. Better still, we will be able to hire them.
This is the pipeline the whole sector says it wants.
Two things stop it scaling, and neither is the placement model.
First, almost nobody knows T Levels exist. Not one local parent or young person I speak to has heard of them, or knows they’re an option. That is an awareness failure, and a fixable one – we’re working with our college on it for the next intake.
Second is the way the money is deployed. Government support does exist: the employer support fund covers costs like equipment, insurance, software and student travel. But it is capped at a recommended £800 per student, against a real hosting cost closer to £3,000 a year. And it is paid in arrears, against receipts, from a discretionary pot the college controls, with no guarantee of an award.
So the money arrives months after a small business has already spent it, in a form that assumes cash reserves those businesses do not have.
To claim for monthly software subscriptions, for instance, an employer would have to switch the whole company to annual billing just to generate a qualifying receipt – paying twelve months upfront to reclaim a fraction, later. A large employer absorbs all this without noticing. An SME (which make up 99.9 per cent of UK businesses, where most young people will actually build their careers) instead quietly declines to offer a placement.
That is why successive schemes have gone millions of pounds unspent. Not for lack of need but because the support was never sized to what hosting costs, or timed to when the costs fall.
The National Audit Office can record the underspend; it cannot record the placements that never happened because a business owner did the sums and said no.
The fix is not expensive, and it is not a dilution.
Pay a modest monthly hosting contribution in advance, rather than reimbursing in arrears. Keep the upfront set-up payment that already works. Publicise the qualification properly.
Do that, and you unlock placement capacity in exactly the small businesses where the jobs are – without ever having to pretend that a placement completed from a bedroom is the same as one completed in a workplace.
The timing could hardly be better for small employers. Employer National Insurance has risen and the threshold has dropped; the minimum wage has climbed again; the cost of taking someone on has rarely been higher.
Plenty of SMEs have responded by simply not hiring – carrying the extra work rather than the extra salary.
A well-run T Level placement is a genuine answer to that squeeze: real, supervised capacity from a motivated young person, at a stage when the business could not otherwise afford to grow its team.
Host well and you are not doing a favour to the education system; you are getting help you need, while training a future hire you already know is good.
That is the argument the sector keeps underselling.
Growing T Level is not a cost to be managed down until enough employers reluctantly comply. It is a supply of skilled young people flowing into the 99.9 per cent of businesses that are small, at exactly the moment those businesses are being priced out of hiring any other way.
Fund the placements properly and you are not propping up a struggling qualification, you are wiring the country’s future workforce into the firms that will actually employ them.