A decision to slim down “bloated” T Levels is a “necessary” move – but shaving classroom hours alone will not be enough to boost take-up, experts have warned.
The Department for Education this week announced it would cut the size of new T Levels to 1,080 classroom hours, down from the current minimum of 1,180 hours, while also continuing efforts to shrink existing courses.
The move follows complaints from colleges that the flagship technical qualifications are too big and difficult to deliver at scale.
But while sector figures say the change should help make T Levels more accessible, many doubt it will be the silver bullet ministers hope for.
Ministers have also been warned the move risks leaving English students with even less teaching time than their peers in other countries that are international leaders in technical education.
‘Painfully bloated’
Robbie Maris, a researcher at the Education Policy Institute (EPI), said reducing hours was a “positive and necessary step” after receiving “consistent feedback from colleges, students and stakeholders that the volume of content has simply been too high – reaching up to 2,000 guided learning hours on top of a sizeable industry placement”.
This has “likely contributed” to relatively high drop-out rates – more than a quarter of students who started the fourth wave of T Levels and should have picked up their results last summer left their course early.
Maris said cutting classroom hours would bring T Levels closer to the three A Level benchmark they intended to equal, adding that this recalibration ensured the qualification remained a “substantial programme that develops high-level technical skills, while finally being proportionate and manageable for students to study and for colleges to deliver”.
The National Audit Office warned last year that T Levels may struggle to scale after student number forecasts were missed by three quarters in 2024-25, compared to original predictions.
Abysmal starts have led to a near-£700 million spending shortfall from T Levels’ launch in 2020 up to 2025.
Latest starts data for 2025-26, published on Tuesday, showed the DfE even missed its revised recruitment target for the academic year by almost a fifth.
Catherine Sezen, director of education policy at the Association of Colleges, backed the classroom hours reduction.
But to make T Levels “truly accessible” the DfE must “go beyond size and look at content, assessment and the nature of the industry placement”, she added.
Claire Green, post-16 and skills specialist at the Association of School and College Leaders, warned reducing hours without adjusting curriculum content or assessment load “will not ease pressures on providers and may ultimately jeopardise student achievement”.
She added that “persistent barriers such as limited availability of industry placements, demanding assessment requirements, and the high English and maths expectations continue to restrict colleges’ ability to deliver these programmes at scale”.
The DfE committed this week to making “further changes” to assessment and industry placements to support growth. New industry placement guidance will be published by June.
The minimum 315-hour industry placement, which is undertaken in addition to classroom hours, will remain. But officials signalled further watering down of the mandatory requirement, including enhancing current placement flexibilities such as conducting them across multiple employers, group projects or remote working.
Regulator Ofqual will also remove content “not absolutely necessary to demonstrate threshold competence” and cut the assessment burden, particularly the staff time required to administer exams.
Meaningful reform or cost-saving measure?
Currently, the smallest T Levels require a minimum of 1,180 classroom hours per learner over two years and attract £11,154 funding. The largest require a minimum of 1,730 hours and are funded at £15,430.
These funding rates are set to be reduced in 2026-27, and the hours cap for new T Levels suggests funding levels could fall further.
Green said cutting classroom hours “appears less like meaningful reform and more like a cost‑saving measure” – one that “risks leaving students worse off than their peers in other OECD countries, who already benefit from greater teaching time”.
Her concerns echo previous research from the EPI, which found T Levels were already relatively narrow and short compared with technical programmes in high-performing countries.
Vocational routes in systems in Germany, Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands typically include classroom-based technical provision of around 1,000 supervised learning hours per year.
Mix-and-match opportunity missed
Tom Richmond, an education policy analyst and former adviser to education ministers, said the government should have gone further and made T Levels a size that allowed them to be studied alongside A Levels – which is the plan for newly proposed V Levels (see page 7).
He told FE Week: “I’m glad the DfE has recognised the painfully bloated nature of T Levels, although these changes fall well short of allowing students to study them alongside an A Level, despite some T Level students being denied university places due to the lack of A Level maths, for example.
“It’s bizarre watching the DfE highlight the importance of allowing students to combine the new V Levels with A Levels, only to completely ignore the same principle for T Levels. I also doubt many schools and colleges will be persuaded to suddenly offer more T Levels just because a few hours have been shaved off the curriculum.”
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