What we’ve learned from six years delivering T Levels

With more than one million young people now classed as not in education, employment or training (NEET), the recent Milburn Review has reignited an important debate about how we prepare young people for work.

The discussion so far has focused on what young people need: more confidence, greater resilience, stronger employability skills and better exposure to the workplace.

As someone who’s been involved in delivering T Levels since the beginning, I can confidently say that T Levels offer my students that. The bigger question is how we make sure teachers feel ready and supported to deliver them.

Six years ago, Middlesbrough College was among the first providers in the country to introduce T Levels.

Today we deliver 17, spanning subjects from accounting and building services to health, digital software development and marketing. Delivering new qualifications from scratch is always daunting. We wanted students to get the very best quality teaching from day one. Reflecting on what’s worked well, I think learnings can be applied to the roll-out of any new qualification, including V Levels due to start next year.

In some ways, we learned on the job together with employers and awarding bodies. At Middlesbrough College, we made a deliberate decision to invest in training staff and provide support right from the outset. We looked carefully at what teachers needed, not just when T Levels launched, but throughout the implementation journey. As a result, our teachers became more confident, more connected and better supported.

And you can see the impact of this in the results of our students: our T Level pass rate rose from 73.4 per cent to 93.2 per cent last year and the proportion of students achieving merit or distinction increased from under half to nearly three-quarters of the cohort.

So how did we do it? We carved out time specifically for professional development, mentoring and training. We have made extensive use of the teaching resources and teacher Communities of Practice from Gatsby’s Technical Education Network (TEN).

The resources have been invaluable for me and my team, completely free and ready to use in the classroom. It’s been a gamechanger and has saved teachers roughly two hours a week in planning time, giving them more time to adapt resources and meet every learner’s needs.

The Communities of Practice have been a huge support to me and so many of my peers. They are subject-focused and allow us to learn from each other, and discuss different approaches in a safe space.

The impact of high-quality teaching resources and practitioner networks like TEN shouldn’t be underestimated and is felt directly by learners. As well as uplift in attainment, our T Level students have some of the highest attendance rates across our Level 3 provision.

They consistently tell us they value the relevance of their learning and the opportunity to apply it in real workplaces. Employers regularly comment on how workplace-ready many of them are by the end of their programme.

I see day in, day out, T Levels creating resilience and confidence in our students, qualities that are very much needed for the world we live in now.

Students can see clearer progression routes into higher education, apprenticeships and employment. Universities have a much stronger understanding of the qualification and employers are actively seeking out T Level students because of their industry experience.

For any new or experienced T Level teachers – and practitioners who will embark on the V Level journey next year – I’d encourage you to seek out high-quality resources, subject-specific professional development and opportunities to collaborate with peers around the country. It’s a key learning for us and we know from results it reaps high rewards.

T Levels are a valuable qualification, and we need to be consistently investing in the teachers who bring it to life. Because when teachers are set up to succeed, so are their students.