Thread by Johnny Rich

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In case you missed this announcement last week: DfE has set up a £12m fund to encourage employers to offer work experience for T levels.
Good news, right? Well, partly.

Yup, it's a thread... 1/22
feweek.co.uk/dfe-announces-new-12m-t-level-employer-placement-fund/
If T Levels are ever going to be a mainstream success as a vocation qualification, they are going to need a lot more employer engagement.

I mean A LOT.
2/22
Let's crunch some numbers. In each cohort of just under 1.5Mn 16yr-olds, the choices are A levels, BTECs or apprenticeships (accounting for about half the cohort between them), jobs, unemployment or other.
3/22
For T levels to grow to even 1/4 of those in education or training and 1/10th of the rest would mean nearly 275k T level work experience opportunities per year. Are there really that many out there?
4/22
Each T Level requires 45 days of work experience.

For 275k T levels, that equates to just under 100 million hrs.
5/22
Let's suppose each work experience opportunity takes just 1hr of admin to arrange and each experience hour they provide takes 10mins of oversight by a paid employee. (I suspect both those estimates are very much on the low side.) That's nearly 17Mn hours of employer time.
6/22
At a median hourly rate of £18.50 for those admin/oversight employees, that's well over £300Mn direct cost to the employers. That's before you account for any of the other costs in providing work experience (the space, utilities, equipment, insurance, etc).
7/22
A fund of £12Mn looks paltry by comparison.
But let us not be churlish. It's better than nothing and presumably the DfE hopes the £12Mn will help fund tens of thousands T levels next year, not yet hundreds of thousands.
8/22
And it's not as if employers engage in T levels to add to their bottom line anyway. This is an investment in the future of their workforce, creating a skills pipeline and contributing to wider society, surely?
9/22
So let's think like a business. How else could they invest and achieve a similar outcome? Well, instead of the new-fangled T levels that have no track record yet, one alternative would be to offer apprenticeships to young people instead.
10/22
Would it be cheaper and more cost effective for the employer?
Cheaper? Yes. Larger employers can offset the cost of apprenticeships against their levy. Smaller employers can claim (most of) the cost back.
11/22
More cost effective? Probably. Apprentices are employees whereas T level students aren't. That gives employers have more control over what they can expect from apprentices' productivity.
12/22
And when they finish their apprenticeship, the employer can chose to (continue to) employ them, rather than, with T level students, hoping that, when they finish, they apply for a job with them rather than perhaps with their competitor, going to uni or doing something else.
13/22
If an employer is looking to invest in their future skills pipeline, they may well decide apprenticeships are a more attractive option than engaging in T levels and even the prospect of a share of a £12Mn fund doesn't come close to tipping that calculation.
14/22
That is perhaps why when the DfE tried setting up a similar fund in 2019, they managed to allocate only £500k out of a total available of £7Mn, funding about 2.5% of the intended number of T level placements.
feweek.co.uk/huge-t-level-employer-cash-incentive-underspend-revealed/
15/22
The £1,000 per placement incentive simply didn't sweeten the deal sufficiently . Even DfE's own research told them as much: just 7% of employers said it would make a difference. www.gov.uk/government/publications/employer-pulse-survey-2021
16/22
If at first you don't succeed... right?

Or there is another way of looking at it: the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
17/22
This may all sound like nay-saying about T levels as if I don't approve of the concept. Nothing could be further from the truth. I would love to see them succeed.
18/22
The problem is that when you have a bold and ambitious policy, you don't get it to fly by giving it half a feather instead of a full set of wings.
19/22
Rather than recognising that a change this big needs real investment of money and effort (especially to overcome the real challenges of delivering T levels at scale at a regional level), the Government's approach appears to be to defund other options. #HobsonsChoice
20/22
Realistically, T levels won't ever be the vocational silver bullet the Govt longs for because of employer engagement, regional disparities in provision & the fact that for some young people they're simply less suitable than BTECs or other options. johnnyrich.com/vocational-qualifications-dont-turn-off-the-tap-to-make-t/
21/22
I hope, however, they find a place in the choice of provision and do not suffer the fate of so many other well-intentioned efforts to create new vocational qualifications.

22/22 ends
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