Let’s crunch some numbers. In each cohort of just under 1.5 million 16-year olds, the choices are A levels, BTECs or apprenticeships (accounting for about half the cohort between them), jobs, unemployment or ‘other’. For T levels to grow to even a quarter of those in education or training and, let’s say, a tenth of the rest would mean nearly 275,000 T level work experience opportunities per year. Are there really that placements many out there to be had? 

Each T Level requires 45 days of work experience. For 275,000 T levels, that equates to just under 100 million hours. Let’s suppose each placement takes just one hour of administrative work to arrange and each experience hour that they provide takes up just 10 minutes of oversight by a paid employee. I suspect both those estimates are generously on the low side, but even that is nearly 17 million hours of employer time.

At a median hourly rate of £18.50 for those employees doing the administration or oversight (again, I’m being generous), that’s well over £300 million of 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).

A fund of £12Mn looks pretty paltry by comparison.

But let us not be churlish. It’s better than nothing and presumably the DfE hopes the £12Mn will help to fund tens of thousands T levels next year, not yet the hundreds of thousands which it may hope may be realised in the future.

Besides, 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?

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 as yet have no track record, one alternative for an employer would be to offer apprenticeships to young people instead.

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.

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. 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.

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 £12 million fund doesn’t come close to tipping that calculation.

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.

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. (My back-of-an-envelope calculation above of £300 million costs for 275,000 placements – which works out at an optimistic £1,090 each – perhaps explains why.)

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.

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

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. 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.

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, even when its own targets for T level expansion won’t replace what’s being lost.

Realistically, T levels won’t ever be the vocational silver bullet qualification that the Government longs for. The problems of employer engagement and regional disparities in provision can be tackled, but never fully overcome, and the fact will remain that for some young people, commitment to a single T level at 16 will simply be less suitable than a mix of BTECs or other options (which usually require a less academic approach to learning and can help a young people keep their options open for longer). 

I do hope, however, that T levels find a place in the choice of provision and do not suffer the fate of so many of the other well-intentioned efforts to create new vocational qualifications. The only vocational qualification that can really be said to have stood the test of time – six decades and counting – are BTECs, which, ironically, the Government wants to scale back. 

A shorter version of this blog was first published as a thread on Twitter on 17th February 2023.

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My policy paper for the HEPI think tank was published yesterday proposing that employers contribute directly to the cost of higher education. 

Here’s a quick and dirty round up of some of the coverage.

• Here’s a link to the paper itself as published by HEPI
• Here’s a longer version with a more detailed argument and commentary on potential objections.
• A blog I wrote about it on this site. 
• A piece I wrote about it for the Times Higher Education (subscription).
• Another one on Wonkhe.
• This week’s Wonkhe Weekly podcast where I talked about it (among other topics), episode 10.
• Interview on BBC Radio 5 Live.
• Interview on TalkRadio.
• Article on BBC website.
• Article on the i.
• Another article on the i.
• Article in The Times (subscription).
• Article in FE News.
• Article in Media FHE. 
• Interview on RT.
• Response blog by Alan Simpson of Million+.
• Another response blog by HEPI’s Hugo Dale-Harris.
• A response from UCU.

I’m sure there are others out there and will be more (The Guardian will be doing something next week), but that’ll do for now.

You may also be interested in:  

• Fairer funding: achieving the impossible

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Read Fairer funding: the case for a graduate levy (HEPI Policy Note) and, exclusively on this site, Fairer funding: the case for a graduate levy (full proposal).

What I’d like for Christmas:

1. We should abolish tuition fees.
2. We should fund English universities well enough that they can continue to be among the best in the world.
3. We should match graduates and jobs so that they have the right skills to get jobs they want and succeed in them.
4. We should ensure that the nation’s skills gaps are plugged. 
5. We shouldn’t ask the taxpayer to pay for more than the public benefit of higher education. 

Is that really such a big ask? Over decades of fiddling with the funding system for higher education in England, apparently so. That’s because some of my wishes are seen as mutually exclusive.  

The funding of higher education England has been played like a game in which if one player wins, another must lose. For example, if students win and don’t have to pay so much, then the taxpayer loses and has to fork out more.

More usually over the past 30 years, it’s the student who’s lost: the burden of cost has shifted consistently to the student, first through student loans in 1991, then top-up loans, then fees of £1,000, then top-up fees of £3,000 and then, in 2012, a trebling of fees to £9,000. 

The funding system is under review at the moment by Philip Augar at the behest of the Prime Minister (as she is at the time of writing). Leaks suggest the balance may swing back away from the student, but the cost will fall instead on either the taxpayer or on universities in the form of slashed  funding. 

However, there is another player in the game, keeping his gambit very quiet in the hope of not being noticed: the employers. 

For too long employers have escaped making a fair contribution. They would, of course, argue that they do contribute through corporate tax and through salaries (which, on average, are higher for graduates). 

That’s true, but this approach leaves them without any skin in the game. They’re not making their investment work for them. 

I have written a paper for the HE sector’s think tank, the Higher Education Policy Institute on how employers could and should pay a ‘graduate levy’ instead of graduates paying fees. This needn’t cost the employers more and, critically, it would mean they get what they need from higher education far better than at present. 

In the process, it would also eliminate tuition fee debt. It would improve courses and graduate employability. And sure enough, it would fund universities well while costing the taxpayer less.

It sounds too good to be true, so please make up your own mind by reading the HEPI paper or I have also produced, exclusively for this website, an expanded version of the full proposal which also includes fuller explanations and counter-arguments to some objections that have been raised with me in discussion.   

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Widening participation: Who gains? This is the text of a presentation I gave recently at a roundtable outlining the case for employers to get involved in the promotion of wider access to higher education.

Why should employers care about widening participation in higher education?

The answer depends on how we see the role of HE in society. Among other things, it is a training ground for the workforce, many of whom work within the private sector. Even if they don’t end up as private sector employees, having a larger supply of graduates is a cultural and economic resource that drives regional, national and global prosperity which is good for business. 

    So, if we fail to have the widest possible participation is HE, it’s like trying to water the flower beds with one foot on the hosepipe.

    Let’s forget social equality, that a fairer society is intrinsically better and that all parts of society benefit from a better whole. There are, I would argue, three clear and distinct commercial benefits 

1. WP in HE allows social diversity in business, particularly at higher levels. That in turn also means other types of diversity: ethnicity, age, gender, disability, etc. This creates companies that look like their customers, greater empathy, broader experience, etc. I remember hearing an HR Director from a high street bank telling a conference she wasn’t interested in diversity, she just wanted the best people for the job. I’m glad to say she was taken to task for failing to recognise that she would not have the best people for the job unless they were diverse, because her customers were diverse and as a business they would fail to understand them if they were not representative of them. 
   
2. Where do we find talent? Does privilege exactly coincide with ability? If so, then no, employers don’t need WP. If not, however, then fishing in a talent pool that includes the disadvantaged means more fish with more talents and a greater probability of a greater number of employers catching the right fish for the job. 
   
3. How do you retain and strengthen your existing workforce? Does it not make sense to keep upskilling your staff, ideally with recognised qualifications taught by institutions that are educational experts? In other words, why don’t more employers work with universities to provide courses, particularly part-time, to their staff? This is the really tough battlefront in WP. Some of the greatest barriers are the need for people to keep working to pay the bills and the fact that people feel they’ve “missed their chance”. 
   

Even if we can all agree that these are real and significant benefits, what can the private sector do about increasing and widening participation? 

We need to follow the pipeline back to find out why individuals do not participate.  Pretty soon you get to schools and colleges. There is a moment – or many moments – when someone – we – could step in and influence a key decision at just the right time. 

In fact more usually, it’s not that people decide not to go to uni. It’s that they don’t make a decision at all and are left with a socially determined default option. For the advantaged, that means they do go to uni. For the disadvantaged, it means they don’t. 

So, who can intervene? Teachers and parents – but they’re just another step back in the pipeline. How do you engage, inform and – using a word David Willetts seemed disturbingly keen at a meeting I attended a couple of days ago – “nudge” them? 

Then there are careers advisers. Sadly, the Government has virtually dismembered the careers profession in England, hacking away like a metronome with an axe. 

I think it’s a scandal that there’s no funding, no national body, no requirement even that ensures that the words ‘career’ or ‘university’ are even spoken to students in post-16 education, let alone actually giving them impartial, high-quality careers support.

We need to make up for this careers advice vacuum. If someone is stuck in a hole – and being in the hole is the only thing they’ve ever known, and they have no ladders or grappling hooks – then you can’t wait for them to magically rise up out of it just because you make things ever more attractive outside the hole. You need to reach out to them to help them up.

And what do we call this reaching out? We call it outreach. Timely interventions that get in the way of their normal daily business – in their schools, their homes or their place of work – and which strike a chord with them.

Outreach is not cheap though. It’s rarely worth it for a private sector organisation to go into a school, say, at a cost of hundreds if not thousands of pounds to talk to maybe 50 students. Any cost-benefit analysis will torpedo that one. 

But what if 50 organisations were willing to chip in and what if it weren’t just one school, but hundreds?  Suddenly the cost is spread, the benefits are increased and the reach is widened. 

We need collaborative outreach between all parties with an interest in WP: universities, Government and the private sector. Collaboration has other benefits too: 

• The outreach gets better because quality assurance is easier to manage;
• The resources can be allocated more effectively through coordination. That means better geographic and demographic coverage at lower cost;
• The whole exercise becomes more measurable, therefore more evidence-based and therefore, in the long-term, ever more effective;
• And follow-up activities can reflect a wider range of options (whether it’s an invitation to a uni summer school, a mentoring project or an invitation to apply for a sponsored degree scheme or a school-leaver programme).

There are many examples of good collaborative outreach projects, but not enough and without enough collaboration. Many are funded by HE. For example, although AimHigher was ‘discontinued’ by the Government, regionally collections of universities have decided to keep some similar arrangements going. There are other third sector initiatives such as Future First, Into University, The Access Group, MyKindaCrowd, Brightside, etc, many of which are engaged in some form of outreach. 

Most of the private sector however hasn’t seen this at its responsibility. So far. 

Without wanting to make this look like a plug, what I’ve been talking about is the reasoning behind another outreach initiative which my own organisation runs: Push. Please forgive me for telling you a little more by way of illustration of how, I believe, collaborative outreach can work and how we’re putting what I believe into practice.

We took a National Careers Award-winning programme of schools outreach that we’d been doing for nearly 20 years and decided to get private sector businesses and universities to support it as a focus for some of their outreach. We received backing from the Association of Graduate Recruiters and a number of key employers. Along with support from various other stakeholders and universities means we now reach nearly 400 schools a year, amounting to over 30,000 students. 

We gather contact details which means that it can be just the first step in a ongoing process of ever-mounting engagement with choices about which options suit them best. This is run as a social enterprise which means that the more organisations we involve, the more backing we get, the wider the reach and the more students and the supporting organisations benefit. It’s all based on a win-win strategy for everyone.

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