This summer around 1,300 students in 43 providers were the first to complete T levels. This cohort was the first of four waves in the staggered rollout of these new qualifications. At this key moment, it is worthwhile recapping on some of the aims for T levels and what their rollout may mean for students. One of the original ambitions for T levels was that “every young person, after an excellent grounding in the core academic subjects and a broad and balanced curriculum to age 16, is presented with two choices: the academic or the technical option.”
It is efforts to streamline this technical option that have been most contentious. It initially appeared as though the government would remove a swathe of both technical and applied general qualifications. The government has subsequently softened this stance. Whilst funding will be removed from qualifications that overlap with T levels, other qualifications, including many BTECs, appear to have had a stay of execution.
