The T-Level qualification: bridging, blurring or deepening the Academic-Vocational divide in post-16 education?

Abstract

Vocational education in England has been continuously reformed over the past 70 years with policymakers attempting to create a vocational qualification of equal status and reputation to academic qualifications. To address this policy churn, which has damaged the reputation of vocational education and training (VET) in England and cemented its position as the poor relation to academic education, T-Levels were introduced. Intended to bring radical change, policymakers announced a significantly different new technical qualification that would bridge the divide between vocational and academic English education.To explore this policy reform, this research adopts a biographical approach with a case-study centred on the perspectives of two groups of students from the same education institution and socio-economic contexts studying either a new T-Level course, or A-Levels. Quantitative and qualitative data provides empirical evidence of students’ first-hand, individual experience and perceptions of T-Levels; the perceived progression opportunities afforded by the new qualification in comparison to the well-established A-Level; and their perspectives on the extent to which the T-Level qualification is raising the status of technical and vocational education to equal academic. The multi-dimensional case-study contextualises students’ perspectives within their familial, community and institutional contexts.Overall, the study showed that the new T-Level qualification raised students’ expectations of their progression opportunities, so facilitating development of a technically skilled workforce of graduates rather than college leavers. The technical skills developed on T-Level courses have the potential to enable vocational students to access elite technical occupations beyond the scope of other vocational education. However, issues of inclusivity, access and logistics put the qualification at risk of becoming an elitist course, only available to the few.Students’ perceptions of post-16 qualifications confirm the persistent English academic-vocational divide. The internalised notion that academic education is intrinsically higher status and superior to vocational binds T-Levels within a deficit model, as second choice for ‘non-academic’ students. However, T-Levels occupy an elite position within the vocational qualification landscape, gaining status through alignment with the academic and distinction from the vocational. In this way, the qualification may blur the dichotomy, if not bridge it.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Nicola Jayne Kingsley: orcid.org/0000-0002-3774-8720

ORCID for Michael Tomlinson: orcid.org/0000-0002-1057-5188

ORCID for Michaela Brockmann: orcid.org/0000-0003-4978-1883

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