Firm makes funding plea to help T-level students
BBCThe owner of a marketing agency in East Sussex has said the government should change the financial help given to small businesses to make it easier for them to take on T-Level students.
Last year, a record 20,000 students completed T-levels, which were introduced in 2020 and combine academic study with 315 mandatory hours in the workplace.
However, colleges in some rural and coastal areas, where most employers are small businesses, have struggled to find enough firms to host the placements.
The Department for Education has been contacted for comment.
Sian Conway-Wood's agency, 181st Street, hosts four students from East Sussex College who are taking a T-Level in Business Management and Administration.
The students spend one day a week at the firm's studio in Hastings working on real-life projects and the other four days at college.
Jake Green, 17, said he chose the T-Level because he "just wanted to get into work as soon as possible" to get "real world experience" that he hoped would make him more employable in the future.
Over the past year, the students have worked on social media campaigns for luxury fashion brands and helped run photoshoots, as well as developing promotions to pitch to clients.
Olivia Wilson, 18, said applying what she's learning in a workplace had been beneficial and had also given her "life experience".
She said: "Learning how to turn up to work on time, knowing the dress code, being professional in this setting is really helpful."
The firm does not pay the students for their work but covers their travel costs and lunch expenses.
Conway-Wood said her agency saw T-Levels as "an investment" to developing a "talent pipeline" in the local area, after finding graduates weren't arriving with the skills she needed.
She warned that not all small businesses could afford to do the same because of the cost of staff time to train he students and the initial outlay of buying equipment, which could run into thousands of pounds.
"We need a laptop, we need cameras to train them on, we need quite a lot of equipment and, for a lot of small businesses, you even need the chair and the desk for them to sit at", she said.
The government pays a grant of £550 per student to the college and employers can claim back some of the costs of hosting a student, but not all.
Conway-Wood said the biggest problem was that money had to be paid out before it could be claimed back and some small businesses simply "don't have that kind of capital reserve to be able to do that".
'Really robust qualifications'
East Sussex College was one of the first colleges to introduce T-levels, which are equivalent to three A-levels, when they were launched by the Conservative government in 2020.
In 2025/26, it had 432 students studying T-Levels and, from September, it is adding qualifications in business and marketing and in cybersecurity.
"We are increasing our enrolments every single year" said Lucy Mitchell, assistant principal.
"They are really robust qualifications."
Mitchell said it had "taken time" to build a network of businesses.
"If you are a college in the middle of a city or near some very large organisations, you're able to provide a range of placements for a number of different T levels" she said.
In East Sussex, the majority of firms are small businesses who will typically host between one and four students for a single T-Level.
Earlier this year the government relaxed the rules around T-Level work placements to allow pupils to fulfil their hours with more than one employer.
It also lifted limits on how much of the work could be carried out remotely to try to make it easier to find employers in rural areas.
The government has promised to put technical education on an equal footing with academic pathways in a bid to get more young people into employment.
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