Blending Academic and Vocational Education: The Impact of T Levels

Upper-secondary technical and vocational education and training (VET) is responsible for educating a large proportion of the world’s population, significantly impacting productivity and economic growth. Over recent years, there has been a global trend towards combining academic and vocational tracks into one pathway within upper secondary education. In this paper, we analyse the short-run impacts of one of the most recent of these efforts – the T level reforms in England. T levels are large VET qualifications that are more academically oriented than existing VET qualifications and are designed in-part to support progression to further academic or vocational study. Using a combination of quasi-experimental methods (instrumental variables, regression adjustment and matching), we find mixed impacts of T levels on student achievement and progression. T level students are significantly less likely to achieve a full level 3 by the age of 18. However, T level students are more likely to progress to advanced apprenticeships and higher technical study. We show that these impacts are more negative for the marginal student and when considering other level 3 vocational pathways as an alternate form of study. We also find heterogeneity by T level pathway (subject), indicating that some pathways are performing significantly better than others.