Supplytrain’s T Level employer engagment service referred over 650 T Level industry placement opportunities to schools and colleges across England, over an 18 month period!

Between October 2022 and March 2024, Supplytrain’s T Level employer engagement service referred over 650 T Level industry placement opportunities to schools and colleges across England, as part of our work as a T Level Growth Partner for the Department for Education (DfE).

As a T Level Growth partner, our remit was to identify, encourage and support SMEs that could host high-quality industry placements in Business and Administration, and Legal, Finance and Accounting T Level routes.

To do this, we set up the ‘T Level Gateway’ service and went about marketing to 1,000s of SMEs through email marketing and social media campaigns. The initial T Level employer engagement was a real success, as we received over 3,000 unique visitors to our website – with 12% of those visitors going on to book a call with our T Level Gateway team to learn more about ‘office-based’ T Levels and industry placements.

The T Level Employer Engagement Service

Our T Level experts would provide SMEs with business-focused, practical, phone support – explaining office-based industry placements, checking employers understood their role and responsibilities and giving them hints and tips on the types of projects or tasks they could offer students.

Where SMEs were keen to learn more and appeared suitable for hosting ‘office-based’ industry placements, we’d understand how many students they might look to initially support, before finding them a local T Level provider they could continue the conversation with.

We referred over 650 opportunities in total, and there was commitment for an additional 250 placements from employers that we couldn’t refer due to no local T Level provider being available or a route, such as childcare, being outside our remit. In these circumstances, we did still provide support where possible.

The importance of working with providers

As well as supporting SMEs through our T Level Employer Engagement service, we also forged great working relationships with many schools and colleges across the country.

We understand that resources to source industry placements are tight in a lot of schools and colleges, but where employer engagement teams made time to explain their industry placement offer to us e.g. time of year placements run, the types of tasks and projects that they want students to complete, we were able to give employers more personalised information and pass over leads to the right person at a school or college at the right time, with the right expectations to keep the momentum and increase the number of referrals that resulted in starts.

Ruhina Mehdi, Work Experience and Industry Team Leader, from Stanmore College said:

“Supplytrain were helpful and reliable to work with as a bolt-on to sourcing industry placements for our Business Administration students. The employers they referred to us all understood their industry placement commitment and were keen to help our students learn through work.

“Supplytrain staff would even chase employers on our behalf, if they weren’t responding to our calls, or keep employers up-to-date if we weren’t able to speak to them within a couple of weeks of signposting. This meant we were able to convert a lot of the interest into placements.”

The importance of industry placements

T Level students cannot be graded without an industry placement, so it is vital that T Level providers put time and resource into sourcing industry placements.

Thankfully, the DfE recognises this and ringfences £550 per student to fund staff time for sourcing industry placements and other related costs such as IT software to manage placements. However, not all schools and colleges have the staff structure to allocate the required resource to engaging employers and nurturing relationships, which is where Supplytrain can help…

T Level employer engagement and support

We now provide a holistic ‘T Level Gateway’ service for multi-academy trusts, schools and colleges that want an expert team to engage local employers and support them through to offering industry placements. This service consists of a small monthly fee, where we:

• Support you to put together an employer engagement strategy
• Identify ‘top targets’ for industry placements in your locality
• Market your T Level offer to employers of all sizes, in all sectors
• Hold initial conversations with employers: explaining what’s in it for them and their role and responsibilities
• Book site visits for your team
• Account manage employers, getting job descriptions, tasks and projects, commitment to roles and responsibilities, etc
• Send out regular communication to keep employers engaged in supporting your students
• Provide feedback from employers to support you to develop your T Level offer over time

Ultimately, we provide an affordable, outsourced, high-quality, T Level employer engagement and support service that generates industry placement commitment, raises your profile with local employers and allows your staff to focus on delivery and student support.