T Level results so far: what the data actually shows

Checked: 2026-08-31. Funding, entry requirements and tariff points move — verify before relying on them.

T Levels started in September 2020, so by results day 2026 five cohorts had finished the two-year course, giving five years of published outcomes data. This sets out what that data actually shows — pass rates, industry placement completion, and the gaps by subject — checked against DfE's own statistics releases and against independent scrutiny from Ofsted and the National Audit Office, rather than repeating results-day headlines uncritically.

The latest results, in outline

DfE's provisional T Level results release for academic year 2025 to 2026, published 13 August 2026, covers the fifth cohort, who started in September 2024, across 21 available T Level pathways. 19,665 students received results, up 65% on the 11,909 who did the year before, taught across 307 schools and colleges, up from 255. 92.6% achieved a Pass or above: 23.7% got a straight Pass, 50.8% a Merit, 17.8% a Distinction and 0.4% a Distinction*, with 7.2% only partially achieving the qualification.

The pass rate, cohort by cohort

DfE publishes each cohort's results twice — provisional on results day, then revised a year later once late placements, resits and remarking are in — and its own release warns against comparing pass rates over time for exactly this reason, since the published timeseries mixes provisional and revised figures. The fairer comparison uses each cohort's first-published, provisional figure:

So the honest picture isn't a smooth improving line: the pass rate fell for three years running, from 92.2% in 2022 to 88.7% in 2024, before recovering to 91.4% in 2025 and 92.6% in 2026. 2025's figure has itself since been revised up to 93.5% — a reminder that 2026's 92.6% is still provisional and will likely move too. A gender gap runs through every year of this data, of roughly similar size each time: 93.5% of female students passed against 90.9% of male students in 2022, 94.9% against 85.8% in 2023, and 96.1% against 89.3% in 2026.

Industry placements: the other headline number

The 45-plus day industry placement is the feature that most distinguishes a T Level, so its completion rate matters as much as the pass rate. In 2025/26, 97.2% of students completed their placement — 552, or 2.8%, did not, a 0.7 percentage point rise in non-completion on the year before, when 97.9% completed. That's a small but real dip, not an improvement, and it varies by subject: among the larger pathways, Digital Support Services, Building Services Engineering, and Design and Development for Engineering and Manufacturing had the weakest completion, around 5% non-completion, while Education and Early Years, Health, and Management and Administration were strongest, each under 2%.

Where the subject-level gaps are

Pass rates vary far more by subject than the headline 92.6% suggests. Craft and Design, Health, Education and Early Years, Management and Administration, and Design, Surveying and Planning for Construction all passed more than 95% of their students in 2025/26. At the other end, Onsite Construction — a smaller pathway now being phased out, with only 213 results this year — passed just 75.1%, the weakest of any T Level, though its small, shrinking cohort makes that figure less representative than a larger subject's. The year before, Design and Development for Engineering and Manufacturing was the weakest larger subject at 81.1%, against a joint high of 97.8% for Legal Services and Education and Early Years.

What independent reviewers have found

DfE's own releases are not the only word on this. Ofsted's thematic review of the first T Levels, published 20 July 2023, found "there remains considerable work to do": placement quality varied widely between providers, and at some, no students progressed from the first year of the course into the second. It also found Health and Science students had not been well prepared for how academic the course turned out to be, and around 1,600 students on that T Level had their first-year results regraded after Ofqual found the original exam papers "did not secure a sufficiently valid or reliable measure of student performance."

More recent scrutiny has focused on cost as much as teaching quality. The National Audit Office's March 2025 investigation found DfE was paying providers roughly £5,500 to £7,000 per student for 2024-25, against up to about £4,800 for other level 3 qualifications, while DfE's case that the extra cost is worthwhile still rests on a projected benefit, not a proven one — the NAO's own words being that "the future economic benefits are uncertain and it will take time for benefits to be realised." A Public Accounts Committee follow-up raised similar concerns about value for money and employer capacity for placements as the programme grows.

What this data doesn't yet tell us

What isn't in any of this is what happens to T Level students in the years after they finish. DfE's Longitudinal Education Outcomes data — the earnings and employment records used to judge how other qualifications pay off over time — hasn't yet been published for T Level leavers, and the NAO has itself noted that so few students have completed a T Level so far that DfE's estimate of their economic value is a projection, not a measured result. The only destinations evidence so far is a DfE-commissioned survey of the first cohort only, self-reported nine to ten months after they finished in 2023: 44% had gone on to a degree, 40% into paid work and 13% into an apprenticeship. That's a useful early signal, not a substitute for multi-year earnings data that would show whether a T Level actually pays off against the alternatives. Nobody should read a career or salary outcome into these results yet — that data doesn't exist.