What to ask a school or college before your child starts a T Level

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

A prospectus and an open evening are built to reassure. The questions below are built to get past that, into the kind of specifics a school running a T Level well should be able to answer on the spot — and where a real DfE source exists behind the question, it's linked here so you can check the answer yourself rather than take it on trust.

Industry placements: track record and backup plans

The school or college, not your child, carries responsibility for organising the mandatory industry placement — DfE's guidance for providers is explicit that providers "have overall responsibility for organising and supporting the delivery of the industry placement." That makes their actual track record fair to ask about directly, not just their policy:

• How many students in this specific subject completed a placement last year? Completion isn't uniform across subjects or providers — this site's guide to who arranges your industry placement sets out the DfE figures behind that variation, including which subject area has struggled most nationally.
• Which employers or sectors has the placement network actually used in the last two years? Named examples tell you more than a general assurance does.
• What's the plan if a placement falls through — an employer withdrawing, a business closing, an illness? This site's guide to placement hours and shortfalls covers exactly what DfE requires a provider to do when that happens, and what counts as a genuine exception.
• Who is the named member of staff responsible for placements, and how do you reach them?

Entry requirements — and what if my child doesn't quite meet them

There's no single national GCSE bar for T Levels. DfE's own page for parents says plainly that "schools and colleges set their own entry requirements for T Levels" — so a figure you've read generally may not be what this specific college asks for.

• What GCSE grades does this particular T Level course ask for — not the college's general sixth-form entry bar, the course itself? This site's guide to T Level entry requirements shows how much this varies between colleges even in the same subject.
• If my child is close but not quite there, what happens? Not yet having grade 4 in GCSE English or maths doesn't rule a student out on its own — DfE guidance treats it as something to work towards during the course rather than a locked gate. Ask specifically whether this school runs a T Level Foundation Year for students who need a run-up year first, since not every provider offers one.

Outcomes: what actually happened to last year's cohort

• What proportion of last year's students passed, and what did they go on to do — university, a degree apprenticeship, a job? A school confident in its own provision should answer this about its own students without hesitation.
• Can I check that independently, rather than taking the school's word for it? Yes. DfE publishes provisional T Level results broken down by individual provider through its Explore Education Statistics table builder, covering pass rates and placement completion college by college. One thing worth knowing before you rely on it: DfE says the provider-level breakdown "usually published in March will no longer be updated as part of this publication series" from 2027, moving instead into a new 16 to 19 performance measures publication — so check the date on whatever figure you're shown.

How established this subject actually is at this school

Not every T Level has been running for the same length of time, and not every school has taught a given subject for long. T Levels only started in September 2020, and DfE's own subject list shows the rollout still happening in phases — tlevels.gov.uk lists Social Care and Sport as subjects not due to start until September 2028, while Finance is closing to new enrolments from September 2026. Nationally, the churn is real: of 255 providers included in one recent DfE results release, 94 had only started teaching T Levels for the first time in 2023 (Provisional T Level results, 2024/25, DfE).

• How many years has this school actually run this specific T Level?
• How many students have completed it here so far?

Being on DfE's list of registered T Level providers confirms a school is approved to deliver T Levels — it says nothing about how long it's run any particular subject, which is exactly why this is worth asking directly rather than assuming.

Support if things go wrong

• What pastoral or wellbeing support is built in if my child struggles with the workload? It isn't an informal add-on: DfE's own funding guidance assumes 150 hours of "employability, enrichment and pastoral" support across the two years for every T Level student (T Levels funding guide 2025 to 2026, DfE) — ask how the school actually uses that time, and who a struggling student talks to.
• If the placement collapses partway through, does my child start again from zero? No — DfE guidance requires a provider to make alternative arrangements with a different employer when a placement ends for reasons outside a student's control, and hours already completed still count (guidance for education providers, GOV.UK). This site's guide to placement hours and shortfalls covers what happens in the rarer case where the hours genuinely can't be made up.

Taking this into the conversation

None of this is meant as an interrogation. A school that runs its T Level provision well should be able to answer all five sets of questions on the spot, with real numbers rather than reassurance — and where the answer is vague, or defaults to "we'll sort it if it happens," that's useful information too, worth weighing up before results day rather than after.