Anyone who has sat through a mind-numbing week of photocopying at a firm of solicitors, or doing little except making coffees at a high-street bank, knows that work experience placements are not always as valuable as their proponents would have you believe.

Don’t forget that by the time students have completed their GCSEs and signed up for a college or sixth form, many are already getting real work experience in a supermarket, say, or a café.

And yet, work placements remain an unmoveable part of the education experience. The ongoing government reforms to technical education mean employment-based learning is growing in importance, and work experience is now a requirement for nearly all college students and sixth-formers.

In her 2011 review of vocational education, Baroness Wolf recommended increasing work-related provision for students aged 16 and older, stressing that changes to the labour market and youth unemployment following the post-2008 crash made the need to improve young people’s “employability skills” more pressing than ever.

Introduced two years later, 16 to 19 study programmes developed by the Department for Education (DfE) have students working towards a “core aim” - usually a qualification, but they take part in other activities, too, including work experience. Lord Sainsbury’s 2016 review of technical education, and the government’s Post-16 Skills Plan that followed, expanded the role of workplace learning in colleges and sixth forms still further.

But is any work experience good work experience? And what does “good” look like?

For starters, how long does work experience need to last to be considered worthwhile? And how do colleges make sure there are sufficient, appropriate opportunities available for all students?

Currently, the work experience requirement does not have a mandatory length, although it is usually around two weeks across a two-year study programme. T levels, which are due to start being taught at 52 providers next year, will include mandatory work placements of at least 45 days.

On top of that, study programme work experience and T-level industry placements must take place “off site”. In its guidance to providers, the DfE gives a rather tautological explanation for this, saying that “work experience provided within a simulated working environment is not the same as external work experience because it does not take place within a real workplace”.

‘Genuine or real experiences’

As a result of these changes, there are legitimate concerns about the sheer volume of work involved in managing these placements for education providers and employers. Last year, a pilot scheme involving around 2,500 students at 21 providers revealed difficulties, particularly for colleges in rural and coastal areas, in delivering placements across a variety of industries that may not be readily available on students’ doorsteps.

Why go this far? Is there no way of offering good work experience within a college? It seems the answer is “no”. In a 2014 report on study programmes, Ofsted makes a distinction between “internal” and “external” work experience. The former takes place in, for example, a college travel agency, restaurant or car workshop, and often involves working for real customers. The report concludes that while this type provides “valuable experiences”, it is not a substitute for the “external” type, which provides “genuine or real experiences” in an actual place of work.

In his 2018 paper “Incidental workplace learning and technical education in England” for the Journal of Vocational Education & Training, Bill Esmond says these “realistic work environments” - which had long provided work experience within colleges - were now seemingly judged to be of too basic a level to advance learners’ knowledge to industry standards.

Esmond, who is an associate professor in learning and employment at the University of Derby, says: “There’s an expectation that young people will only really gain practical and useful skills for work if they are in the workplace.

“When study programme placements came in, several colleges said, ‘We have an environment where people learn work-based skills in college - in a travel centre that operates like a commercial travel agent or a restaurant for catering students’. The government said this isn’t what it’s about. People need to be in industry.

He continues: “This assumes that people will learn more on the job than in college. They may learn more about the discipline of a job and the behaviours that are expected of them in work. But whether they are learning meaningful skills is another thing.”

Why do students learn in a work placement setting? The idea that learning can occur as a consequence of, or simultaneously with, work activities has received support from theories of informal (or situated) learning as well as theories of incidental learning.

The government’s rationale for industry placements is for learners to pick up technical skills, and could be viewed through the lens of situated learning, which Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger define as learning through an immersive process of “legitimate peripheral participation” as newcomers among “communities of practice” or “old-timers”.

It is, however, resource intensive for the employer, as it takes them away from their daily business without their gaining a highly qualified member of staff at the end, as with an apprentice.

The concept of incidental learning is perhaps applied best to the “soft skills” that can be picked up through work-based encounters. Victoria Marsick and Karen Watkins posit that incidental learning is that which takes place as a “by-product” of another task, be it interpersonal interaction, sensing an organisational culture or trial-and-error processes. It is hard to plan for this type of learning, and people are not always conscious of it, but it almost always takes place, Marsick and Watkins say.

With the DfE’s focus on “developing the practical and technical skills required for the occupation” during placements, these soft skills that incidental learning is good at providing are less valued by the government.

In his paper, Esmond adds: “The concept of incidental learning provides less guidance about the contribution that unconscious processes can make to the learning by young people of knowledge unavailable in colleges but its assumptions appear to be shared by the Skills Plan and, it will be argued, by much work-based learning practice in contemporary post-16 education.”

Becci Newton, deputy director of employment policy research at the Institute for Employment Studies, says that, from Wolf to Sainsbury, there has been a shift from work experience and gaining what the Confederation of British Industry calls “employability skills” - or soft skills - to industry placements, where young people are expected to gain greater technical skills in the workplace. She adds: “With work placements, the young person is meant to develop technical and vocational skills, not just be looking over someone’s shoulder. The kids are meant to be there doing worthwhile and productive things.”

Newton, who was one of the researchers involved in the evaluation of the industry placement pilots, says that when the placements were good, young people really benefited from them, and often did pick up technical skills. However, quite often, their learning tended more towards soft skills.

That’s the theory so far, but how workable are good industry placements in practice? What is being expected of businesses and industry is “huge”, says Newton. “We’re asking so much of employers already. They’re expected to go into schools and talk about how to apply for work, offer careers guidance, work experience, and a lot are doing apprenticeships.”

For some industries, investment in apprenticeships is possible, but it is a lot harder in the case of placements. Some highly technical equipment can take 12 months to master, for example - impossible to achieve in a placement lasting just a few weeks.

Is it workable?

Newton says there is enormous value in work experience and placements for young people for whom education is not an easy experience and who may not understand its relationship to the workplace.

“If they can see how continuing in education will help their progress in work, it can help with their motivation,” she says. However, “the ambition is one thing but the reality is another”.

Newton is certain there will need to be flexibility and changes to the configuration of industry placements. The sheer amount of work that will go into organising such a large number of students taking long work placements is one of the potential hurdles for T levels to surmount.

Research by City & Guilds suggests there will be around 180,000 industry placements per year when T levels are fully up and running; its managing director, Kirstie Donnelly, said in a research briefing that this represents “a huge uplift in what is being delivered currently”, adding that “the extended length of the work placement is an enormous step change from what is happening in industry today, with most employers only offering a week or two of work experience”.

To add to this, colleges and training providers “only have small numbers of people responsible for facilitating work placements, so they will need to reorganise, train and possibly even recruit to meet demand”.

In its rationale for longer placements, the DfE says this “ensures students are given enough time to master the essentials, and that the employer has the opportunity to develop and shape young people’s skills”. For employers, “it means a young person can genuinely contribute to their workplace once they’ve settled in”.

The administrative burden of organising industry placements falls to the education provider. Estimated numbers of T-level students have not yet been released by the DfE but, putting together figures for an imaginary college with, say, 500 T-level students can give a sense of the work involved in administering placements. If each of these students completed the minimum required hours of placement, that represents:

157,500 hours of placements that need to be timetabled;

45,000 journeys to and from a place of work that students will need to make;

1,500 inductions, mid-point and final reviews of student progress on placements;

500 employers that may need to be secured, across a spectrum of industries, with potentially hundreds more courted to help match students to appropriate employers.

However, providers will be compensated - somewhat. On top of the base rate of funding for T levels, providers will be given £275 per student per year to contribute towards the costs of delivering industry placements. As a crude calculation, for a college with 500 T-level students, this would represent £137,500 of funding.

Following the industry placements pilot last year, the charity that coordinated them, The Challenge, compiled guidance for providers on how to deliver such placements.

The Challenge advises colleges and schools delivering T levels to use some of the extra funding available to employ dedicated staff to administer placements.

The charity adds: “Some education providers gave their existing staff responsibility for sourcing industry placements. However, this often resulted in too large a workload, causing plans to fall behind or further support to be bought in.

“In order to avoid this, education providers found that it was best to create new roles, bringing in new staff to provide focused support on implementing industry placements, such as sourcing employers, matching students with placements, preparing students and managing them.

“Project-managing industry placements implementation can be done by an existing staff member as long as they are given sufficient time in their role to do this.”

Rural, coastal and remote

Another concern that came out of the pilot was from providers in rural, coastal and remote areas. Under current plans, students will not be able to finish their T-levels unless they have successfully completed the placement. This presents a potentially major stumbling block for the national roll-out of the new technical qualifications.

The issues surrounding rurality are threefold. First, in order to deliver the 25 T-level subjects due to be available from 2023, appropriate work placements need to be found in industries relevant to the subject being taken, which may not be possible in all parts of the country. Second, the length of the placements can be a barrier in areas with a propensity of small and medium-sized enterprises, which may be unwilling or unable to take on a learner. Third - and most fundamentally - travelling to and from placements is more difficult in rural areas, where there may be poor bus services.

Truro and Penwith College, in Cornwall, is about as rural, coastal and remote as they come. The college’s director of teaching and learning, Andy Stittle, says changes are needed for providers in rural areas if T levels are going to work. “If there was flexibility with the 45-day requirement, that would be easier. A lot of employers would like to do one day a week - 45 days would be difficult, then, when a college year is around 36 weeks. An employer could end up with having to take two students at once.”

The future of applied generals - level 3 qualifications such as BTECs and Cambridge Technicals, which sit alongside A levels - hangs over rural colleges, too. Level 3 qualifications, excluding A levels, T levels and apprenticeships, are currently being reviewed by the government. Part of the rationale for introducing T levels was to streamline the 13,000 level 3 technical qualifications into the 25 T levels on offer. The fate of applied generals, which are taken by around 200,000 students a year, is still unclear, although education secretary Damian Hinds hinted there would be a place for them in the post-T-level landscape.

Uncertainty remains, however. At Truro and Penwith, for instance, even finding an additional placement for the mere 120 students on science BTECs would be an almost insurmountable challenge, Stittle says. “Work placements are valuable, but there needs to be some flexibility.”

George Ryan is an FE reporter for Tes. He tweets @GeorgeMRyan

This article originally appeared in the 15 February 2019 issue under the headline “Nice work (if you can get it)”