The Challenge / Department for Education
Helping young people to succeed in the UK job market
Creating practical guidance, tools and templates to help colleges, employers and students deliver and participate in T Level industry placements.
- Duration
- 4 months (April–July 2018)
- Beneficiaries
- UK students aged 16-23 following the soon to be introduced technical education courses (“T Levels”)
Creating an ecosystem to build a highly skilled technical workforce in the UK
The Government is reforming technical education to address skills
shortages in UK industry and to help young people enter the job market. Among these reforms is a new 45+ working day industry placement that will be compulsory for all students taking T Levels.
The Department for Education commissioned The Challenge to create a comprehensive package of expert guidance, tools and templates to help colleges, employers and students to deliver/participate in these new placements. These resources needed to draw on lessons from the pilot placement programme that The Challenge had delivered in 2017/18.
The Challenge required additional capacity to deliver these within a short timeframe as well as specialist skills in facilitation, writing and design.
Targeted and engaging resources to make industry placements simple for everyone
The Impact Collective provided a team with combined expertise in strategy, marketing and communications. Our experts:
- facilitated a series of workshops with the 21 education providers, project managers and business development teams who had completed the pilot to draw out lessons learned and map out what resources were needed to roll out industry placements more widely
- planned and produced over 25 user-centric resources. Formats included: guidance booklets, presentations, template emails and letters, model agreements, timelines, flowcharts, social media campaigns, promotional marketing materials and videos
- consistently checked content and usability with target audiences, including 16-year old students, and managed / integrated multiple rounds of feedback from key stakeholders, government and sector bodies
The result
Having completed the project, all resources were approved by the Department for Education and were published online by July 2018, allowing 420 education providers to begin implementing industry placements that autumn.
Our team
Nadia Laabs
Francesca Pileggi
Anna Patton
Georgina Bremridge
Bex Dawkes (external collaborator)
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