Posted on July 25th, 2025
We spoke to Oliver Rosen, Head of Faculty of Computing, Media and Social Science, Acland Burghley School after their Open Evening for T Levels and their new Media Production Suite launch to talk about their experience of delivering T Levels, with all of the challenges and successes. Oliver reflects on the journey that he and the school have been on and shares his advice for those delivering, or about to deliver T Levels.
What T Levels is Acland Burghley currently delivering?
We’re currently delivering the Media, Broadcast and Production T level, but across LaSWAP [which is a consortium of four schools], we are introducing three new T Levels in 2025; Marketing, Digital and Early Years Education.
How does the consortium work?
We have four sites, La Sainte Union, William Ellis, Acland Burghley and Parliament Hill. What the consortium enables us to do is to give the widest range of A Level courses available because we draw upon provision and expertise from the four schools. In terms of T Levels the set up enables collaboration between the different departments across the four schools. That might look like shared curriculum planning, revision initiatives and so forth. We can draw upon different departments, we can get together for shared planning, open evenings as well as celebrating student endeavours.
And that takes us nicely onto the Open Evening in December. Can you explain your experience of that night?
We have two open evenings, one where families come in and look at the whole range of courses available but because of the quite specific and technical nature of the T Level we offer a second evening to elucidate provision around the T Level. What we do is take expressions of interest and we use it to promote our T Level specific evening, which we’ve been doing for the last couple of years. It’s given everyone more awareness of T Levels and drawn in different stakeholders and those supporting the T Levels, those in higher education, in industry or in the borough. It gives us an opportunity for our students to promote the type of work done on the T Level. I’m interested in seeing how this can progress in the next few years, I think we’ll still draw upon our industry collaborators, but I think we’ll be able to celebrate our T Level student outcomes by way of promoting the courses and the successes of it.
What is the reaction for current T Level students, for the course and to the new Media Suite? Have you noticed an improvement in their development and in their work?
What’s rapidly emerged is student’s intrinsic motivation that the new resources coupled with industry partnerships and contextualised learning fosters. We’re starting to get a very clear idea about how to structure and sequence the course from that. There’s a fine balance between generating interest and excitement against technical skill and professional behaviours. It’s very easy to get overexcited seeing global companies, Oscar award-winning VFX and makeup artists presenting to students. The challenge is to balance that excitement with real expectations of what the course and industry demand.
We’re learning very quickly, through our partners, there are lots of different experiences that lend themselves really well to T Level learning, it might be visiting Higher Education institutions, VFX houses, or going to visit ITV studios for an understanding of the industry. To begin with students get a broad sense of what the creative industries are, enabling informed decisions about skills development on the course that are relevant and purposeful. If you think about the shift, which is a classroom-led teacher from GCSE to T Level, you’re now engaging with professionals who are lending their expertise to your curriculum crafting, which affords a very different style of learning. It is having a positive impact on learner outcomes. The challenge is to be able to foster the curiosity that leads to an understanding of the robust nature of the core content and the type of detail needed to be successful, conducting the Employee SET Projects and the occupational specialisms.
We conduct a more granular approach to researching our industry partners in preparation for placements. Our T Levellers have experience days across the creative industries with Havas Village UK, The Mill and Moonbug Entertainment, looking at their kind of pipeline and workflow. Coming back from those experience days, we put students through a mock interview process making it a really challenging experience so they understand the nature of the industry, their requirements so they don’t take the placements for granted. This provides pragmatic insight into the types of experiences they will have in the industry and calibrates their approach to it.
Can we touch upon how the industry partners and how you’ve built those relationships.
There has been a number of ways of building those partnerships, which take a very specific skill set and experience. You are going to need to draw upon the support from the Education Training Foundation such as Industry Insight days. These are a very quick way into meeting like-minded people that may have access to opportunities. We’re very lucky in our locality of Camden to have a large concentration of businesses and a borough-wide approach like Camden Learning. I think being strategic about your local market information and having an understanding about how your T Level fits in with the region and the locality is absolutely fundamental to any strategy you’ve got.
It’s very much about drawing upon the skills in the room, we’ve got a 20-year history of supporting journeys and creating partnerships. That’s why we felt we were in a good position to deliver the Media, Broadcast and Production T Level, but it has most definitely been enhanced by the Industry Insights days that have been provided by ETF. I think that the more chances you take to engage with industry, the more likelihood you have of drawing that industry in. You have to be realistic about your expectations, I would have a range of different ways industry can support you, that could be anything, providing workshops, working to a live brief or mentoring. I think from an industry perspective, it’s quite daunting taking on young people and any opportunity that you can take by way of open evenings, sharing student work to really bring the students to life in terms of their skill sets or their ambitions goes a long way into bringing industry with you. It is important to demystify the idea that they may have about these non-entities that are just going to be drawn upon their resources, and their productivity aids partnerships. If you can bring the students to life, it’s really helpful, you can demonstrate how students are going to be an asset, perhaps not on the first day, but over time and over the duration of the.
We found that with Camden Learning and that with the borough, which has brokered some really great meetings for us. There can be a really lovely partnership between education and industry and that gap in between, from either the borough or the Education Training Foundation, that can really help paint the purposeful nature of the T Level and where those young people fit alongside it in terms of their education and their step into industry.
What was really helpful for us were the Industry Insight days from ETF, as well as other parts, but that’s what springs to mind as the most important to us in our journey. To use ITV as an example, taking on board that Industry Insights opportunity meant that not only were we in a group of like-minded educators, but also the right person from ITV, in our case it was Laura Scougall. We moved from a broad stroke T Level understanding to having acute industry awareness.
And speaking of Laura Scougall, you presented together at the National T level Conferences, how was that experience of sharing your journeys to other T Level providers?
What an incredible opportunity it was to speak alongside aligned practitioners of the T Level, the Department for Education with the deeply committed Laura, Head of ITV Academy. Laura’s insight into the industry, professionalism and enthusiasm is infectious while providing exceptional opportunities and understanding of the creative industries. It was a defining moment that underscored the importance of collaboration and partnerships in delivering the T Level.
Have you seen any changes in the perception of T Level students?
Yes, students’ awareness of the T Level is improving year in year out, not least because of our T Level ambassadors that do such a good job in promoting the aims of and experience on the course. We encourage all our students to create a digital portfolio of the core content and the performance outcomes that they’re working towards – which is a really excellent endorsement of T Level learning. Employers are responding really well to the outcomes that the students are doing which is vital to the sustainability of the course.
Where do you think you are now from when you first started?
With T Levels, you need to have a very specific skill set, as the Organisation and Individual Training Needs Analysis that ETF suggests. Once you can identify needs you can plan, implement and deliver, I think there’s always an element of jumping off the cliff and going for it. We’re now confident in the fact that we can deliver T Levels in terms of having the right expertise in the room – we have incredibly dedicated teaching staff with expertise. We’re much more confident having planned and crafted the curriculum in terms of delivery, but we’ll be more confident when we go through the first set of exam results and will be able to review and refine our practice.
We are completely elated with the resources that the planning has led to, we’re confident that we have allocated budgets the right way that we have got the right equipment which is in line with the specification of the course. We are now in a position to review assessment so we can measure the rate of progress that students are making over the two years appropriately.
Firstly, what successes have you seen? And have there been any challenges that you’ve faced and overcome?
We are really pleased with the student buy in and industry enagement. Our students have risen to the challenge and engaged with industry that is supporting the course’s aims. The robust pipeline and opportunity for students, not least through ITV Academy, Havas Uk, Moonbug Entertainment, Curve Media, Harriet Wilde and our resident Orchestra Age of Enlightment. Industry engagement also represents the biggest challenge as well, so it is a kind of rollercoaster journey.
Other challenges involve helping people understand what a T Level is, which is why so much goes into drawing upon our students to tell the story, using our open evenings to tell the story and our outcomes also tell a story. The other challenge, is once your students are on board about T Levels, it’s about making sure they understand the robust nature and challenge of the course. A further challenge is taking a Year 11 student having just done their GCSEs and instilling those professional behaviours, that is a steep learning curve that our students are doing a brilliant job with, but it demands a lot.
To reach those really successful outcomes is another challenge, the T Level course is content and technical skill heavy so it needs to be managed strategically. You’re spinning quite a few different plates at once; exams; synopitic assessments; work placements – that’s a challenge but one that we’ve relished. Leading up to that, the crafting of the curriculum and the resources needed, any teacher will probably cite that as the biggest challenge – appriopriate resourcing through quality first teaching mechanisms to ensure that you’ve got a clear crafted curriculum is no easy task! However, it is one that can be broken down into smaller managable chunks.
Is there any advice you would like to give those teachers or organisations that are thinking about delivering T Levels
I would say is that there are disparate aspects to a T Level, but from our Media, Broadcast and Production point of view, Media education is still Media education and Technical skills are still Technical skills. As advice to teachers, I’d say look at your existing courses to see what lends itself as a starting point. For example, gathering existing pre-production documentation to align with the MBP T Level specification. The next piece of advice is to join a Network and those Industry Insight days. The Networks have been invaluable because you meet like-minded people and you can divide the labour and share the load, I think that’s really important. That one has enabled our planning to be a little bit more digestible and a little bit easier. Do create a network to share your resources and collaborate with each other. And use your Area Relationship Development Lead (ARDL), their knowledge and help is invaluable and they can pull from so many strands to help you. A huge shout out to our ARDL Katrina Cotton for the fantastic lead and support she has provided.