Baker Dearing celebrated T Levels Week 2025 by highlighting stories of students who had progressed to amazing destinations after completing one of the gold-standard technical qualifications.

Students like Alina Safonova, who has secured an assistant project manager apprenticeship at one of Europe’s leading railway infrastructure service suppliers Colas Rail, an employer she worked with during her placement. This is after achieving a Distinction in her design, surveying and planning T Level at Thomas Telford UTC.

Alina credits the UTC with “guiding me slowly out of my comfort zone and pushing me towards what I wanted and in the right direction for my future career to be successful.”

She previously worked with Colas Rail as part of her placement with the Midland Metro Alliance. This is a consortium working on extending metro services in the West Midlands, which is also a long-time patron of Thomas Telford UTC.

In her new role, Alina is planning and delivering projects while also studying towards a degree in project management.

She is involved with scheduling, budgeting, document control and communication between teams, and says it is giving her great hands-on learning experience that builds practical project management skills alongside academic knowledge.

T Levels Week seeks to raise awareness of qualifications

Katherine Condie is another UTC T Level success story that we celebrated during the Week. She has progressed to a biochemistry degree at the University of Lincoln after completing a science T Level at University Technical College Norfolk (UTCN).

“Trying to get an industry placement for a science career at such a young age is really challenging – but not if you do T Level,” said Katherine, speaking before she left the UTC.

“The course is really set up to help you get that practical experience, which will help when it comes to getting a job when my course has finished.”

Katherine said UTCN had “helped me develop my public speaking skills and my communication skills with employers.”

“The smaller class sizes at UTCN allow me to establish stronger relationships with my teachers and provided me with the opportunity to have one-on-one help.”

The UTC says that, during her time at the school, Katherine became an “ambassador” for the qualification, mentoring year 12 students who benefited from her T level experience.

Katherine was “part of the school leadership team,” they added, and her oracy skills “helped her to confidently talk to a big audience in school open events promoting T Levels.”

Katherine completed her industry placement at the John Innes Centre, a research centre for plant and microbial science. She also completed three days’ work experience at the Wellcome Sanger Institute’s Genome Academy where she immersed herself in the world of genomics.

Another success story we shared during the week concerned Jenson Burrows from UTC South Durham. He has progressed to a degree apprenticeship with County Durham technology firm Kromek Group plc after achieving a Distinction in his engineering T Level.

Jenson started at the UTC at age 14 and was, he said, drawn there because of its large engineering workshop.

“I had never seen anything like that in my life,” he told BBC Look North for a recent news report about the UTC.

He continued: “Being able to learn in different environments while maintaining a strong academic level of learning was something I was really interested in.”

For his T Level industry placement, Jenson spent the full 45 days at Kromek, during which time, he designed a radiation detection system with the team.

So impressed were Kromek with Jenson’s work, they put in place an level 6 apprenticeship offer just for him.

The UTC’s T Level Placement Officer Lynne Thompson said: “Jenson is an outstanding young engineer who has professionalism, energy, passion and commitment in all that he does. He has been at the UTC since Year 10 and has always had that focus on being in the engineering sector.

“The T Level gave him the opportunity to achieve academic excellence but also gave him outstanding relevant work experience.”

Baker Dearing will continue to celebrate T Levels during #thinkUTC week

UTCs have become centres of excellence for T Levels, with nearly half of UTC T Level leavers progressing to an apprenticeship in 2024. Another third progressed to university, and a fifth entered employment.

These results have been achieved due to the UTC model of high-quality, employer-led technical education that gels perfectly with rigorous, industry-focused T Levels.

This has been made possible through Baker Dearing’s comprehensive development programme for staff. In October, engineering leads from across the UTC programme attended a CPD session at LK Metrology and Baker Dearing would like to thank the Gene Haas Foundation for sponsoring this engineering CPD programme, which made these CPD events possible.

UTCs have also made effective use of investment, which has led to the opening of specialist facilities such as London Design and Engineering UTC’s new T Level building that was recently visited by representatives from NatWest Group.

We work with a vast array of employers and partners like the Gene Haas Foundation to expand and improve the delivery of T Levels. Baker Dearing would like to especially thank the Gatsby Charitable Foundation for their continued support for us and those UTCs delivering T Levels.

Every week is T Levels Week in the UTC programme. But we will be celebrating the qualifications again during our upcoming #thinkUTC week between 17 and 21 November. This is our annual celebration of the 44-strong network of technical education secondary schools.

As part of this, we will be publishing data on how many year 13 students who left a UTC in 2025 have progressed to an apprenticeship, university, and employment. This is sure to provide another great opportunity to celebrate T Levels and the students who have made a success of themselves.