Unlocking T Level Industry Placements in Health and Care

Every T Level includes a 45-day industry placement which, like the T Level course, is designed with employers. Sue Howard is Head of Workforce Development at NHS Greater Manchester. In this new blog for Gatsby, she reflects on the opportunities for health and social care to develop their workforce pipeline by engaging with T Levels.

"When I started this piece of work — aimed at increasing T Level industry placement capacity across our health and care system in Greater Manchester —  I took it on with my usual gusto, but unsure whether it might be a hard-sell for health and care organisations in the current climate. However, I’ve been bowled over by the response; countless health and care employers across our system have stepped forward to support T Level industry placements”.

NHS Greater Manchester is working closely with the Gatsby Charitable Foundation and Greater Manchester Combined Authority to both expand T Level industry placement numbers and increase the range of health and care employers supporting placements, thus providing students with more choice and a greater number of learning environment opportunities. We aim to include placements in primary care, social care and the voluntary sector, as well as in clinical and non-clinical hospital settings. Alongside this, we are using workforce planning insights to target our most at-risk professions.

One such example is midwifery, a profession with a significant recruitment shortfall. Until recently there were no T Level maternity industry placements in Greater Manchester – yet we knew such placements were operating well in other parts of the country. Learning from that experience through the ICS Industry Placement Network community, including a useful webinar from Kate Giles of Great Western Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, 2025 will see the initiation of midwifery placements in Greater Manchester and we will be working to expand this across other maternity units.

We are also developing a model for rotational placements that follows the patient journey in and out of hospital. These models are being developed in a collaborative way and enable ongoing learning to be shared across our system partners here in Greater Manchester and beyond. So far, we have engagement from employers in primary care, the voluntary sector, estates and facilities, oncology, infection prevention and control, and finance – and the list is growing.

With over 350 professions to choose from across health and care (including non-clinical roles such as finance, administration, engineering, digital, and many others), and as an employer of an estimated 1 in 6 working people across Greater Manchester - we have a role for everyone!

Supporting T Level students offers an exciting opportunity to expand our workforce pipeline and support the development of the next generation of health and care staff.

There is a lot of activity in this space currently. The Department for Education is considering a rollout of NHS T Level coordinators nationally. In Greater Manchester, the Combined Authority is doing a significant amount of work on technical career pathway expansion and Health & Social Care has been identified as one of seven gateway sectors that are critical to the Greater Manchester economy and technical education ambitions. So now is a great time to line up a discussion about how you might get on-board, email gm.workforce@nhs.net.