Why Every Placement Needs a Design, not just a Plan? 

Experience isn’t enough to make graduates employable. Why experience must be designed by providers to be in line with the government’s skills reforms, rather than simply offered?

The author believes the fundamental principle of all these reforms is the same and underlies every sector of FE and HE: the assumption that practical experience is the key to employability. That’s only half right. Experience is not employable unless it is reflected on. It can be used to teach a student to mimic a work environment as readily as it can think. This is important because, as the sector is not lacking in experience. Government policy is broadening the access to placements, industry visits, live projects and, recently, short ‘apprenticeship units’. Having a chance to develop that skill is only part of the equation, though. It is the point that helps lead up to, and after, the chance that make all the difference. This is the argument that this article advances and it is very much on track for policy to follow.

In October 2025, the Department for Education published its Post-16 Education and Skills White Paper which outlined a vision to see two thirds of young people reach higher level learning (academic, technical or apprenticeship) by 25. The task behind that ambition is stark at Skills England, with its own analysis predicting the UK’s priority sectors will require about 900,000 more skilled workers by 2030 – mostly in digital and engineering work. None of this is to be accomplished by knowledge transfer. It’s delivered via T Levels industrial placements, the new V Level qualifications (which will be released in 2027), and the new reformed Growth and Skills Levy (to be introduced from April 2026), which will provide funding for short, flexible ‘apprenticeship units’ alongside full apprenticeships. All these routes are based on experience in doing work that was previously the responsibility of a syllabus. The Department has even gone so far as to modify the delivery requirements for T Level industrial placements this year, enabling learners to split their placement with more than one provider and/or do some of their placements remotely, a sensible, practical change that does not lower the stakes on design, but increases the threat. A flexible placement without any reflective structure is just a shorter version of the same risk.

What does it mean when “experience is not enough” in a classroom?

We have witnessed this first-hand with students from our Computing department when we took them to Bett UK, the UK’s education technology event held at ExCeL London. They did much more than just walk the floor. They attended seminars and workshops and tried tools and platforms on the stands at hand and spoke directly to people from some of the top IT, software and emerging technology vendors on the stands. It wasn’t the exhibition, after all, because lots of students go to trade shows and soon forget what they saw after a week. It was before and after that. Prior to visiting, students were given specific real questions from their actual learning to test against the claims made by a vendor in their marketing: What claims did they find true when directly questioned about data or accessibility, for example, of a tool shown in their marketing campaign? They then needed to take that home to their class and explain what they had found, what had surprised them and where it was consistent with or different from what we had learned in class. Students regularly reported that they were more comfortable after — not because they’ve been in such a good place — but because they had to question, test and explain to themselves what they saw.

The loop: there is a live question going in, and a reflective account coming back out, and that’s the whole argument in miniature. Formally, Kolb’s experiential learning cycle defines it as experience, reflection, conceptualisation and experimentation. In practice, it’s easier to do than that: don’t send the students somewhere and then hope, hold them to account later.

There are three design principles, not three optional extras!

Reflect, don’t hope. A placement, industry visit or live project must be accompanied by a reflective activity of some sort, a brief written activity that must be assessed as writing, a facilitated debrief, or a structured discussion or the placement/industry visit/live project may be just a placement/industry visit/live project. The flexibility in when and how the placement occurs, is the gap left in the T Level industrial placement guidance, but it does not mean it is included, reflection needs to be added deliberately. Make connections between theory and practice in both directions. Often theory takes place in the first 10 weeks and practice in the placement that comes after, like two separate events. A good design takes it upon itself to ask the students out with questions of the discipline that are alive in the real world and brings the cacophony of what they discover back into the seminar room for challenge to theory. The reason my Bett Global UK example worked is the questions were sent back and forth.

Think of it as a journey, not an event. It takes a whole range of employability modules (or a once-off industry trip) for this to make a difference in isolation. Capability is built through a sequence – smaller and more low-stakes at the start of a programme, bigger and more self-directed at the end of the programme – and each experience gives confidence and judgement for the next. The trend of the Growth and Skills Levy to offering a handful of short, stackable “apprenticeship units” instead of just longer apprenticeships is based on this logic as well: the short units, if pieced together, can create something significant.

HE brings disciplinary depth and research informed practice to work-based learning, apprenticeships and engagement with employers, which FE has much experience of. There is a growing case for these pathways to be seen as complementary strands of one design problem, and not as two alternative “vocational” and “academic” ones: at the same time each of the three, T Levels, V Levels and reformed apprenticeship routes, is expanding. The FE work placement and the subsequent HE dissertation project do not need to be two distinct philosophies joined at the end of the FE course. A student’s FE work placement and the subsequent HE dissertation project can be seen as one continuous strand of reflective capability, not two distinct philosophies joined at the FE/HE interface. It’s a challenge to do it effectively. Implementing quality assurance, credit recognition and staff development across institutional boundaries requires ongoing investment and research and development in the specific ways in which it can be replicated for the sector is limited. But the direction of travel is absolutely in the same direction in the Post-16 White Paper, in Skills England’s priority-sector planning, and in international reference points such as the OECD’s Learning Compass 2030 towards the learner as active partner, not passive recipient.

Design is not an alternative to the policy; it is the means of delivering it. None of this can be construed as a criticism of rigour, or of the need to make all courses a placement. It suggests intentionally creating, as opposed to copying, the ambiguous, authentic, non-constructed situation in which stakes are high and which a language model cannot duplicate, and then providing students with structured support to make sense of it. This is even less predictable than a lecture and more challenging to ensure the quality of than a multiple-choice exam. It is in fact the hidden key to the functioning of the government’s own skills reforms.

The institutional leader’s question is not about investing in experiential learning — we will, those funding ways and qualification changes are an assumption. Whether we take the design of that experience, as well as the reflective work, seriously as we do the experience itself.

By Aminul Islam, Lecturer and Researcher, Northumbria University London and Afzal Sayed Munna, Senior Lecturer and Accreditation Lead, University of Hull London