Managing T Level Industry Placements on Navigate (Training Session)

This training session walks staff through the full T Level industry placement workflow on Navigate, from enrolling students on their course right through to creating, approving and delivering the placement and all of its paperwork..

What this session covers

• Enrolling a group of students onto their T Level course (a one-time step per group)
• Creating a T Level placement across the learner, employer and placement detail tabs
• Approving the placement from the home page
• Working through the placement administration milestones: compliance and due diligence, placement agreement, induction checklist and the three reviews
• Adding and managing placement targets (three employability and three technical)
• Assigning tasks to colleagues and tracking progress with the administration task reports
• Requesting placements from students, plus how students confirm attendance and complete targets on the student site

Logging in

1. Open the Navigate staff site.
2. Click Login using Microsoft or Login using Google depending on which platform your college uses.
3. You are taken straight through to your account and the staff home page, where the key items are the Number of students, Requiring approval and Targets requiring sign-off bubbles.

Enrolling students onto their T Level course

This only needs to be done once per group of students. It keeps the DFE delivery approaches and guidelines tied to the placement.

1. Click the Number of students bubble on the home page to open a grid view of students.
2. Use the top-left My students filter and switch it to All students to bring up every student across the college.
3. Use the remaining filters (department, course, tutor group, campus) to drill down to the group you need.
4. Select your students using the tick boxes, then click Actions on the right and choose Enroll on T-level course.
5. In the enrollment wizard, choose the course (pulled from the DFE), then enter the start and end date (it defaults to the two-year duration).
6. Review the allowable deliverables, minimum placement hours and allowable delivery approaches shown.
7. Set the roles and responsibilities (tutor, placement coordinator), adding extra staff with Add a new responsibility if needed, then finish.
8. You land in the Enrollments module, which lists every T Level student and their course. To check whether a student is already enrolled, click the Student name column header to sort alphabetically.

Creating a T Level placement

1. Go to the Placements module on the left and click Add a placement at the top.
2. Choose T-level placement (the other option is work experience).
3. On the Learner details tab, search for and select your learner. Existing tutor, department and health and safety / medical notes pull through automatically. Note the health and safety / medical notes box is visible to the employer, student and parent, whereas the student notes box is not seen by the student.
4. Set Parent approval to add the parent consent name and email address if applicable.
5. On the Employer tab, search for the employer across your database (add a new one only if they do not already exist). Confirm the saved contact and use the email tick boxes to decide who receives the weekly attendance emails. As a rule of thumb, send to both the employer and yourself for backup.
6. On the Placement details tab, set the placement coordinator and the Placement planned hours (the hours for this specific placement).
7. Choose the Placement type (e.g. industry placement) and Location type (in person, virtual or combined).
8. Set the daily break times and travel times so the hours stay accurate (the break is automatically deducted from each date).
9. Set the paid status, the role title, and complete the text boxes for placement description, objectives, typical activities, minimum starting requirements, suggested prior learning, frequency of communication and dress code.
10. In Dates and times, add the first day. The time defaults to 9 to 5 but can be changed, and the system remembers your edited start and end time for subsequent dates. Click a weekday name (e.g. Wednesday) to schedule every Wednesday in the month. You can back-date and schedule in advance.
11. Scroll to the top and Save the page.

After saving: enrollment, duplicating and the audit trail

1. Once saved, the new Placement administration tab appears, along with completion and targets tabs.
2. In Placement details, open the Course enrollment section, which now shows the enrollment. Click in to select the relevant allowable delivery approaches and explain why each is being used.
3. Use Duplicate placement at the top to create an identical placement for another student going on the same placement, just changing the learner name.
4. Add notes, interactions and documents against the placement; everything is recorded in the audit trail.

Adding placement targets

Every T Level needs at least three employability and three technical targets. They run through the targets module so the terminology stays consistent for students.

1. Open the Targets tab on the placement.
2. Click Add placement target to create one directly, or Link an existing target if you have already added them outside the placement.
3. Give the target a name, set the required completion date, and add a description of exactly what the student must do.
4. Repeat until you have three employability and three technical targets.

Approving the placement

1. On the home page, click the Requiring your approval bubble.
2. Click the student's name to open the placement on the Placement administration tab.

Working through the placement milestones

The placement administration tab shows milestones, each with a series of tasks: Compliance, Placement agreement, Induction checklist and the three Reviews. Milestones must be completed in order, and any task can be overridden if it has already been done on paper.

Compliance and due diligence

1. Click Send form to email the employer the due diligence checklist, optionally CC'ing a health and safety officer or second contact.
2. If you are not sending the form, click the icon on the left of the task and fill in the Date completed column to override it.
3. You can also fill the form in on the employer's behalf by clicking View data while on the phone with them. Note the ELI expiry date field, which you will later record on the employer.
4. Once submitted, the task shows as completed. To finish the milestone, click View data, check the form and click Approve.

Placement agreement

1. Start with the college review: click View data as the college / placement coordinator, check the details and Approve internally.
2. Click Send form to send to everyone else (the learner, parent and employer).
3. Approve each of the learner, parent and employer approvals as they come in (the employer has an extra confirmation tick box on behalf of their organisation). Each action is time-stamped in the audit trail. Any of these can be overridden via View data if confirmed another way.

Induction checklist

1. Click Send form to send the induction checklist to the employer (or fill it in via View data).
2. Once returned, click View data, check it over and Approve.

Reviews

1. Fill in the review first via the college (e.g. the initial review), recording whether it was face to face or by phone, reviewing the goals and adding comments, then submit.
2. Click Send form to send the review to the learner, employer and parent for approval. The parent must click through their email to approve.
3. Repeat for the midpoint and end-point reviews.

Assigning tasks and tracking progress

1. By default the placement coordinator is the internal owner of every task. To reassign, click the icon on the left of a task and choose a colleague's name under Task owner.
2. Open the administration task reports and use My tasks to see your own tasks due this week, in the future or overdue, grouped so you can click into a section to see the related placements.
3. Use Site-wide tasks to view tasks by status (pending, active, completed) and filter by task owner to see how colleagues are progressing.

Tracking placements in the Placements module

1. The top panels flag placements awaiting internal approval, awaiting employer approval, and placements the student has marked as finished (students can only press finish once every task is done).
2. A panel on the right flags placements running live against non-compliant employers so you can gather compliance information.
3. The grid below lists all your placements by status with administration task progress (NA indicates a work experience placement) and rolling confirmation of hours showing student-confirmed and employer-confirmed hours, so you can spot where a student or employer is falling behind.

Requesting a placement from a student

1. For an individual student, use the Quick links button at the top, search for the student to open their record, and choose Request a placement (work experience or T-level), setting a target date for them to submit by. This generates a blank form on the student site.
2. For a bulk request, go to the Number of students grid, filter to your group, select them, click Actions and choose Request a T-level industry placement, adding the target date.

On the student site

1. Students open the My placements module to see live and requested placements.
2. An active placement has tabs for placement details, the pre-placement checklist, confirming attendance, and the feedback form. For each scheduled day the student selects I attended (recording hours, reflections, skills developed, evidence and which target it counts towards) or I did not attend with a reason.
3. To submit a requested placement, the student clicks Add, completes the location, dress code, description, employer, manager and dates, then submits; the requester becomes the placement coordinator. The student cannot finish the placement until every task, including the checklist, is complete.
4. Under My targets, attendance confirmations attached to a target pull through as evidence; alternatively students add evidence from their timeline. They save the target and then Mark as complete, which sends it to the staff Targets requiring sign-off bubble for the staff member to reject (with a reason) or sign off.

Summarised from the recorded training session.