Ross Millen

With the looming opening of the first occupational specialism assessment window for my T-Level Digital Support Services students nearing, I’ve taken a moment to reflect on how significantly the options for computing education have changed and diversified since I completed my Level 3 IT Practitioners course back in 2012.

This reflection was partly spurred by a chat I had with a student recently about how they had scoured local colleges and sixth forms to find a course that resembled the DSS qualification. Even compared to the other Digital T-Level specialisms, this one is particularly unique.

For those unversed in the myriad of T-Level Digital options available:

• Digital Production, Design and Development: Think web design, user experience, app, and game development.
• Digital Business Services: Focuses on data analysis and market research applications.
• Digital Support Services: Entry into IT support, cybersecurity, and systems administration.

Each has a “specialism” taught alongside the route core (or RC/exam) year. The specialism I deliver at EKC Dover College is the Digital Support specialism.

From the perspective of someone who felt underwhelmed by their computing education way back when, the content is excellent. Students are first asked to take on the role of an IT consultant for a business and create a solution for a small network, considering security impacts, networking design, IP addressing schemes, access control, audits, certification, and many other aspects.

They then become systems engineers, assessed on their ability to deploy DHCP, DNS, and Active Directory Domain Services on Windows Server. Now, I’m a Linux guy, but that is so awesome! They’re graded on the correct deployment of an enterprise management piece of software. What I would have given for a course like that to have been around ten or fifteen years back.

I get a kick out of going to work and supporting students in setting this stuff up, training them on industry best practices—not just what’s coming up in an exam paper. I’ve enjoyed it so much that I’ve been reusing these resources from the T-Level Active Directory lessons with my Level 2 cohort, getting them to tackle AD as well for their networking and cybersecurity units.

Following my research on comparative approaches to secondary assessment, the OS assessments feel quite familiar to some of the assessments undertaken in the Flemish education system in the Flanders region of Belgium.

They provide a far more holistic overview of the students’ skills in computing as a whole, checking their understanding of a range of areas:

• Network design
• Legal and regulatory considerations
• Support and customer interactions
• Disaster recovery
• Data management
• Documentation skills
• Time management

Now, while there are weak areas in this assessment, the upcoming Pearson transition for the course addresses some of these. However, these assessments will struggle to emulate current infrastructure management in 2025 due to the mass transition to cloud-based environments that have succeeded the traditional “local domain” approach that was once so commonplace.

That said, I welcome the change and improvements coming in the redesign from Pearson in the form of the “Digital Support and Security” T-Level, and I look forward to teaching the OS year all over again in 2027.