In 2017, I was appointed to the UK Government Department for Education (DfE) Technical Level Panel and tasked with co-authoring the national curriculum for construction-industry qualification that will serve to enable young people to gain both an understanding of and experience within each of the different construction industry trades, within an affordable (and by implication, economically accessible) model of post-compulsory education. The T-Levels (T for Technical) are designed to offer a skills-based alternative to A-Levels, encompassing both college-based and employment-based learning. It is one of a suite of 15 vocational routes across all technical education, with each route bringing together occupations with related skills, knowledge and behaviour requirements into groupings, such as ‘engineering and manufacturing’, ‘health and science’ and ‘digital’. Together, these routes cover 13 million vocational roles in the economy at the moment. This new framework will transform full- and part-time college-based courses into high-quality technical education options. These will fit coherently alongside reformed apprenticeships, and extend to the highest levels of education and training. In particular, they will offer a paid pathway into architecture careers for young people from lower income and more diverse family backgrounds, and by implication, help to improve the poor levels of representation within the architecture profession as a whole.