Although I can't help you finding companies in the UK, I've been in a similar situation in the Netherlands. I live in the quite desolated north of the Netherlands, along farm lands, long distances from colleges and it's hard to find actual engineering work around here.
I have to say it's quite essential to get at least a Bachelor degree if you want to do any serious design work. Skills like soldering aren't teached in classes at college. If I wanted to get better at that I'd have to ask tutors in workshop and practice myself. I found practice material with my own projects, but unfortunately that doesn't pay money.
Sometimes the assumption is made you can just solder, and it's a hassle when you can't.
We all mess up sometimes, like bending pins on small LQFP packages on a prototype, ah well..
Usually prototypes tend to get rather ugly when rushed.
I've been lucky that I could be a student worker in holidays and saturdays at a company closely nearby where I had an internship. Before going to my final year in college I've continued my internship assignment in summer holidays making it finished to be actually used/sold. This was paid per hour.
What I've seen vocational education level tend to end up with production-like jobs. They assemble and test products.
No degree gets you soldering jobs. We have 16-17 year old students from secondary school doing such tasks on a saturday. They fabricate custom cables harnesses and solder simple through hole boards.
Some more experienced students (they are a bit older and are around for a couple of years) hand-place and reflow SMT boards..
All these jobs are guided with QA documents and lots of manuals.
I have to say, when I was in my 2nd year (before I went on internships) I did the same jobs and it was nicer to do than working in a supermarket. But it isn't something to write home about.
Saying you don't need a degree for design work is BS.
Internships are a nice way to apply at a company. Especially after your study, but sometimes also during your study. I've been lucky enough I could actually do design/programming jobs on a saturday, because it so happens a colleague (another firmware programmer) went back to college and worked part-time (3 days work, 3 days college). This way I could help out with some tasks like debugging bugs, writing&testing some library code and stuff like that. I considered it be a quite luxurious position.
The people in our production workshop are quite far away from the design work. They may improvise sometimes for a custom configuration but it's usually with consent of R&D.
R&D typically delivers manuals, QA documents and asks feedback on the products we build. We then investigate, debug and fix those issues.
Communication between the two is essential though, but in general R&D specify, design, debug and verify circuits, production assemble, test and install them.
Mileage may vary between companies and hierarchy. I don't know if this is standard, but this seems to be the way things are where I am.