inTERVIEW


THE QUEST TO SAVE ENGLAND’S EDUCATION AND TRAINING SYSTEM


Professor Alison Wolf says ‘pointless’ Area Reviews will miss the chance to create a ‘new sphere’ of advanced tertiary education and training. Alan Thomson reports


or someone proud to call herself a champion of further education and training, Alison Wolf has some harsh things to say about the sector. “I don’t think that FE colleges are fit for purpose at the moment. They have become far too multipurpose, and have lost what


they were set up to do as technical and professional colleges,” says Wolf, who is Sir Roy Grifiths Professor of Public Sector Management at King’s College London. “And look at the number of private providers, most of them are tiny. It just doesn’t make sense.” Wolf, who as Baroness Wolf of Dulwich sits as


a cross-bench peer in the House of Lords, has published three reports since 2011 and, by any measure, these reports (and those preceding them) have helped push FE and skills up the political agenda. Wolf was also a member of the Independent


“I am strongly in favour of professional training for FE teachers and trainers.”


Panel on Technical Education, chaired by former Labour minister Lord Sainsbury, which published its report in April 2016. The panel’s recommendations informed the government’s Post-16 Skills Plan, published in July 2016, and shaped the subsequent Technical and


Further Education Bill, which is currently making its way through parliament. Central to Wolf’s thinking is the need to create


a proper tertiary education system in England. Tertiary is a rarely used, but neat, term for everything beyond schools: as in primary, secondary and tertiary education.


10 ISSUE 27 • SPRING 2017 INTUITION


Wolf argues, convincingly, that our collective obsession with growing degree-level university provision – and she says that mass higher education is a global phenomenon – has seriously distorted tertiary education in UK, and England specifically. Today, almost half of all young people study for


Professor Alison Wolf talks about her vision for


tertiary education


degrees in an expensive, state-subsidised higher education system, while the other half studies qualifications, overwhelmingly at level 3 and below, in an under-resourced further education and skills sector. Wolf’s most recent report, Remaking Tertiary


Education, published last November, attacked a catastrophic collapse in the numbers of level 4 and 5 technical and professional qualifications. At the same time as employers are crying out for


staff with level 4, 5 and 6 technical qualifications, over-supply means many university graduates are forced to take lower-paying, non-graduate jobs and are, typically, tens of thousands of pounds in debt. The Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates that


70 per cent of student loan borrowers will never earn enough to repay their debts in full – leaving taxpayers, who fund the loans, seriously out of pocket. Wolf’s two previous papers, Heading for the


Precipice, published in June 2015, and her Review of Vocational Education published in March 2011 are hardly less scathing. In Heading for the Precipice, Wolf said that FE could vanish under a grossly unfair funding system. “When researching Heading for the Precipice


I was shocked when I looked at the figures and realised how close we are to the wheels falling off tertiary education in England,” she recalls. “It was an ‘oh my God’ moment. We are


cheating an entire generation of young people by encouraging them to go into HE and rack up these huge debts.


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