inTuition has collaborated with the Education Policy Institute (EPI), which commissioned Baroness Wolf’s report, Remaking Tertiary Education, so that you can watch her EPI lecture from your digital issue. If reading the digital issue, press the play arrow.


FURTHER READING AND RESOURCES • Remaking Tertiary Education is available


at goo.gl/0LEVPI


• Heading for the Precipice is available at goo.gl/8wF5ZV


• Review of Vocational Education: The Wolf Report is available at goo.gl/7hPyx4


• The Government’s Post-16 Skills Plan and the report of the Independent Panel on Technical Education are available at goo.gl/fUd8pF


• Find out more about the Technical and Further Education Bill at goo.gl/Ev71dJ


“We have got to create a middle tertiary sphere.


I don’t think we can recreate the polytechnics exactly as they were, but we have to move back to that model to some extent.” Wolf believes it was a mistake to allow the former


polytechnics to become universities in 1992. More universities have been created since 1992, and the Higher Education and Research Bill, currently before parliament, will make it easier for still more organisations to gain university titles, including further education providers. The trouble, says Wolf, is that new universities


reduced their provision of two-year, higher level technical qualifications, like Foundation Degrees and Higher National Certificates and Diplomas (HNCs and HNDs). Instead, they switched to providing three-year degrees for which they can charge maximum tuition fees. “We need a new middle. We could provide higher


technical education in universities, but that’s really not what they are for,” Wolf says. “And, currently, further education is picking up too much of the excess demand from 16 to 18-year-olds. More 16 to 18-year-olds should be in school.” Wolf is disparaging of the ongoing further education Area Reviews. “They are pointless as they are only looking at FE,”


she says. “With a proper review of tertiary education we could have had a mixture of universities and colleges recreating a proper technical phase in tertiary education. “My sense is that we have quite a crunch coming in the next few years. A separation of institutions is required – and there may be blood on the floor.”


Government intervention is required not only to incentivise that “new middle” – Wolf argues for an individual financial entitlement which people can use to pay for education and training throughout their lives – but also to create a national system of respected technical and professional qualifications. The Post-16 Skills Plan outlines a national


framework of 15 vocational training routes, aligned with occupational areas. Running parallel are the reforms to apprenticeships. “So far so good. We are heading in the right


direction,” Wolf says. As for the teachers and trainers required to deliver


an advanced technical curriculum, Wolf has clear, and not uncontentious, views. “When I first used to visit colleges in the 1980s, a


lot of teachers were vocational practitioners, people who were also working in their industry,” she says. “This is not the way it is done now, by and large. “I am strongly against having a sort of licensing


system, whereby technical and vocational experts can’t teach in FE without some formal teaching certificate. But I’m strongly in favour of professional training for those on the job.” Wolf, the product of a grammar school and Oxford


University, is an unlikely – and far from uncritical – champion of further education and training. “If universities did their job properly they would be full of unlikely champions, and not just for FE,” Wolf says wryly. “I hope I am the woman to burst higher education’s bubble and help build a proper tertiary education system in England. But, to be honest, I currently feel much too much like Don Quixote.”


Alan Thomson is editor of inTuition


INTUITION ISSUE 27 • SPRING 2017 11


Phillip Waterman


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