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Three days after the launch of her landmark report on vocational education for 14 to 19-year-olds, Alison Wolf was back at her desk at King’s College London. As she began reclaiming her life as an academic and tutor, IfL invited Professor Wolf to reflect on the past eight months and to explain the thinking behind some of the recommendations in her report.

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Professor Wolf is forthright about her commitment to sweeping away the barriers that had prevented further education teachers and trainers with Qualified Teacher Learning and Skills status from teaching in schools alongside fellow educators with Qualified Teacher Status.

“How can it be that someone with QTS can teach 18-year-olds in college but someone with QTLS cannot teach five-year-olds in school?” she says. “I am not terribly keen on any kind of restriction and this seems to be a raging example of restrictive practice.

“I was aware of how this irritated people and then there was the evidence from IfL and the individual fury of people who had come into FE and, when they were offered a job in a school, they were treated as second-class citizens.”

IfL’s submission to the Wolf review was based on a survey of 5,000 members who between them generated more than 10,000 separate comments and recommendations. Nearly nine out of ten of the respondents felt that the lack of recognition for QTLS in a school setting was evidence of the lower status accorded to those delivering vocational and professional skills in further education. 

Addressing the iniquity, recommendation 17 of Professor Wolf’s report states: “At present teachers with QTS can teach in FE colleges; the FE equivalent – QTLS – should be recognised in schools, which is currently not the case. This will enable schools to recruit qualified professionals to teach courses at school level (rather than bussing pupils to colleges) with clear efficiency gains.”

The report goes on to say: “The great advantage of colleges is that they can offer vocational programmes without needing large additional capacity, and have a critical mass of professional staff already available.”

Within hours of the publication of Professor Wolf’s report on 3 March 2011, the education secretary Michael Gove had accepted her recommendation on QTLS staff teaching in schools.

Professor Wolf is delighted, seeing permeability between the further education and schools sectors as key to the reforms she proposes for 14 to 19 education.
“Breaking down the barriers is absolutely fundamental to changing the educational culture. Why should one person be intrinsically better at teaching than anyone else, including a graduate compared to someone who has worked as a fashion designer or accountant or hairdresser?” she says.

“Ultimately there are two issues. The first is whether one is competent to teach a subject. Then there are the teaching skills that we can learn, and these seem to be clearly different and not related to subject skills, and whether teaching should be a graduate-only profession.”

Professor Wolf is clear on the role of professional licensing.

“In so far as any professional wants to be licensed by a professional body – which from all the evidence does tend to increase your income – then they have to pay for it,” she says.

“You cannot have it both ways. You cannot want to be a professional group and be recognised as such with other people barred from practice and expect someone else to pay.”

She is also clear about the importance of teachers’ professional peers in developing and maintaining quality.

“Most of what we know about teaching and what improves it is working with really good peers, being coached and being mentored. It is very much down to the professional development delivered, much of it informal.”

Professor Wolf sees a causal link between, on the one hand, the professionalism of teaching staff and the extent to which they are allowed to exercise that professionalism and, on the other, the quality and appropriateness of the vocational education on offer.

“One of the most depressing things in the last few years has been the extent to which many young people were steered on to courses that educators must have known were not going to do them any good,” she says.

“What we know is that there are a lot of courses that kids are being entered for because they are easy. Too many young people find out at the end of Key Stage 4 that they are blocked from progressing.”

The blame for this failure is laid at the feet of previous governments who, says Professor Wolf, have tried to micromanage 14 to 19 education. Funding systems that paid providers by the qualification encouraged a proliferation of “dead end” vocational courses that led neither to a job nor to further educational progression.

“We need to change the pressures and incentives and the way that things are pushed and steered. And if government got off the backs of professionals, things would be a lot better,” she says.

Despite this explanation some have interpreted Professor Wolf’s report as an attack on vocational education generally. Professor Wolf is frustrated by this and emphasises the praise contained in her report for vocational education and the teachers and trainers who deliver it.
“One of the things that was most impressive in the course of preparing the report was seeing the fantastic stuff going on in colleges and the good stuff was very local. It was genuinely bottom-up,” she says.

“I hope vocational educators see this report as genuinely a statement of faith in them. Students need opportunities, choices and to be told the truth. But to achieve this we need to reduce the micromanagement and second-guessing of professionals and to set them free.

“What I hope is that if you free things up you will get collaboration across what are currently two different sectors. Ultimately, we to have to trust professionals.”

Further education is, in general terms, better suited to vocational education, Professor Wolf says. But she says that no school should be forbidden from offering vocational programmes. This, she says, is why the professional collaboration afforded by her recommendation on QTLS acceptance in schools is so important.

Collaboration between the two sectors offers schools access not only to further education’s reservoir of experts in the trades and other manual crafts but, for example, to FE’s growing pool of language teachers, such as those teaching Mandarin, and to its substantial numbers of educators in the creative industries and in professional areas like business, management, law and computing.

It is also a two-way street with Professor Wolf keen to have colleges recruiting students from age 14 on to vocational programmes, albeit ones that obey her mantra that no vocational course should be specialised to the degree that it closes off future opportunities for education and/or employment.

Underlying Professor Wolf’s demands for a freer, more responsive and demand-led education system for 14 to 19-year-olds is her faith in the power of competition to succeed in stimulating and regulating provision where central government has failed. Many in FE are likely to be sceptical of this stance.
Professor Wolf is unapologetic.

“I think we all want to do a good job at the end of the day. And I believe in competition because that’s how we find out if we are getting it right,” she says.

Download Professor Wolf’s report on vocational education (PDF, 2.2Mb)

Download IfL’s response to the Wolf review consultation (PDF, 80Kb)