Wolf remains one of the biggest hitters in education policy: highly respected, influential and regarded. And her standing grows year after year.That’s because many in No.10, Treasury and even the OECD share Wolf’s worldview that increased participation in HE has not resulted in increased productivity – and that there is a mismatch with skills and qualifications, with many graduates doing non-graduate jobs. For Wolf, it is highly regressive to require graduates today and taxpayers in future to keep investing in an inefficient system producing questionable outcomes. So there was initial umming and arring in No.10 about whether she should chair the post-18 review before putting her on the expert panel – following reservations from senior officials at DfE that she may push policy too far away from the current status quo.
It’s transparent, however, that the review’s final terms of reference are designed to arrive at the kind of policy solutions Wolf has been pushing for a decade-plus – the natural follow-up to her 2011 independent review of 14 to 19 vocational education for DfE.
Wolf has long-argued for a major rebalancing and streamlining of public subsidy from HE to FE and stopping the inexorable expansion of universities over all other routes to higher skills, particularly adult and community education. She wants a highly flexible funding and credit-based system, replacing the current HE tuition loan scheme with a lifelong tertiary education allowance – in part to tackle the catastrophic collapse in part-time and adult learners. And for her, that means putting apprenticeships at the heart of industrial strategy, not continually investing in short-term here-today, gone-tomorrow policy initiatives.
Despite all this, Wolf remains an enormous champion of her own university, King’s College London, as well as a staunch defender of wider academic freedom and institutional autonomy. She is watching OfS’ implementation like a hawk – both its extensive intervention powers and the default tendency of ministers who, as she told the House of Lords this year, “wish to tell the regulator precisely how to manage”.
The next 12 months will, no doubt, keep her busy.