Review of Vocational Education: The Wolf Report

A review has been published by the Department for Education which recommends how vocational education for 14-19 year olds should serve the purpose of creating and maintaining opportunities for all young people. The principal aim of the review was to consider how vocational education for 14-19 year olds can be improved in order to promote successful progression into the labour market and into higher level education and training routes.

The review was informed by over 400 pieces of evidence from the public, a number of visits to colleges, academies and training providers, and interviews and discussion sessions with key partners in the sector.

The economic, social and educational context within which English vocational education currently operates and whether it responds effectively to individual aspirations and labour market realities is explored in detail in the review. An ‘audit of current provision’ identified a number of ways in which current arrangements ‘create perverse incentives that serve young people ill, are unnecessarily expensive and bureaucratic, and fail to recognise the specific needs of 14-19 year olds compared to adults. In response to this audit, the review goes on to make 27 specific recommendations, some wide-ranging and some highly specific, as well as making four overriding conclusions:

  • 14-16 year olds need to follow a broad education and avoid premature specialisation, meaning that even those students who reach the end of Key Stage 4 with weak maths and English should continue with them. But at the same time, any young person’s programme of study, whether ‘academic’ or ‘vocational’, should provide for labour market and educational progress
  • The system should enable and encourage variety, innovation and flexibility, including different opportunities for specialisation, rather than the highly detailed prescription that currently exists, which creates delays and rigidities, thereby undermining the quality of the provision
  • It is critical that institutions – whether highly specialised or more general – maintain close links with local employers. The review sees employers as the only really reliable source of quality assurance in vocational areas, and have, for too long now, been progressively frozen out of the way vocational education operates
  • More needs to be done, actively, to help young people to enter the labour market and obtain genuine employment experience. The review makes recommendations to prioritise and develop not only the growth of full apprenticeships, but also other forms of supported and subsidised workplace experience or employment. As part of this, increasing genuine employer involvement in local colleges should also have important positive effects

The full report can be downloaded below.



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