Vocational education: Professor Alison Wolf comments

Professor Alison Wolf is the Sir Roy Griffiths Professor of Public Sector Management at King's College London, specialising in the relationship between education and the labour market.

Almost all English young people now stay in education after 16, and the majority are taking vocational qualifications. There is nothing unusual about this. In pretty well every other European country, a large proportion of 16 to 18 year olds are also in vocational courses. But England has been way behind in developing coherent programmes for these students. Instead, vocational education had become a matter of piling up separate certificates to meet centrally set targets. I hope this will now change.