Rate My Professor Alison Wolf

Professor Dame Alison Wolf DBE, Baroness Wolf of Dulwich, is the Sir Roy Griffiths Professor of Public Sector Management at King’s College London. She specialises in the relationship between education and the labour market, with particular interests in training and skills policy, the role of universities in modern societies, higher education and qualifications policy, professions, and labour market skills. She directs the MSc in Executive Management and the International Centre for University Policy Research at the King’s Policy Institute. Wolf was educated at the universities of Oxford, where she earned an MA and MPhil, and Neuchatel. Her early career included work as a policy analyst for the US federal government, followed by many years at the Institute of Education, University of London, before joining King’s College London.

Wolf sits as a cross-bench peer in the UK House of Lords. She was the founding Chair of Governors of King’s College London Mathematics School and continues as a governor and vice-chair. She has contributed to major government reviews, including authoring the 2011 Wolf Report on vocational education, serving on the independent panel for the 2019 Augar Review of Post-18 Education and Funding, and participating in the Sainsbury Review on technical education. She was seconded to the No 10 Downing Street Policy Unit from 2020 to 2023 as an expert adviser on skills and manpower policy and served as a non-executive director of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology from 2023 to 2024. Wolf was awarded the CBE in the 2012 Queen’s Birthday Honours and the DBE in the 2024 King’s Birthday Honours for services to education. Her books include The XX Factor: How Working Women Are Creating A New Society (2013), Remaking Tertiary Education (2016), and Managers and Academics in a Centralising Sector: new staffing patterns in UK higher education (2021). She has published widely in applied economics and education journals and advised organisations including the OECD, the European Commission, and various government ministries.