Are we there yet?

There is widespread acknowledgement that the vocational education system in Britain needs to be much more effective. Its attractiveness and quality impacts on business, young people and communities alike. Many attempts have been made at reform, with a continuously changing institutional and funding landscape being one of the major consequences. The latest of the reforms is the Wolf Review, which concludes that vocational education is failing thousands of young people because it is not leading to university or a job. Despite being wide ranging in its scope, with some positive proposals, the proposed improvements to vocational education will generate mixed results unless other real challenges, such as the focus on quantity rather than quality, a voluntary approach to skills investment by employers and competition based largely on price, are tackled.