Reading List
Alison Wolf
Economist and Professor of Public Sector Management, King's College London
Alison Wolf, Baroness Wolf of Dulwich, is a British economist and the Sir Roy Griffiths Professor of Public Sector Management at King’s College London. Her research sits where education meets the labour market.
Does Education Matter? Myths about Education and Economic Growth (2002) questioned the belief that more public spending on education drives growth, and argued that the skills that count most at work are the maths and language taught in school. Her 2011 review of vocational education for the Department for Education became known as the Wolf Report. The XX Factor (2013) looks at how the rise of highly educated working women has reshaped society.
She was made a CBE in 2012 for services to education and sits in the House of Lords as a crossbench peer.
Independent People
by Halldor Laxness
“Independent People is the book that has just bowled me over in the last couple of years, more than anything else I’ve read. It is incredibly moving, about a poor Icelandic farmer who does not want to be dependent on anyone for anything. And that is his overriding value – a very classic value of small, self-supporting peasant farmers. They have this integrity and courage as well as this drive to independence.” — via Interview, February 2010
Education and the Working Class
by Brian Jackson
“This is one of the few books about education that you can recommend to the general reader – it is based on in-depth interviews with 88 working-class families after their children had been through the grammar school system after the Second World War, when free secondary education was really opened up. Again, I think what it captures is a combination of the eternal and an England that has completely vanished.” — via Interview, February 2010
The Economy of Cities
by Jane Jacobs
“Like Michael Young, Jane Jacobs is one of my idols. And her work links into my overriding interest in the interaction between human behaviour and institutions. Although in my academic work I have focused on the labour market and education, I like Jane Jacobs because she also talks about how institutions emerge from people’s daily life.” — via Interview, February 2010
The Harpole Report
by James Lloyd Carr
“The Harpole Report is a very funny satirical novel, very short. It captures what is eternal about a state-funded school system and also a time that seems almost innocent in the degree to which schools were left alone to do whatever they were doing. There’s also the endless war between the layers of the hierarchy, the teachers and the head, and then the head and the caretaker.” — via Interview, February 2010
The Rise of the Meritocracy
by Michael Young
“It is also really important that people realise that the term meritocracy, which we now wave around as if it was the one thing we could all agree on as a good thing, was actually coined for this satirical novel. The rise of the meritocracy is not seen as the arrival of nirvana: it’s seen as something which has a large number of downsides, both socially and particularly in the way individuals feel about themselves.” — via Interview, February 2010