Professor Dame Alison Wolf DBE, Baroness Wolf of Dulwich, is the Sir Roy Griffiths Professor of Public Sector Management, and sits as a cross-bench peer in the UK House of Lords. She specialises in the relationship between education and the economy. She has a particular interest in:

• training and skills policy including apprenticeships
• the role of universities in modern societies

She currently directs the MSc in Executive Management.

Alison was seconded part-time to the No 10 Downing Street Policy Unit from February 2020 to February 2023, as an expert adviser to the Prime Minister on skills and manpower policy. She was closely involved in the development of the Skills and Post-16 Education Act of 2022 and in the Lifelong Learning Act of 2023. From April 2023 to March 2024 she served as one of the initial non-executive directors of the new Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. In 2022 she was appointed to the Advisory Council for the UK government’s Levelling Up strategy. In 2019 she delivered the annual King's lectures, on 'Universities. the economy and the state'.

In February 2018, Alison was appointed to the English Government's Review of Post-18 Education and Funding, as a member of the independent expert panel. The report of the panel ('the 'Augar Review') was published in 2019. The government subsequently accepted many of the panel’s recommendations, including its number one recommendation that ‘the government should introduce a single lifelong learning loan allowance’ for all English adults, covering all courses at university undergraduate level (4, 5 and 6 in the qualifications framework). The Lifelong Learning Entitlement, which received cross-party support, is scheduled to be introduced in 2025.

In 2015/16 she was a member of the independent panel on technical education, chaired by Lord David Sainsbury, whose report formed the basis of the Government's 2016 Skills Plan.

In March 2011 she completed the ‘Wolf Report’ on vocational education for the English government. The recommendations were accepted and implemented. Alison has also been a specialist adviser to the House of Commons select committee on education and skills, writes widely for the national press and has been a presenter for Analysis on BBC Radio 4.

While most of Alison's current work focuses on the interface between education institutions and labour markets, she also has long-standing interests in assessment, and in mathematics education. She was the founding Chair of Governors of the King's College London Mathematics School, established by King's College London as one of the first of the government’s specialist university mathematics schools for 16-18 year olds. She continues to be a governor of the school. She also helped establish and is a trustee of the University Maths School Network, ‘U-Maths’, a charity which supports the growing maths school network and its outreach activities, ,https://umaths.ac.uk/

Alison has been an adviser to, among others, the OECD, the Royal College of Surgeons, the Ministries of Education of New Zealand, France and South Africa, the European Commission, the International Accounting Education Standards Board, and the Bar Council.

Alison's books and monographs include The XX Factor: How Working Women Are Creating A New Society (Profile Books 2013) ; Remaking Tertiary Education (Resolution Foundation 2016) and Managers and Academics in a Centralising Sector: new staffing patterns in UK higher education. (2021) Her recent work has focused on the changing structure of the UK university sector, including the impact of international league tables. She has published widely in applied economics and education journals. She was educated at the universities of Oxford (MA, MPhil) and Neuchatel.

Alison spent her early career in the United States working as a policy analyst for the federal government, and worked for many years at the Institute of Education, University of London. Alison was awarded the CBE for services to education in the Queen's 2012 birthday honours and appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2024 King’s Birthday Honours.

Alison's Research Excellence Framework 2021 impact case study is called Rethinking and Re-engineering Government Skills Policy. Read the impact feature on this case study here.