Alison joined the IFS in 2013. Alison’s research examines the origins of socio-economic and gender inequalities, especially focusing on the roles of childhood, adolescence, marriage and parenthood. Her work combines the use of randomised controlled trials, novel methods for measuring the drivers of inequality and structural modelling. Alison’s research is primarily focused in India and the UK.
Education
MSc (Distinction) Economics, University College London, 2016
BA (1st Class Honours) Economics, University of Cambridge, 2013
This online event presents new evidence on economic inequalities between men and women. It investigates how far patterns of work and pay have changed over time and what the causes of the persistent gaps are.
The COVID-19 school closures forced children and parents to make unprecedented changes to their daily routines. Including the summer holidays, most children will have had a five-and-a-half-month break from physically attending school by the time they returned in September.
In this observation, we use data from an online survey of parents with school-aged children – funded by the Nuffield Foundation and collected during June and July 2020 – to document the patchwork of in-person schooling that children had before the summer. We also explore parents’ concerns about sending their children back to school at the end of the last term.
Prior to the crisis there was no gap in the average amount of time spent learning between children from better and worse off families, but during the lockdown a sizeable gap emerged.
This paper combines novel data on the time use, home learning practices and economic circumstances of families with children during the COVID-19 lockdown with pre-lockdown data from the UK Time User Survey to characterise the time use of children and how it changed during lockdown.
