Claire is a Research Fellow of the IFS and Assistant Professor of Economics at the UCL Institute of Education.
She was previously affiliated with the University of Birmingham and Programme Director of the Skills sector at IFS. Her research interests focus on the determinants of educational attainment and HE participation, including the roles of socio-economic status, expectations and aspirations, month of birth and parents' marital status. She is particularly interested in how education policy can be used to improve the outcomes of children from disadvantaged backgrounds, and has played a leading role in the evaluations of a number of education programmes aiming to do just that, including on behalf of the Department of Education and the Education Endowment Foundation.
This government, alongside most of its predecessors, is concerned about social mobility. As the coalition government prepares to launch its own strategy for tackling social mobility, recent work at IFS exploring the literature on social mobility has highlighted some important conclusions that the government would be wise to bear in mind.
Using a simple decomposition analysis, we show that around two thirds of the socio-economic gap in attainment at age 16 can be accounted for by long-run family background characteristics and prior ability, suggesting that circumstances and investments made considerably earlier in the child's life explain the majority of the gap in test scores between young people from rich and poor families.
We find that parental cognitive ability is a significant predictor of children's cognitive ability; moreover, it explains one sixth of the socio-economic gap in those skills, even after controlling for a rich set of demographic, attitudinal and behavioural factors.
Childcare costs are often viewed as one of the biggest barriers to work, particularly among lone parents on low incomes. We investigate the impact of youngest child being eligible for full-time primary education (relative to part-time nursery education) on welfare receipt and employment patterns amongst lone parents receiving welfare.
We find a very strong correlation between cognitive ability across generations, as well as a strong relationship between family socio-economic status and cognitive ability.
The online appendix for IFS working paper W10/15, 'The role of attitudes and behaviours in explaining socio-economic differences in attainment at age 16'.
Online appendix for IFS working paper W10/16, 'Explaining the socio-economic gradient in child outcomes: the intergenerational transmission of cognitive skills'.
Using a simple decomposition analysis, we show that around two thirds of the socio-economic gap in attainment at age 16 can be accounted for by long-run family background characteristics and prior ability.
This paper examines the impact of month of birth on national achievement test scores in England whilst children are in school, and on subsequent further and higher education participation.
This paper makes use of newly linked administrative data to better understand the determinants of higher education participation amongst individuals from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds.
