Ellen Greaves

While there is broad agreement in the UK on the importance of social mobility, current evidence suggests that social background is more strongly related to outcomes in the UK than in many other developed countries.

The Government has introduced substantial reforms to the pay of teachers in the English local authority (LA) maintained sector, to give schools greater freedom to decide how much they pay teachers and how quickly their pay progresses. This study set out to identify what reforms schools were making, what influenced their decisions, and the perceived implications for staff and schools.

There is substantial evidence of a significant relationship between parents’ income and sons’ earnings in the UK, and that this relationship has strengthened over time. We extend this by exploring a broader measure of net family income as an outcome.

Public sector pay has been squeezed since public spending cuts began to take effect from 2011, and it looks set to be squeezed even further up to 2020. However, this comes on the back of an increase in public sector wages relative to those in the private sector during the Great Recession. There is currently significant policy interest in the extent to which continued stagnation in public sector wages will affect the ability of the public sector to recruit and retain high-quality workers, although to date little is known about the potential effects.

New IFS research finds that providing school breakfasts free to all children in disadvantaged English primary schools helps pupils to make two months’ additional progress over the course of a year. These gains seem to be driven by better behaviour and concentration in the classroom, meaning that even students who don’t eat breakfast at school can benefit from the improved learning environment. These benefits come at a low cost relative to other programmes with a similar impact on attainment.

This report, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, shows how routes into teaching have changed in recent years, and looks at the costs, benefits and retention rates for each route.

This report uses linked individual-level administrative data from schools in England and universities in the UK to document the relationships between socio-economic status, ethnicity and HE participation, and explore what drives these relationships.

This evaluation compares the education outcomes of Social Mobility Foundation (SMF) participants (collected by SMF via participant questionnaires) with outcomes for a group of pupils with similar observable characteristics (such as performance at secondary school and neighbourhood context), observed in administrative data. This report focuses on the education outcomes for four cohorts of participants with the SMF: the first cohort featured entered the programme in 2009 (referred to as the 2009 cohort), the second in 2010, the third in 2011 and the fourth in 2012.