Luke Sibieta

Today the IFS published a detailed examination of what happened to living standards, to poverty and to inequality over Labour's 13 years in office. Amongst other findings, this shows that income inequality rose under Labour. Much of the explanation for this can be found in the fast growth in the incomes of the very richest, and in particular of the incomes of just the top one or two percent. These very high earners have seen their incomes pull away from those of the large majority.

Yesterday, the Government announced the details of a new bursary scheme to replace the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA). The funding for this will total £180m, of which £15m is reserved for a £1,200 annual grant for vulnerable children. The remaining £165m will form a discretionary fund that schools and colleges will distribute to students deemed to have the greatest need. In this observation, we analyse how this fund could be structured and its potential impact on students.

The Government has announced a pupil premium of £430 per pupil eligible for free school meals no matter where they live in England. This is a simple and transparent policy, which should make the financial incentives generated by the pupil premium that much clearer. The combination of a freeze in existing funding per pupil and the new pupil premium means that less deprived schools will see larger cuts than more deprived schools, some of whom will receive a small increase in funding.

These slides were presented at a Policy Exchange seminar, 'The Child Poverty Target: Towards an Index of Life Chances?'.

These slides were presented at a Society for Longitudinal and Life Course Studies Conference, Clare College, Cambridge.

These slides were presented at a Westminster Education Forum Keynote Seminar: 'Building school for the future - next steps'.

As part of an international collaboration funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and the Australian Research Council, researchers at the IFS and the Australian National University have sought to compare the nature of private schooling in both Australia and the UK.

The coalition government has announced ambitious plans for a new generation of schools inspired by the Swedish model of "free schools." Creating these new schools will clearly involve a capital cost. However, capital spending is likely to be significantly cut across most departments over the next four years, education included. Unless the new schools programme is to be very modest, plans for overall capital spending will need to be revised upwards or the cuts to investment spending elsewhere will be extremely deep.