Sarah is an Associate Director in the Education and Skills sector. She joined the IFS in 2012 after completing her PhD in Economics at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on the origins of inequality within and across generations. Her current projects look at the determinants of early childhood development, the drivers of intergenerational mobility, and the impact of COVID-19 on families' time-use and child development. Sarah is also a Research Fellow at IZA Bonn and of the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group (HCEO). She also served as a teaching fellow at the University College London.
Education
PhD Economics, University College London, 2012
MA Economics, University of Chicago, 2007
BA (Magna cum Laude) Economics and Political Science, Columbia University, 2005
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.
This report presents the main findings of the project “Improving early childhood development in rural Ghana through scalable low-cost community-run play schemes''.
The COVID-19 crisis has caused drastic changes to most parents’ work lives and other responsibilities. Millions of adults have lost or are forecast to lose their jobs permanently; many more have stopped work temporarily. Others are newly working from home, while many key workers are experiencing additional pressures and risks in their work. For most parents, school and childcare closures have meant that children are at home, and requiring care, for at least an extra six hours a day.
The coronavirus pandemic, and the measures put in place to combat it, have changed almost everything about how people live their day-to-day lives. More than ever before, life today is being conducted behind the nation’s front doors.
Many governments are considering expanding childcare subsidies to increase the labour force participation of parents (especially mothers) with young children.
We examine the channels through which a randomized early childhood intervention in Colombia led to significant gains in cognitive and socio-emotional skills among a sample of disavantaged children aged 12 to 24 months at baseline.
In a new feasibility study, we conclude that it would be possible to implement and evaluate a new programme targeted at very young children in disadvantaged families. We also provide a blueprint for what the programme and evaluation could look like.
We have established a new partnership between academics, local government and early years practitioners to develop, implement and evaluate a home-visiting programme for parents with very young children in England. In this feasibility study, we research local priorities and existing services to evaluate the need for a new early childhood intervention in England.
Our research looks at the impacts that Sure Start had on children’s health during their primary school years from its start in 1999 and its peak in the late 2000s.
Event
4 June 2019 at 10:30<p>One Great George Street, Westminster, London SW1P 3AA</p>
New IFS research, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, examines the effect that Sure Start has had on health outcomes. To what extent has Sure Start benefitted children’s health? Which groups of children benefit the most? How might these benefits have come about?
From lagging well behind most European countries in the early 1990s, the UK is now one of the highest spenders on the under-5s in Europe (OECD, 2014). One of the biggest programmes for this age group is Sure Start. It offers families with children under the age of 5 a ‘one-stop shop’ for childcare and early education, health services, parenting support, and employment advice, with the aim of improving children’s school readiness, health, and social and emotional development.
Despite receiving 55% of A levels overall in 2018, girls received just 43% of A levels awarded in STEM subjects. Rachel Cassidy, Sarah Cattan and Claire Crawford explore what drives girls’ A level choices, including why they may or may not opt for maths or physics.
There is a large gender gap in the likelihood of taking maths and physics at A-level, even among high-achieving pupils. Among pupils who achieved grade A or A* (equivalent to grades 7-9) in GCSE maths in 2010, 36.5% of girls compared to 51.1% of boys took maths A-level. Among those who achieved grade A or A* in GCSE physics, just 13.2% of girls compared to 39.3% of boys took physics A-level. By contrast, there is almost no gender gap in the likelihood of taking chemistry A-level amongst those who score highly in the subject at GCSE, and girls are actually more likely to take biology A-level than boys.
We examine the channels through which a randomized early childhood intervention in Colombia led to signi cant gains in cognitive and socio-emotional skills among a sample of disadvantaged children aged 12 to 24 months at baseline.
