You cannot fairly assign grades to a cohort of students who have not done the exams. A Levels "didn’t need to be this much of a mess", writes Paul Johnson.
17 August 2020
How reforms to the pensions provided to public sector employees led to a £17 billion bill to rectify the incompetence of ministers and/or civil servants.
20 July 2020
The pandemic will lead us to question many aspects of the way we are governed and the way we run our economy, writes Paul Johnson. It should certainly lead us to question the dominance of Whitehall and the historical subservience of local government.
6 July 2020
Thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement, "there has been rather a lot of soul-searching going on within the economics profession", writes Paul Johnson. "I do think that we could be an awful lot better and that greater diversity would help us to be better."
22 June 2020
We need policies directly focused on job creation and supporting people - especially young people - to find jobs, writes Paul Johnson.
8 June 2020
"School closures don’t merely put progress on educational equity at risk", Paul Johnson writes, "they put at risk years of slow progress towards gender equality in the labour market."
25 May 2020
We will have to be very smart and very lucky to get away with a swift bounce-back from the deepest recession in history, writes Paul Johnson.
11 May 2020
"We are not all in this together when it comes to the social and economic consequences of the virus and our response to it", writes Paul Johnson.
27 April 2020
When and how should the coronavirus lockdown end? "We need some framework for decision-making, not a set of opinions about the right decision", argues Paul Johnson.
13 April 2020
By the time the coronavirus lockdown ends, the government's choices "will be utterly different" to when it took office, writes Paul Johnson. "How it makes those choices could prove even more important than the immediate response to the crisis."
30 March 2020
"Doing a degree on average adds significantly to earnings over a lifetime", Paul Johnson writes. But still, "we do not have an education and training system that provides...routes into good employment for enough young people."
2 March 2020
"If we want more spending, we’ll have to pay for it. That, eventually, must mean more taxes." Paul Johnson surveys Rishi Sunak's choices ahead of the 2020 Budget.
17 February 2020