The Government defends its intention to scrap EMA - and replace it with a smaller payment - on the grounds that the EMA is expensive and fails to deliver enough bang for its buck. But what does the evidence on the effectiveness of the EMA show?
Last week the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, Vince Cable, suggested a graduate tax as a 'fairer' replacement for tuition fees in higher education. All the Labour leadership candidates - with the exception of David Miliband - have expressed support for this idea, as has the National Union of Students; the leading universities, meanwhile, have opposed it. This Observation examines whether the rationale for such a policy and the practical implications of it have been fully considered.
The type of school a child attends is known to impact on educational attainment and later life outcomes. But there is very little persuasive empirical evidence (although widespread and varied anecdotal evidence) on why parents opt to take their children outside the state system.
This study evaluates a university access program that provides financial, academic and social support to low socioeconomic status (SES) students using a natural experiment which exploits the time variation in the expansion of the program across schools.
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.
On the face of it, there appears to be much agreement between the three main UK parties on education policy: they all propose the creation of new schools or academies, and all plan to introduce a 'pupil premium' that is intended to provide more funds to schools with disadvantaged pupils. On closer examination, however, this apparent consensus fades away - there are real and significant differences between the parties' approaches to the education system.
This book documents the first five years of life of the children of the influential Millennium Cohort Study, which is tracking almost 19,000 babies born in 2000 and 2001 in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
We study the impact of socio-economic status on dropping-out of high school, finding that, together, child ability measured at age 15 and parental valuation of education fully explain differences in drop-out rates between high and low parental education families.
This paper evaluates a United Kingdom pilot study designed to test whether a means-tested conditional cash transfer paid to 16- to 18-year-olds for staying in full-time education is an effective way of reducing the proportion of school dropouts.
In this paper we offer an appraisal of the economics of education research area, charting its history as a field and discussing the ways in which economists have contributed both to education research and to education policy-making.
This paper examines the impact of <i>in utero</i> exposure to the Asian influenza pandemic of 1957 upon physical and cognitive development in childhood.
