Schools

We assigned two cohorts of kindergarten students, totaling more than 24,000 children, to teachers within schools with a rule that is as-good-as-random. We collected data on children at the beginning of the school year, and applied 12 tests of math, language and executive function (EF) at the end of the year. All teachers were filmed teaching for a full day, and the videos were coded using a wellknown classroom observation tool, the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (or CLASS). We find substantial classroom effects: A one-standard deviation increase in classroom quality results in 0.11, 0.11, and 0.07 standard deviation higher test scores in language, math, and EF, respectively. Teacher behaviors, as measured by the CLASS, are associated with higher test scores. Parents recognize better teachers, but do not change their behaviors appreciably to take account of differences in teacher quality.

The effect of increasing school resources on educational outcomes is a central issue inthe debate on improving school quality.

We exploit wage regulation to examine the impact of pay on school performance and analyse data from over 3000 schools containing around 200,000 teachers who educate around half a million children per year.

This report analyses the impact of abolishing the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) in 2011. We show that this reduced Year 12 participation by around 1.5 percentage points.

This report explores the link between reading skills at age 10 and a range of outcomes later in life, including employment status, earnings and self-reported health status. It also investigates whether reading skills have greater benefits for children growing up in poor families.

In this paper the authors use a randomised experiment to analyse the impact of a school grants program in Senegal, which decentralised a portion of the country's education budget.

This briefing note focuses on changes in schools spending in England over time, comparing these with other areas of education spending, and examines how reforms to school funding have affected different groups of schools.

School funding per pupil increased substantially between 1999-00 and 2012-13 in England. In this paper, we decompose these increases in funding per pupil into the amount explained by quantities of different types of staff per pupil, their price and changes in non-staffing costs.

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.

Human capital and inequality in the United Kingdom

This note summarises the results of two related research projects. With funding from the ESRC through its Secondary Data Analysis Initiative, and the Nuffield Foundation, Jo Blanden (University of Surrey), Emilia Del Bono (University of Essex), Kirstine Hansen (Institute of Education), Sandra McNally (University of Surrey) and Birgitta Rabe (University of Essex) investigated the impact of free early education on children’s development.

New research from CMPO, IFS and the University of Cambridge suggests families with lower socio-economic status have less access to higher performing schools than families with higher socio-economic status.