Education and skills

Early exposure to adversity, such as abuse or neglect, is associated with poorer outcomes across social, education and health domains. Children in care (referred to as looked-after children in the UK) are a vulnerable group who experience adversity serious enough for the state to intervene in family life and place them under the supervision of child protection services within the home or, more frequently, to remove the child and place them in out-of-home care (OHC).

Unlike performance incentives for private sector managers, little is known about performance incentives for managers in public sector bureaucracies. Through a randomized trial in rural China, we study performance incentives rewarding school administrators for reducing student anemia—as well as complementarity between incentives and orthogonally assigned discretionary resources.

Graduates from higher income families (with median income of around £77,000) have average earnings which are 20% higher than those from lower income families (with median income of around £26,000). Once we condition on institution and subject choices, this premium roughly halves, to around 10%.

This report estimates the impact on earnings of attending HE compared with not going. The authors detail how this varies by subject and institution of study, as well as how these returns vary by gender, prior educational attainment and the sorts of subjects individuals have studied up to age 18. The report makes use of the Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) dataset, which links together tax, benefit, higher education and school records to provide a rich description of individuals’ trajectories through the education system and into the labour market.

Pupils benefit from a large amount of state funding for education in the 12+ years they spend in formal education, about £73,000 on average for pupils aged 16 in Summer 2010 in England. The total amount they experience is shaped by their education choices (e.g. whether to stay on post 16 and/or go to higher education) and the nature of the funding system for each stage of education. In the 1980s, considerably more was spent on the education of those from well-off backgrounds than on those from poorer backgrounds. This was driven by the fact that poorer children were much less likely to stay in education beyond 16, let alone go to university. And funding for higher education (HE) was relatively high. In this report, we find that these differences in funding by social class have now vanished.

There have been many studies of the impact of higher education (HE) on the wages and earnings of graduates. However, for working women, the variation in wages only explains 30% of the variance in net family income. To understand the overall impact of HE on the living standards of female graduates, this paper explores the wider impact of HE.

The Causal Effect of Education on Tooth Loss: Evidence from UK Schooling Reforms

Journal article published in Early Childhood Research Quarterly on Colombia study on the impact of childcare centres and home-based childcare on child cognitive and socio-emotional development.

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.

There is a lack of evidence on the adverse effects of air pollution on cognition for people with air quality-related health conditions. We propose that educational attainment, as a proxy for cognition, may increase with improved air quality. This study will explore whether asthma and seasonal allergic rhinitis, when exacerbated by acute exposure to air pollution, is associated with educational attainment.

The Secure Anonymised Information Linkage (SAIL) databank facilitated linkage of routinely collected health and education data, high spatial resolution pollution modelling and daily pollen measurements for 18,241 pupils in 7 cross-sectional cohorts across Cardiff city, UK, to investigate effects of air quality and respiratory health conditions on education attainment.