Education and skills

This article identifies some of the gaps in the existing literature pertaining to childhood development. It then introduces the Young Lives dataset, explaining the importance of such comparable data from longitudinal studies in different countries for this field of research, before exploring the contributions of each of the articles using this data in this journal's special edition.

We evaluate the long-term impacts of a randomized Colombian training and job placement program.

The short- and long-run impact of the national funding formula for schools in England

Public sector pay has been squeezed since public spending cuts began to take effect from 2011, and it looks set to be squeezed even further up to 2020. However, this comes on the back of an increase in public sector wages relative to those in the private sector during the Great Recession. There is currently significant policy interest in the extent to which continued stagnation in public sector wages will affect the ability of the public sector to recruit and retain high-quality workers, although to date little is known about the potential effects.

We estimate the effect of education on lifetime earnings by distinguishing between individuals who lived in rural or urban areas during childhood and between individuals with access to many or few books at home at age 10.

In this report, we present long-run series of spending per student in England across the four main stages of education (early years, schools, further education and sixth forms, and higher education).

Fifty years ago, entry to state secondary schools in England was decided on the basis of an exam taken at age 11. Those with the highest scores – around 25% of the population – could go to grammar schools (selective state funded schools), while the rest would go to secondary moderns. Children educated at these different types of school followed different curricula and took different qualifications at age 16, and staying in education beyond this point was usually only open to those who had attended grammar schools.

In this new work, the researchers compared what happened to the labour market outcomes of mothers and fathers as their children moved from being entitled to a free part-time nursery place (offering 15 hours of free childcare per week) to a full-time place at primary school (which effectively offers parents 30–35 hours of free childcare per week).

The success of universal preschool education depends crucially on the policy parameters and specific country context.