Education and skills

We use direct evidence on credit constraints to study their importance for household consumption growth and for welfare.

Early childhood is a period of rapid growth and development, which lays the foundations for later life, but it is also a period in which children are at their most vulnerable. Poverty, poor nutrition and under-stimulating and unhygienic surroundings, which affect millions of children in developing countries, hamper and stifle child health and development.

This paper provides new estimates of the medium- and long-term impacts of Head Start on health and behavioral problems.

This report provides the first evidence of the relative cost-effectiveness of different routes into teaching in England, describing and empirically estimating the costs and benefits of different routes into teaching while accounting, as far as possible, for the selection of teachers with different characteristics into each route.

This report describes new research on the impact of different pre-school experiences on academic outcomes at the end of Key Stage 4 (KS4, age 16) and relates this to the potential longer-term economic benefits for both the individuals themselves and the exchequer.

This paper provides new evidence on what happens to young people from different backgrounds once they arrive at university, exploring socio-economic differences in drop-out, degree completion and degree class.

Online Appendix to accompany IFS Working Paper W14/31: socio-economic differences in university outcomes in the UK: drop-out, degree completion and degree class by Claire Crawford

This paper focuses on individuals who have completed university and provides new evidence on differences in graduates’ earnings by socio-economic background, with a particular focus on whether they attended a private school.

This research looks at the impact of changes to financial support for students in higher education

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.

This report estimates the impact of free, universal pre-school education for three year olds on maternal labour supply in England.