In the UK there has historically been a clear demarcation between the academic and vocational routes through education post-16. Generally vocational study is taken either on a part time basis or full time at Further Education (FE) colleges. Students who want to take academic qualifications such as A levels have the option to enrol in a school…

The Centre for the Economics of Education was asked to investigate the factors that influence a range of children's academic and non-academic outcomes, including their enjoyment of school, whether they take unauthorised absence from school and whether they feel they are bullied. The study also investigated whether schools can influence these…

Commuting or re-location costs could be an in important influence on students' university choices and might even deter some from going to university. The barriers presented by these costs may be high for lower-income students, and students for whom there are cultural incentives to remain in or close to the parental home. If this is the case, then…

A large proportion of the UK adult population has very poor literacy and/or numeracy skills (see the 1999 Moser Report, the 2003 "Skills for Life" Survey and the 2006 Leitch report). In 1999, the Moser report found that approximately 20% of adults in England had severe literacy difficulties, whilst around 40% had some numeracy problems. Having a…

The purpose of this report is to determine the extent to which NVQ2 qualifications, when acquired in a person's late twenties and early thirties, encourage progression on to other learning and/or lead to other beneficial changes in a person's economic circumstances. The project will provide evidence to help inform the Department about whether NVQ2…

The recent industrial action taken by the Association of University Teachers (AUT) has given the issue of academic pay high prominence in the UK press. There appears to be a remarkable consensus that higher education academic salaries are too low, relative to other groups of workers in the UK, and that this is leading to an academic "brain drain".…

In this paper we evaluate the labour market value of basic skills in the UK, focusing on the wage and employment returns to having better literacy and numeracy skills. We draw on literacy and numeracy assessments undertaken by all cohort members of the UK 1970 British Cohort Study. The data used are very rich and allow us to account for potential…

Policy-makers in almost all countries agree on one thing: namely on the importance of education and skills to ensuring future economic prosperity. A fruitful line of research has focused on determining the impact that acquiring education or training has on an individual's labour market productivity and earning prospects: this is known as rate of…

Throughout the post-war period there have been many attempts to reform the UK education system, often with an explicit intention to try and make it more productive. The list of education policy reforms that have been attempted over the last 50 years is quite extensive, and recently the UK (and in particular England and Wales) has introduced many…

The paper aims to make a methodological contribution to the education segregation literature, providing a critique of previous measures of segregation used in the literature, as well as suggesting an alternative approach to measuring school segregation. It also provides new empirical evidence on changes in the extent of socio-economic segregation…

There has been a substantial rise in British education levels in recent decades, and new empirical evidence suggests that less able but wealthier children have benefited most from this expansion, at least during the 1970s and 1980s. There are many potential explanations for this trend. For example, during this period, the UK's highly selective…