Mental health problems--and depression in particular--have been rising internationally. The link between poor mental health and poor educational outcomes is particularly interesting in the case of the UK which has a low international ranking both on measures of child wellbeing and the probability of early drop-out from the labour market and…

In recent years there has been an increase in the number of children going to school in England who do not speak English as a first language. We investigate whether this has an impact on the educational outcomes of native English speakers at the end of primary school. We show that the negative correlation observed in the raw data is mainly an…

Public college graduates in many developing countries outperform graduates of private ones on the college exit exams. This has often been attributed to the cutting edge education provided in public colleges. However, public colleges are highly subsidized, suggesting that the private-public education outcome gap might reflect the pre-determined…

In this paper, we study a high profile case--the introduction of academy schools into the English secondary school sector--that has allowed schools to gain more autonomy and flexible governance by changing their school structure. We consider the impact of an academy school conversion on their pupil intake and pupil performance and possible…

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…

Education is recognized to be a key factor of economic development, not only giving access to technological progress as emphasized by the Schumpeterian growth theory, but also entailing numerous social externalities such as the demographic transition (Murtin, 2009) or democratization (Murtin and Wacziarg, 2010). If the evolution of world…

The motivation for this paper is to increase individuals' understanding of the way in which inequality in educational outcomes and in the relation between measures of backgrounds is related to levels and dispersion of educational performance of young persons. The article thus sheds light on the international variation in the importance of…

Private schooling, in its various guises, is an important feature of education systems across the world. The existence of a private education sector generates the possibility for parents to opt their children out of state provided education. In the case of the UK, private schools, though far less numerous than state schools, have for a long time…

The Centre for the Economics of Education was asked to bring together a wide range of academic evidence (primarily England-based) to investigate the extent to which academic and non-academic childhood outcomes are complementary to each other, or are in some way traded-off against each other. The report also investigates the drivers of both…

The Every Child Matters (ECM) agenda was introduced in the UK, as a policy aiming to improve child outcomes along five broad areas. The categories are Be Healthy, Stay Safe, Enjoy and Achieve, Make a Positive Contribution and Achieve Economic Wellbeing. The objective therefore, is to move beyond the traditional focus on child academic outcomes, to…

Using the 1991 to 2007 waves of the UK British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), the authors estimate a fixed effects specification that has as outcomes (i) earnings and (ii) an indicator of social position measured using the CAMSIS scale. Adopting a fixed effects specification enables them to isolate the role of lifelong learning on these two…

Intergenerational mobility is concerned with the relationship between the socio-economic status of parents and the socio-economic outcomes of their children as adults. This can be measured in a variety of ways, by income and earnings, social class or status, or education. If an individual's income/social class/education is strongly related to his…

In the UK, education is the third largest area of government spending (of which school spending has the largest share). Since 2000, school expenditure has increased by about 40 per cent in real terms for both primary and secondary schools (see Figure 1). The question as to whether such investment is worthwhile is of central importance. The…

We examine the links between various measures of university quality and graduate earnings in the United Kingdom. We explore the implications of using different measures of quality and combining them into an aggregate measure. Our findings suggest a positive return to university quality with an average earnings differential of about 6 percent for a…

Regional labour mobility has long been viewed as a crucial component in the functioning of the labour markets of different countries. Indeed, the study of regional labour mobility has moved towards the top of the research agenda, especially in Europe, where regional unemployment differentials have been persistently larger than in the United…