When studying different types of returns to education, educational reforms are commonly used in the economics literature as a source of exogenous variation in education. The Swedish compulsory school reform is one example; the reform extended compulsory education throughout the country, in...

In 2002 the former Labour government launched the Academies Programme of school improvement. This scheme has targeted entrenched issues of pupil underachievement within state secondary schools located in deprived areas, by enabling private sponsors to run the renewed schools and by granting...

The need for education to help every child rather than focus on average attainment has become a more central part of the policy agenda in the US and the UK. Remedial programmes are often difficult to evaluate because participation is usually based on pupil characteristics that are largely...

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...

University fees have recently trebled in England and there are fears that many young people may be put off from participating in further and higher education - especially those from low income backgrounds. This could exacerbate inequalities that are already very stark in the UK. In this paper,...

Educational inequalities are evident even before children start school. Those connected to disadvantage widen out as children progress through the education system and into the labour market. We document various forms of educational inequality. We then review available evidence for England about...

During the early Nineties the proportion of UK graduates doubled over a very short period of time. This paper investigates the effect of the expansion on early labour market attainment, focusing on over-education. We define over-education by combining occupation codes and a self-reported measure...

It is difficult to know whether widening access to schools which provide a more academically oriented general education makes a difference to average educational achievement. We make use of reforms affecting admission to the 'high ability' track in Northern Ireland, but not England. The...

The underrepresentation of minority teachers and male teachers remains an issue in US elementary education, and there is evidence that racial interactions partly shape student performance. However there is little work on discrimination within the classroom. Do teachers give better grades to...

The issue of social segregation in schools has seen a recent resurgence of interest - in the US, UK and internationally - as the debate rages on about whether policies that expand families' freedom to choose amongst schools encourage divergence or convergence in the types of pupil different...