Against a backdrop of increasing demands for health care, the National Health Service (NHS) has long sought ways to increase the number of staff available to provide care to patients. More doctors, nurses, midwives and health-care assistants (HCAs) mean that the NHS can deliver more, and...

With the COVID-19 lockdowns and the ongoing cost-of-living crisis, the importance of the early years system for children and their parents has been made particularly obvious over the last few years. In this report, we analyse how public spending on early childhood education and care has changed...

The 2020 NHS People Plan committed to providing flexible working opportunities to all NHS staff. An important component of flexible working is less-than-full-time (LTFT) working, enabling staff to balance paid work with other commitments. However, there is currently only limited empirical...

Medicine is a high-paid and high-status career. It is also a big profession - and expected to grow considerably over coming decades. Understanding differences in access to medical careers by ethnicity, and different career paths within medicine by ethnicity, is therefore an important and...

The last 25 years has seen a transformation in how early years education and childcare is approached in England. The establishment and subsequent expansions of a "free entitlement" to funded early education and childcare have seen early years spending quadruple over the last 25 years, and a...

In this report, we examine the career progression of nurses and other staff groups within the NHS Agenda for Change (AfC) pay framework in England over the decade between 2012 and 2021. We document differences in progression across pay bands between staff groups and within groups of nurses to...