The focus of this report is the distribution of household income in the UK. We assess the changes to average incomes, income inequality and poverty that occurred in the latest year of data (2014-15), and put these in historical context using comparable data spanning the last 50 years. The...

The official statistics on the distribution of income and the extent of poverty in the UK in 2011-12 were released on Thursday 13 June 2013. Using the data underlying these statistics, this report analyses: •the changes in average incomes in the most recent year of data and the period since...

In 2008-09, the UK experienced its deepest recession since the Second World War. One notable feature of this recession was, however, the resilience of employment, which fell by just 2.1% at a time when GDP fell by 6.3%. This suggests that firms may have been trying to weather the recession by...

This report updates and extends the previous IFS work to examine the consequences of these changes for graduates. In particular, we use a new model of graduate earnings and repayments and explore in more detail the pattern and size of loan repayments made, including by different types of graduates.

This report examines how living standards - most commonly measured by households' incomes - have changed for different groups in the UK, and the consequences that these changes have for income inequality and for measures of deprivation and poverty. In this latest report, we focus in particular...

Education spending is the second-largest area of public service spending in the UK, representing about 4.5% of national income in 2015-16. Government spending on education grew by around 1.7% per year in real terms over the 1980s and 1990s, before increasing sharply over the 2000s by more than...

The Social Mobility Foundation (SMF) is a charity that aims to make apractical improvement to social mobility in the UK by encouraging and supporting access to "high-status" universities and professional occupations for high attaining pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds. The SMF's programmes...

The uncertainty over future student loan repayments means that the debate about whether the government contribution to the cost of higher education is too high will almost certainly continue. However, as our analysis makes clear, whatever the current estimate of the RAB charge, it is based on a...

The Effective Pre-School, Primary and Secondary Education (EPPSE) project is the first large-scale British study on the effects of different pre-school experiences on children's outcomes. It enables researchers to look at the impact of both pre-school education and pre-school quality not only on...

How have household incomes evolved since the onset of the financial crisis? How has the gap between rich and poor changed? How have living standards changed over time for different parts of the population? How many people are in poverty and which groups are most likely to face poverty? Each...