In the last few months, there has been a series of strikes by teachers in further education colleges across England over pay and conditions, and more strikes look set to impact the post-16 education sector this year. With inflation at around 10%, college teachers have experienced large...

Five years ago, then Prime Minister Boris Johnson made "levelling up" a central plank of the Conservative Party's bid for re-election, with a manifesto pledge to "level up every part of the UK". In 2022, the government published a thorough and ambitious White Paper setting out 12 levelling up...

The introduction of universal credit (UC) has been the most significant reform to the workingage benefits system since the reforms following the post-war Beveridge Report. When fully rolled out, around 8 million families - 29% of all working-age families - will be entitled to the benefit. UC is...

Politicians typically focus on short-term economic issues; but, a nation’s long-term economic well-being is directly linked to its rate of economic growth. In turn, its growth rate is directly linked to the economically relevant skills of its population. Until recently, however, economists...

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted many aspects of children's lives, with impacts on their social and emotional development as well as their educational attainment. School closures increased social and emotional difficulties (Blanden et al., 2021); lack of contact with friends and extended family...

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...

Governments invest a lot of money in education, so it is important to understand the benefits of this spending. One essential aspect is that education can potentially make people better parents and thus improve the educational and employment outcomes of their children. Interventions that...