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...

The COVID-19 pandemic has dealt a monumental blow to the education of English school children. Over the past 18 months, English school pupils experienced two long periods of nationwide school closures. The first round of universal school closures lasted 10 weeks (from 23 March to 1 June 2020);...

The COVID-19 school closures forced children and parents to make unprecedented changes to their daily routines. Including the summer holidays, most children will have had a five-and-a-half-month break from physically attending school by the time they returned in September. There has been...

From lagging well behind most European countries in the early 1990s, the UK is now one of the highest spenders on the under-5s in Europe (OECD, 2014). One of the biggest programmes for this age group is Sure Start. It offers families with children under the age of 5 a "one-stop shop" for...

This report presents a detailed overview of the baseline data collection activities as part of the project "Improving early childhood development in rural Ghana through scalable low-cost community-run play schemes''. The project is collaboration between The Institute for Fiscal Studies (UK),...

There is a large gender gap in the likelihood of taking maths and physics at A-level, even among high-achieving pupils. Among pupils who achieved grade A or A* (equivalent to grades 7-9) in GCSE maths in 2010, 36.5% of girls compared to 51.1% of boys took maths A-level. Among those who achieved...

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...

This report presents evidence of the short- and medium-term impacts of the programme on educational outcomes. Using a robust evaluation methodology and administrative education data covering 15 cohorts of children, we measure the impact of having had access to a Sure Start centre between ages 0...