Childhood is a critical period for development of mental health: episodes of mental illness during this time often recur in adulthood but early intervention can be highly effective at reducing this persistence. Understanding determinants of child mental health is therefore key for the design of...

Despite the relatively uncontested importance of promoting school attendance in the policy arena, little evidence exists on the causal effect of school absence on long-run socio-economic outcomes. We address this question by combining historical and administrative records for cohorts of Swedish...

In light of the dramatic rise in mental health disorders among adolescents seen in the past decade across the world, there is an urgent need for robust evidence on what works to combat this trend. This paper provides the first robust evaluation of the impacts on school outcomes of 6-year funding...

In England, school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic represented a sudden but relatively long-lasting shock to children’s education. During the first lockdown, schools were closed to all but the most vulnerable children and those with key worker parents from 23 March to the end of May;...

This paper provides novel empirical evidence on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the division of labour among parents of school-aged children in two-parent opposite-gender families. In line with existing evidence, we find that mothers' paid work took a larger hit than that of fathers, and...

This paper combines novel data on the time use, home learning practices and economic circumstances of families with children during the COVID-19 lockdown with pre-lockdown data from the UK Time User Survey to characterise the time use of children and how it changed during lockdown, and to gauge...