Education spending is the second-largest element of public service spending in the UK behind health, representing about £90 billion in 2017-18 in today's prices or about 4.3% of national income. The level of UK education spending has risen significantly in real terms over time, growing...

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...

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...

This report uses data on food and non-alcoholic drink purchases from shops, takeaways, restaurants and other outlets to analyse how the diets of a large, representative panel of households in Great Britain evolved 15 months before and up to 24 months after the start of the onset of the COVID-19...

In this report, we analyse the current state of the education system in England and set out the key challenges that the next government will inherit. This is not just a tale of despair. Compared with many other developed countries, England's education system does well in terms of student...

COVID-19 has uprooted many aspects of parents' daily routines, from their jobs to their childcare arrangements. In this paper, we provide a novel description of how parents in England living in two-parent opposite-gender families are spending their time under lockdown. We find that mothers' paid...

We evaluate the short- and medium-term health impacts of Sure Start, a large-scale and universal early childhood program in England. We exploit the rollout of the program and implement a difference-in-difference approach, combining data on the exact location and opening date of Sure Start...

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...

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;...