This paper uses a unique data set from 5028 primary school children in rural India to examine whether the demographic interactions between students and teachers influence student outcomes and whether social distance between student and teacher exacerbates gender, caste and religious gaps in...

University fees have recently trebled in England, prompting fears that young people may be put off from participating in higher education. We investigate students' knowledge and their receptiveness to information campaigns about the costs and benefits of staying on in education. We compare the...

'League table' information on school effectiveness in England generally relies on either a comparison of the average outcomes of pupils by school, e.g. mean exam scores, or on estimates of the average value added by each school. These approaches assume that the information parents and...

Social mobility has emerged as one of the key academic and political topics in Britain over the last decade. Although economists and sociologists disagree on whether mobility has increased or decreased, and if this is a bigger issue in the UK than other developed countries, both groups recognise...

One in five children in England are recorded as having some kind of special educational need, meaning that they receive additional help in school; yet there is very little evidence of the effect of such assistance on pupil’s academic progress. This is at least partly because it is usually...

Each year more than 300,000 individuals leave Great Britain to start a new life overseas. Indeed, recent estimates suggest that up to 4.7 million British nationals now live abroad. Yet, in contrast to the substantial literature on the economic and social welfare of immigrants into Great Britain,...

In 2013 Spain introduced a series of educational reforms explicitly inspired by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012 results. These reforms were mainly implemented in secondary education based upon the assumption that this is where Spain's educational problems lie. This...

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) are two highly respected studies of school pupils’ academic achievement. English policymakers have been disappointed with school children’s performance on these tests,...

Children born at the end of the academic year have lower educational attainment, on average, than those born at the start of the academic year. Previous research shows that the difference is most pronounced early in pupils’ school lives, but remains evident and statistically significant...

In this paper we consider whether certain countries are particularly adept (or particularly poor) at getting children from disadvantaged homes to study for a bachelor’s degree. A series of university access models are estimated for four English speaking countries (England, Canada,...