There is a long history of research in the UK and elsewhere showing that children who are born at the end of the academic year tend to have lower educational attainment than children born at the start of the academic year. In England, where the academic year runs from 1 September to 31 August,...

This report considers the extent to which differences in parental characteristics explain gaps in cognitive and socio-emotional development between children at older ages. It documents and explores the differences between children born to cohabiting and married couples for a range of other...

The Social Mobility Foundation (SMF) is a charity that aims to make apractical improvement to social mobility in the UK by encouraging and supporting access to "high-status" universities and professional occupations for high attaining pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds. The SMF's programmes...

Teach First is a charity that seeks to address educational disadvantage by placing high-quality graduates as teachers in schools with the most educationally disadvantaged pupils. There are two questions to answer when deciding the appropriate way to do this. First, how does one define...

Higher education (HE) participation has expanded dramatically in England over the last half century; however, access to HE amongst particular groups of students remains a major policy concern. This report makes use of newly linked administrative data to better understand the determinants of...

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...

This report provides the first evidence of the relative cost-effectiveness of different routes into teaching in England, describing and empirically estimating the costs and benefits of different routes into teaching while accounting, as far as possible, for the selection of teachers with...

Teacher recruitment and retention are increasingly challenging for schools as the pools of graduates in key subjects decline and pupil numbers grow. This report reveals around 40% of teachers who begin their initial training are not in a state school job five years later. That means of 35,000 or...

The Social Mobility Foundation (SMF) is a charity that aims to make a practical improvement to social mobility in the UK by encouraging and supporting access to 'high-status' universities and professional occupations for high-attaining pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds. This evaluation...