This paper estimates the impact of two flagship education policies, the Specialist Schools initiative and the Excellence in Cities programme, on the attainment of secondary school pupils in England. The focus is on their relative impact across gender, ethnic and socio-economic groups. Using...

This paper estimates the impact of the Specialist Schools initiative and the Excellence in Cities programme on the attainment of secondary school pupils in England. The focus is on their relative impact across gender and ethnic groups. Using pupil-level data, we find that both policies have had...