Education

Blog

ADR UK:

Understanding labour markets through administrative data: A workshop of collaborating minds

This blog is by ADR UK Research Fellow Guglielmo Ventura, who reflects on a recent workshop hosted at the LSE Centre for Economic Performance. The event brought together leading academic and policy voices to explore how ...Read more...

Blog

LSE Europp:

Ten countries, five continents, one pattern - women are less likely to pick STEM subjects

Women make up only 35 per cent of STEM graduates globally. Andres Barrios Fernandez and Aspasia Bizopoulou show that while there is huge variety between countries in the educational attainment of men and women, young wom...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

How the Great Recession affected millennial education and careers

In 2025 the proportion of young British people aged 16 to 24 who were not in education, employment or training was at its highest since 2014. How much impact do educational choices made at that age have on future careers...Read more...

Journal article

Italian Economic Journal:

Artificial Intelligence in Education: Computer-Assisted Learning and AI-guided Tutors

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Computer-Assisted Learning (CAL) offer powerful tools to improve foundational skills and close educational gaps, with evidence showing meaningful gains in student performance, especially ...Read more...

Blog

LSE Inequalities:

Bred to rule: What a £180,000 private tutor job reveals about the education arms race

What does a £180,000 job ad for a private tutor *for a baby* reveal about the global education arms race? It's tempting to put it down to the eccentric indulgence of a tiny global elite. But it in fact points to an expl...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Personnel policy in public sector organizations: evidence from England's academy schools

Many governments are increasingly decentralizing the governance of public sector organizations, by granting more autonomy to their managers. At the same time, public sector managers often cannot use key personnel practic...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Elite school students end up in better universities than expected, based on their grades

Students of private and grammar schools are over-represented in elite universities. While some of that is explained by better grades, therse is also a degree of mismatch between how well students do in exams and the qual...Read more...

Journal article

Economics of Education Review:

Home broadband and human capital formation

Using administrative data from England, we estimate the effect of home broadband speed on student-level value-added test scores. Our primary estimation leverages jumps in connection quality between close neighbors across...Read more...

Journal article

Children and Youth Services Review:

Supplemental nutrition assistance program and parents’ time investments in children

An emerging literature explores whether social policy programs have benefits to families and their children, above and beyond economic and human capital outcomes. We investigate whether the Supplemental Nutrition Assista...Read more...

Journal article

Economics of Education Review: Forthcoming

Free to improve? The impact of free school attendance in England

We evaluate the impact of attending two secondary free schools in England - new autonomous state-funded start-ups - using admission lotteries and a distance-based regression discontinuity design. We characterise each sch...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

What can we learn about youth crime from weekday school closures?

Schools are lauded for their ability to keep young people away from crime and on the right path. But what happens behind the school gates? Janine Boshoff and Matteo Sandi reveal a more complex story - one where schoolyar...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Pipeline vs. choice: the global gender gap in STEM applications

Women account for only 35% of global STEM graduates, a share unchanged for a decade. We use administrative microdata from centralized university admissions in ten systems to deliver the first cross-national decomposition...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

What's at stake for teenagers in England awaiting their GCSE results?

The 16-year-olds who took their GCSEs this summer started secondary school in the middle of the pandemic. The results of these high-stakes exams will highlight the uneven toll that Covid-19 lockdowns took on learning, as...Read more...

CVER Research Paper

Young people, human capital investment and the Great Recession

Policy makers recognise the importance of encouraging young people to stay in education for longer. We use the experience of the Great Recession in England to evaluate whether the incentive to invest in human capital bea...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Private highs: investigating university overmatch among students from elite schools

Inequality in elite college attendance is a key driver of intergenerational mobility. This paper shifts the focus upstream to examine how elite high school attendance - specifically, enrollment in UK private, fee-paying ...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy:

The Making of Civic Virtues: A School-Based Experiment in Three Countries

This paper shows that schools can foster the transmission of civic virtues by helping students to develop concrete, democratically chosen, collective projects. We draw on a RCT implemented in 200 middle schools in three ...Read more...

Blog

LSE Inequalities:

How does housing affect educational outcomes? Evidence from the UK's Right to Buy scheme

Right-to-Buy gave tenants of local authority owned 'council' houses the chance to own their home. The policy, which began in 1980, has been criticised for increasing inequality in the housing market, but Richard Disney a...Read more...

CEP report

Pupil absence and the Covid-19 pandemic

A high level of school absence has persisted across many countries since the Covid-19 pandemic. We use English data to investigate how local health and social regulations affected pupil absence rates during the pandemic ...Read more...

Blog

LSE British politics and policy:

Universities are engines of growth and must be backed by policy

The Industrial Strategy identifies growth-driving sectors that will require a highly-skilled workforce. Higher education will be a key to unlocking this ambition. But as universities aim to recruit the best talent from a...Read more...

Blog

LSE Impact:

Banning NDAs in universities is only the first step toward a better research culture

The UK government is moving to ban non-disclosure agreements being used to silence employees who have suffered harassment or discrimination. Such a ban has already come into place in higher education, economists Dina Rab...Read more...

CentrePiece article

The benefits of elite universities are more social than academic

From Cambridge and Oxford to Harvard and Yale, elite universities are a feature of many education systems. Andrés Barrios Fernández, Christopher Neilson and Seth Zimmerman ask whether these institutions of higher educati...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Public sector performance disclosure: salary and career outcomes for top managers and employees

Public sector organizations around the world are held to account on the basis of objective measures of performance. This paper investigates, for the first time, the impact of subjective school inspection ratings on labor...Read more...

External report

A joined-up approach to UK skills policy

It is generally accepted that skills are a key driver of economic productivity and economic dynamism. They are a means by which individuals and communities can become resilient to social and economic change and are a key...Read more...

Government consultation

Social mobility policy

This submission argues for a new model of social mobility that recognises and values all forms of talent - academic, vocational, and creative - and helps people to lead decent lives, wherever they live, whatever their ba...Read more...

Government consultation

Social mobility policy committee

To ensure inclusivity in the post-16 education system, the government must guarantee a clear progression route for the "other 50 per cent" of young people who are not on the academic track. The government should introduc...Read more...