Skip to main content
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...
Marco Bertoni, Gabriel Heller-Sahlgren and Olmo Silva
30 September 2025
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...
Andrés Barrios Fernández, Christopher Neilson and Seth Zimmerman
20 June 2025
In recent decades, many countries have established autonomous schools, which are publicly funded but can operate more independently than government-run schools. Natalie Irmert, Jan Bietenbeck, Linn Mattisson and Felix We...Read more...
Jan Bietenbeck, Natalie Irmert, Linn Mattisson and Felix Weinhardt
27 February 2024
Keeping young people in education can provide them with protection from crime as well as limiting opportunities for them to engage in criminal activities. But a policy of raising the age of compulsory attendance may also...Read more...
Matteo Sandi
1 November 2023
Read more...
Lee Elliot Major, Emily Briant
6 October 2023
Youth custody has severe long-term consequences for detained young people. Stephen Machin, Sandra McNally and Jenifer Ruiz-Valenzuela investigate the relationship between GCSE qualifications and youth custody, and find t...Read more...
Stephen Machin, Sandra McNally and Jenifer Ruiz-Valenzuela
30 August 2023
Lee Elliot Major discusses how teacher-parent partnerships can help make the UK's childcare system more effective and provides three policy recommendations the government can implement....Read more...
Lee Elliot Major
25 July 2023
While many presumed school attendance levels would recover rapidly from the impact of the pandemic, new research reveals the scale of continued absenteeism among school pupils across the country. Andrew Eyles, Esme Lilly...Read more...
Lee Elliot Major, Andrew Eyles and Esme Lillywhite
28 June 2023
Education plays a crucial role in shaping the future of individuals and societies. Pilar Cuevas-Ruiz, Cristina Borra and Almudena Sevilla present findings from research on the long-term health effects of a comprehensive ...Read more...
Cristina Borra, Pilar Cuevas-Ruiz and Almudena Sevilla
21 June 2023
20 June 2023
Andrew Eyles explains that while the government's goals in education policy have been ambitious and are to be applauded, the policies in place fall short of the targets set out as part of the broader levelling up agenda....Read more...
Andrew Eyles
26 August 2022
Girls and young women underperform in mathematics relative to their male peers - a loss of talent that may hinder productivity growth. Almudena Sevilla and Pilar Cuevas-Ruiz explain how new developments in gender economi...Read more...
Pilar Cuevas-Ruiz and Almudena Sevilla
21 June 2022
Submission to the House of Commons Select Committee....Read more...
Lee Elliot Major and Andrew Eyles
23 March 2021
This paper studies whether pupil performance gains in autonomous schools in England can be attributed to the strategic exclusion of poorly performing pupils. England has had two phases of academy school introduction, the...Read more...
Stephen Machin and Matteo Sandi
1 January 2020
This paper studies the origins of what has become one of the most radical and encompassing programmes of school reform seen in the recent past in advanced countries�the introduction of academy schools to English educat...Read more...
Andrew Eyles and Stephen Machin
1 August 2019
The English education system has undergone large-scale restructuring through the introduction of academy schools. The most salient feature of these schools is that, despite remaining part of the state sector, they operat...Read more...
Andrew Eyles, Stephen Machin and Olmo Silva
1 March 2018
This paper studies whether pupil performance gains achieved by autonomous schools – specifically academy schools in England – can be attributed to the strategic exclusion of poorly performing pupils. In England there hav...Read more...
25 January 2018
The UK change of government in 2010 provoked a large structural change in the English education landscape. Unexpectedly, the new government offered primary schools the chance to have "the freedom and the power to take co...Read more...
Andrew Eyles, Stephen Machin and Sandra McNally
1 November 2017
The expansion of the academies programme has been one of the biggest changes to the English education system in a generation. 3.4 million children are now taught in either a sponsored or a converter academy. Those childr...Read more...
Jon Andrews, Natalie Perera, Andrew Eyles, Gabriel Heller Sahlgren, Stephen Machin, Matteo Sandi and Olmo Silva
1 July 2017
The relationship between school reforms, specifically those involving the introduction of new school types, and pupil performance is studied. The particular context is the introduction of academy schools in England, but ...Read more...
Andrew Eyles, Claudia Hupkau and Stephen Machin
1 August 2016
There has been an increase in the number of children going to school in England who do not speak English as a first language. We investigate whether this has an impact on the educational outcomes of native English speake...Read more...
Charlotte Geay, Sandra McNally and Shqiponja Telhaj
1 August 2013
