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Throughout the developed and developing worlds, education spending is seen as a key tool for government policy makers in the quest for economic growth. Promoting 'human capital' development is a prime objective for economic and education ministries. The seminal articles discussed in this essential research review include early classics which explain why education became central to productivity debates and more recent papers which elucidate the enormous controversies in this important field

One rationale for devolution is that local decision makers may be well placed to adapt national policies to the local context. We test whether such adaptation helps meet programme objectives in the case of the Apprenticeship Grant for Employers. Originally a national programme, aimed at incentivising employers to take on apprentices, reforms a few years into operation gave some Local Authorities negotiated flexibilities in how the scheme operated. We consider the impact of the national scheme and then use a difference‐in‐differences approach to test whether flexibility led to an increase in the number of apprenticeship starts in devolved areas relative to control groups. We find that flexibility had zero effect. There is suggestive evidence that this is because flexibilities were negotiated on the wrong margins.

AbstractIn common with other OECD countries, there is a gender gap in educational achievement in England favouring girls. This carries through to tertiary education. On the other hand, boys are far more likely to engage in STEM in post-16 vocational education and at university. The underachievement of boys overall, but over-representation in STEM, presents significant challenges for policy. This paper documents changes in the gender gap over the last 20 years in England and discusses findings in the light of international evidence. It concludes that education policies, in academic and in vocational spheres, can be designed to reduce gender inequalities that exist in both.

Most students do not follow the 'academic track' (i.e. A-levels) after leaving school and only about a third of students go to university before the age of 20. Yet progression routes for the majority that do not take this path but opt for vocational post-compulsory education are not as well-known, which partly has to do with the complexity of the vocational education system and the difficulty of deciphering available data. If we are to tackle long-standing problems of low social mobility and a long tail of underachievers, it is essential that post-16 vocational options come under proper scrutiny. This paper is a step in that direction.We use linked administrative data to track decisions made by all students in England who left compulsory education after having undertaken the national examination – the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) – at age 16 in the year 2009/10. We track them up to the age of 21, as they progress through the education system and (for some) into the labour market. We categorise the many different types of post-16 qualifications into several broad categories and we look at the probability of achieving various educational and early labour market outcomes, conditional on the path chosen at age 17. We also take into account the influence of demographics, prior attainment and the secondary school attended. Our findings illustrate the strong inequality apparently generated by routes chosen at age 17, even whilst controlling for prior attainment and schooling up to that point

This article studies the effect of free pre-school education on child outcomes in primary school. We exploit the staggered implementation of free part-time pre-school for three year olds across Local Education Authorities in England in the early 2000s. The policy led to small improvements in attainment at age 5, with no apparent benefits by age 11. We argue that this is because the expansion of free places largely crowded out privately paid care, with small changes in total participation, and was achieved through an increase in private provision, where quality is lower on average than in the public sector.