Health inequalities

There are marked differences in life expectancy between the regions of England, between the countries in the UK, and between the UK and other wealthy countries. Within England, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, life expectancy at birth was more than two years higher in London and the South East than in the North of England. For decades, life expectancy in Scotland has been two years lower than in other constituent countries. Throughout the UK, gains in life expectancy slowed considerably after 2010, proximately attributable to a slowdown in progress against cardiovascular disease. After many years of gains in life expectancy, something has gone seriously wrong. In 2019, the UK ranked 24th in the OECD in life expectancy, behind all other English-speaking countries (with the exception of the US) and nearly all countries of Western Europe

The impacts of a multifaceted pre-natal intervention on human capital accumulation in early life

We evaluate an intervention targeting early life nutrition and well-being for households in extreme poverty in Northern Nigeria. The intervention leads to large and sustained improvements in children's anthropometric and health outcomes, including an 8% reduction in stunting four years post-intervention. These impacts are partly driven by information-related channels. However, the certain and substantial flow of cash transfers is also key. They induce positive labor supply responses among women, and enables them to undertake productive investments in livestock. These provide protein rich diets for children, and generate higher household earnings streams long after the cash transfers expire

The Impacts of a Multifaceted Pre-natal Intervention on Human Capital Accumulation in Early Life

We evaluate an intervention targeting early life nutrition and well-being for households in extreme poverty in Northern Nigeria. The intervention leads to large and sustained improvements in children's anthropometric and health outcomes, including an 8% reduction in stunting four years post-intervention. These impacts are partly driven by information-related channels. However, the certain and substantial flow of cash transfers is also key. They induce positive labor supply responses among women, and enables them to undertake productive investments in livestock. These provide protein rich diets for children, and generate higher household earnings streams long after the cash transfers expire

Family time use and home learning during the COVID-19 lockdown

The COVID-19 school closures forced children and parents to make unprecedented changes to their daily routines. Including the summer holidays, most children will have had a five-and-a-half-month break from physically attending school by the time they returned in September. There has been considerable discussion of the challenges that home learning presents for some children, and the inequalities that it could lead to (Burgess and Vignoles, 2020; Education Endowment Foundation, 2020; Eyles, Gibbons and Montebruno, 2020). In this report, we present analysis of some of the first data on children's lives during the lockdown and how home learning during the lockdown worked in practice. Between 29 April and 20 June 2020, we interviewed over 5,500 parents with at least one child entering Reception in September 2020 or a child in school aged 4-15. We asked parents about their employment circumstances, as well as how they and their children spent their time during a weekday. We also asked about the resources (both from their schools and at home) that school-age children had available for home learning. We collaborated with an online survey company to ensure that our respondents came from a mix of genders, regions, and social and economic backgrounds. We then reweighted our data to ensure that they are as representative as possible of families with school-aged children in England

The gendered division of paid and domestic work under lockdown

COVID-19 has uprooted many aspects of parents' daily routines, from their jobs to their childcare arrangements. In this paper, we provide a novel description of how parents in England living in two-parent opposite-gender families are spending their time under lockdown. We find that mothers' paid work has taken a larger hit than that of fathers', on both the extensive and intensive margins. We find that mothers are spending substantially longer in childcare and housework than their partners and that they are spending a larger fraction of their paid work hours having to juggle work and childcare. Gender differences in the allocation of domestic work cannot be straightforwardly explained by gender differences in employment rates or earnings. Very large gender asymmetries emerge when one partner has stopped working for pay during the crisis: mothers who have stopped working for pay do far more domestic work than fathers in the equivalent situation do

Inequalities in children’s experiences of home learning during the covid-19 lockdown in England

This paper combines novel data on the time use, home-learning practices and economic circumstances of families with children during the COVID-19 lockdown with pre-lockdown data from the UK Time Use Survey to characterise the time use of children and how it changed during lockdown, and to gauge the extent to which changes in time use and learning practices during this period are likely to reinforce the already large gaps in educational attainment between children from poorer and better-off families. We find considerable heterogeneity in children's learning experiences – amount of time spent learning, activities undertaken during this time and availability of resources to support learning. Concerningly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, this heterogeneity is strongly associated with family income and in some instances more so than before lockdown. Furthermore, our analysis suggests that any impacts of inequalities in time spent learning between poorer and richer children are likely to be compounded by inequalities not only in learning resources available at home, but also in those provided by schools