Living standards during previous recessions

The current recession is the first that the UK has experienced since the early 1990s. Much has changed since then, and society's collective memory of who fared worst during previous recessions seems likely to have faded. Many workers in their 20s or early 30s have not experienced a recession during their working lives - including both authors of this report, one of whom had just started secondary school at the end of the last recession and the other of whom had just started junior school. This Briefing Note thus aims to document the course of average living standards, and those of particular subgroups in society, during the previous three UK recessions. It will also show what happened to measures of poverty and inequality during these periods

Public spending on education in the UK: prepared for the Education and Skills Select Committee

This note is based on analysis prepared by Alissa Goodman and Luke Sibieta of the Institute for Fiscal Studies at the request of the House of Commons Education and Skills Select Committee, for their inquiry into Public Expenditure on Education and Skills being carried out during June and July 2006. The note discusses some key issues that have arisen in education spending in the last year. We begin by examining the significance of the Chancellor's statements in Budget 2006 - both regarding school capital expenditure and the pledge to increase funding per pupil in the state sector to that currently seen in the private sector. We then move on to what the Comprehensive Spending Review in 2007 is likely to mean for education, given commitments in other areas of government spending. An Appendix contains some information about overall trends in public spending on education in the UK, and the international context

Poverty and inequality in the UK: 2007

This Briefing Note provides an update on trends in living standards, income inequality and poverty. It uses the same approach to measuring income and poverty as the government employs in its Households Below Average Income (HBAI) publication. The analysis is based on the latest HBAI figures (published on 27 March 2007), providing information about incomes up to the year 2005-06. The measure of income used is net household weekly income, which has been adjusted to take account of family size ('equivalised'). The income amounts provided below are expressed as the equivalent for a couple with no children, and all changes given are in real terms (i.e. after adjusting for inflation). For the first time in recent years, data are available for the whole of the United Kingdom, not just Great Britain, but data for Northern Ireland are only available from 2002-03. Some comparisons over time are provided for Great Britain only, but others will compare statistics for GB before 2002-03 with those for the UK afterwards. PLEASE NOTE: On 23 April 2007, the Department for Work and Pensions announced that an error had occurred when producing the latest Households Below Average Income publication. This Briefing Note was based on the same dataset and therefore suffers from similar errors. In response to revisions announced by the DWP in May 2007, we have now updated our findings in a revised press release and have produced a revised summary

Poverty and Inequality in the UK: 2008

In this Commentary, we assess the changes to average incomes, inequality and poverty that have occurred under the first 10 years of the Labour government, with a particular focus on the changes that have occurred in the latest year of data. This analysis is based upon the latest figures from the DWP's Households Below Average Income (HBAI) series, published on 10 June 2008 (Department for Work and Pensions, 2008c). The HBAI series takes household income as its measure of living standards and is derived from the Family Resources Survey, a survey of around 28,000 households in the United Kingdom that asks detailed questions about income from a range of sources

Poverty and inequality in the UK: 2009

In this Commentary, we assess the changes to average incomes, inequality and poverty that have occurred since Labour came to power in 1997, with a particular focus on the changes that have occurred in the latest year of data. This analysis is based upon the latest figures from the DWP's Households Below Average Income (HBAI) series, published on 7 May 2009 (Department for Work and Pensions, 2009). The HBAI series takes household income as its measure of living standards, and is derived from the Family Resources Survey, a survey of around 25,000 households in the United Kingdom that asks detailed questions about income from a range of sources

Poverty and inequality in Britain: 2006

This Commentary provides an update on trends in poverty and inequality in Great Britain, based on the latest official government statistics. It uses the same approach to measuring incomes and poverty in Great Britain as the government employs in its Households Below Average Income (HBAI) publication

National evaluation of the neighbourhood nurseries: impact report

This study assessed the impact of NNI on parental employment, use of formal childcare, and take-up of benefits and tax credits, particularly for disadvantaged groups such as lone parents, low income families and ethnic minority groups

The impact of undergraduate degrees on early-career earnings

This report uses the new Longitudinal Educational Outcomes (LEO) administrative dataset to provide the latest estimates of the impact of Higher Education (HE) on individuals’ early-career earnings after accounting for individuals’ pre-university characteristics. This will provide vital evidence for prospective students choosing whether, where and what to study at university

How much does degree choice matter?

We use a large and novel administrative dataset to investigate returns to different university ‘degrees’ (subject-institution combinations) in the United Kingdom. Conditioning on a rich set of background characteristics, we find substantial variation in returns across degrees with similar selectivity levels, suggesting students’ degree choices matter a lot for later-life earnings. Returns increase with university selectivity much more at the top of the selectivity distribution than further down, and much more for some subjects than others. Returns are poorly correlated with observable degree characteristics other than selectivity, which could have important implications for student choices and the incentives of universities

Rigorous Large-Scale Educational RCTs are Often Uninformative : Should We Be Concerned?

There are a growing number of large-scale educational Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs). Considering their expense, it is important to reflect on the effectiveness of this approach. We assessed the magnitude and precision of effects found in those large-scale RCTs commissioned by the EEF (UK) and the NCEE (US) which evaluated interventions aimed at improving academic achievement in K-12 (141 RCTs; 1,222,024 students). The mean effect size was 0.06 standard deviations (SDs). These sat within relatively large confidence intervals (mean width 0.30 SDs) which meant that the results were often uninformative (the median Bayes factor was 0.56). We argue that our field needs, as a priority, to understand why educational RCTs often find small and uninformative effects