Research Blog

As part of a wider commitment to improving social mobility by increasing the number of good school places, the government has proposed reform and expansion of grammar schools, prohibited since the 1998 School Standards and Frameworks Act.

Opponents of the idea that schools could be owned and operated by businesses for profit often claim that such can only come at the expense of quality. Until relatively recently, there's been little rigourous evidence to help settle this question, but now that there is, it's clear that there’s no basis for this claim, and therefore for excluding commercial operators.

The correlation between family income and educational achievement is well established worldwide. This correlation is often interpreted in causal terms, leading to calls for income redistribution and other social policy interventions that could improve pupil outcomes.

In the past decades, politicians worldwide have embarked on reforms to increase market and government accountability in state-funded education sectors. The idea behind has been to increase incentives to improve pupil performance.

In the past decades, an increasing number of school voucher programmes have been implemented in the US. Geared toward low-income households, these programmes allow participants to use vouchers toward tuition fees in private schools. Since the schemes generally have more applicants than places, lotteries have often been used as a tiebreak device.