This interim report shares emerging findings and recommendations from a collaborative project. The project examines post-16 Education and Training (E&T) in the UK. It is focused on analysing the divergent approaches to E&T policy across the four devolved nations to understand more deeply the key policy issues and challenges facing E&T…

Purpose: The paper explores the relationship between vocational education and training (VET), the labour market and social justice in the current conjuncture. Approach: The paper adopts an approach rooted in critical policy analysis. It consequently sets the discussion within the wider socio-economic and political context. Such an approach enables…

Young men are significantly less likely to enter higher education than young women, and they are also more likely to drop out and less likely to achieve a highly-graded degree. There are many causes and the disparity in educational achievement starts long before higher education. Yet, while this issue is better understood than it was, there has…

Though a relative small part of the school sector, private schools have an important role in British society, and there are policy concerns about their negative effect on social mobility. Other studies show that individuals who have attended a private school go on to have higher levels of educational achievement, are more likely to secure a…

The privatisation of state education in a variety of ways has introduced a range of risks to school governance and management which have not previously existed in the public service. State-funded education is in danger of losing its standing on the moral high ground as a public good delivered almost exclusively by individuals committed to ethics…

We study the effects of the large expansion in British educational attainment that took place for cohorts born between 1970 and 1975. Using the Quarterly Labour Force Survey, we find that the expansion caused men to increase education by about a year on average and gain about 8% higher wages; women obtained a slightly greater increase in education…

This paper looks at what the value of a doctorate is, both to employers in particular and to society and the economy at large. Given the emphasis many universities and funding agencies/governments are putting upon the development of PhD programmes, this is an issue deserving attention. The paper tries to show how two separate but interrelated…

The Centre for the Economics of Education was asked to bring together a wide range of academic evidence (primarily England-based) to investigate the extent to which academic and non-academic childhood outcomes are complementary to each other, or are in some way traded-off against each other. The report also investigates the drivers of both…

Education in the arts and humanities has always been important to the United States' arts and culture and to its competitiveness in a global economy. Providing all students with a complete education in the arts and humanities can help them cope with, and master, the fast-paced technological advances, forces of globalization, and major demographic…

In the past few years an important beginning has been made toward defining and exploring the major issues in the economics of higher education. The research of economists covers a wide range of problems, from that of the Nation's requirements for college-trained people, to detailed questions of financing. Perhaps no single area of this work offers…

The rhetoric surrounding career education programs was examined by exploring two questions. The first question was which employment sectors anticipate significant job growth and what skill levels and academic competencies were required to work within those sectors. The second question was whether increasing the level of student knowledge and skill…

This book, which traces the emergence of an official state-sanctioned learning policy for education and training in the United Kingdom, examines how the country's government has taken a concerted approach to accomplishing the following two goals: (1) integrating the reproduction of knowledge at all levels in the educational institutions under…

This book contains nine papers devoted to the psychological experience of youth employment and its role in shaping future employment experiences and expectations. "Introduction" (Julian Barling, E. Kevin Kelloway) emphasizes the diversity of young people as a group and the diversity of individual youth's employment experience. "The…