Claire is a Research Fellow of the IFS and Assistant Professor of Economics at the UCL Institute of Education.
She was previously affiliated with the University of Birmingham and Programme Director of the Skills sector at IFS. Her research interests focus on the determinants of educational attainment and HE participation, including the roles of socio-economic status, expectations and aspirations, month of birth and parents' marital status. She is particularly interested in how education policy can be used to improve the outcomes of children from disadvantaged backgrounds, and has played a leading role in the evaluations of a number of education programmes aiming to do just that, including on behalf of the Department of Education and the Education Endowment Foundation.
Many governments are considering expanding childcare subsidies, but little is known about the impact of such policies on parent’s labour supply. Exploiting free childcare eligibility rules based on date of birth in a difference-in-differences framework, we compare the effects of offering free part-time childcare and of expanding this offer to the whole school day. Free part-time childcare only affects the labour force participation of mothers whose youngest child is eligible. Expanding from part-time to full-time free childcare leads to significant increases in labour force participation and employment of these mothers, which emerge immediately and grow over the months following entitlement.
In this new work, the researchers compared what happened to the labour market outcomes of mothers and fathers as their children moved from being entitled to a free part-time nursery place (offering 15 hours of free childcare per week) to a full-time place at primary school (which effectively offers parents 30–35 hours of free childcare per week).
This book examines how family background determines university success, analyses who goes to university, who does best at university once they are there, and who succeeds in the labour market following graduation, and looks at the impact of the 2006 and 2012 tuition fee increases.
New IFS research finds that providing school breakfasts free to all children in disadvantaged English primary schools helps pupils to make two months’ additional progress over the course of a year. These gains seem to be driven by better behaviour and concentration in the classroom, meaning that even students who don’t eat breakfast at school can benefit from the improved learning environment. These benefits come at a low cost relative to other programmes with a similar impact on attainment.
New IFS research finds that providing school breakfasts free to all children in disadvantaged English primary schools helps pupils to make two months’ additional progress over the course of a year. These gains seem to be driven by better behaviour and concentration in the classroom, meaning that even students who don’t eat breakfast at school can benefit from the improved learning environment. These benefits come at a low cost relative to other programmes with a similar impact on attainment.
All ethnic minority groups in England are now, on average, more likely to go to university than their White British peers. This is the case even amongst groups who were previously under-represented in higher education, such as those of Black Caribbean ethnic origin, a relatively recent change. These differences also vary by socio-economic background, and in some cases are very large indeed. For example, Chinese pupils in the lowest socio-economic quintile group are, on average, more than 10 percentage points more likely to go to university than White British pupils in the highest socio-economic quintile group. By contrast, White British pupils in the lowest socio-economic quintile group have participation rates that are more than 10 percentage points lower than those observed for any other ethnic group. These are amongst the findings of research undertaken by IFS researchers, funded by the Departments of Education and Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), and published by BIS.
This report uses linked individual-level administrative data from schools in England and universities in the UK to document the relationships between socio-economic status, ethnicity and HE participation, and explore what drives these relationships.
The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills launched a public consultation regarding the proposal on 22 July 2015. This short note was submitted to the consultation and extends the work of Briefing Note 174 (Britton, Crawford and Dearden, 2015), analysing the likely implications of the proposed changes for students entering university in 2016-17.
This report explores the link between reading skills at age 10 and a range of outcomes later in life, including employment status, earnings and self-reported health status. It also investigates whether reading skills have greater benefits for children growing up in poor families.
This evaluation compares the education outcomes of Social Mobility Foundation (SMF) participants (collected by SMF via participant questionnaires) with outcomes for a group of pupils with similar observable characteristics (such as performance at secondary school and neighbourhood context), observed in administrative data. This report focuses on the education outcomes for four cohorts of participants with the SMF: the first cohort featured entered the programme in 2009 (referred to as the 2009 cohort), the second in 2010, the third in 2011 and the fourth in 2012.
This report describes new research on the impact of different pre-school experiences on academic outcomes at the end of Key Stage 4 (KS4, age 16) and relates this to the potential longer-term economic benefits for both the individuals themselves and the exchequer.
Event
4 November 2014 at 10:0028 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3JS
With student number controls being relaxed in England, more young people will have the opportunity to go to university than ever before. But with the benefits of a degree varying by subject and institution, the challenge of ensuring that higher education remains a vehicle for social mobility is likely to continue.
At the same time, there remain ever-present questions about the financial stability of the HE sector: is the current system of undergraduate funding sustainable? What about other sources of university funding? This event will draw on research funded by the Nuffield Foundation and other IFS work.
