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Type: Observations Authors: Alastair Muriel and Luke Sibieta
"It is not acceptable for children's futures to be decided on the roll of a dice." So said shadow schools minister Nick Gibb, criticising the use of lotteries to allocate places in oversubscribed schools. Schools Secretary Ed Balls has stated that he would be concerned if lotteries were used "other than as a last resort", and announced that the practice is to be reviewed by the Schools Adjudicator, to ensure that it is "fair for children." The natural question to ask is: 'fair' compared to what? Oversubscribed schools can't take in every pupil who applies, so the places must be allocated somehow - and all systems for doing so create winners and losers.The most common allocation mechanism is the 'catchment area' - whereby pupils living closest to the school are first in line for scarce school places. This system naturally favours children born to better-off parents, who can afford those (more expensive) houses near a good school. We might say that this system allocates school places according to a different lottery - the lottery of birth. These affluent parents lose out under a lottery system, because they can no longer guarantee a place for their child at the state school of their choice (by buying the 'right' house). The gainers from a lottery system are the less-affluent parents, who could not afford to live right next to the popular school. Where before their child would have had no chance whatsoever of getting into the oversubscribed school, they now have a real (albeit possibly small) chance of a place. Beyond the issue of what is fair, it is worth emphasising that a child's prospects for success in life are unlikely to hinge entirely on the outcome of a school place lottery. In his best-selling book, 'Freakonomics', Steven Levitt quotes one of his research findings from a school lottery in the Chicago Public System. Levitt and his co-authors found that children who won a place at an oversubscribed school via the lottery did no better at school than children who lost the lottery. This finding does not mean that schools are irrelevant to a child's success in life. Some schools are clearly better than others. It is just that the impact of attending a "good" school may be much smaller than the effect of having a parent who wants the best for their children.Schools policy will be one of the topics debated at the 2009 IFS Residential Conference, to be held in Cambridge on 2-3 April. Numerous experts in the field - including Eric Hanushek, one of the world's leading authorities on improving school quality - will bring together the latest evidence on education policy, in both a UK and international context.
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Cutting the deficit: three years down, five to go?
The UK is in the fourth year of a planned eight-year fiscal tightening. Following further announcements made in Budget 2013, this fiscal consolidation is now forecast to total £143 billion by 2017–18. The UK is intending the fourth largest fiscal consolidation among the 29 advanced economies for which comparable data are available. By the end of this financial year, half of the total consolidation is expected to have been implemented. However, within this tax increases and cuts to investment spending have been relatively front-loaded, while cuts to welfare spending and other non-investment spending have been relatively back-loaded.
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The March Budget forecast that borrowing would fall by £0.1 billion from £121.0 billion in 2011–12 to £120.9 billion in 2012–13. On Tuesday, the Office for National Statistics is due to release its first estimate of public sector net borrowing in March 2013 and, therefore, for the whole of 2012–13. Borrowing could easily end up being higher or lower than it was in the previous year, either due to backwards revisions, the uncertainty inherent in forecasting borrowing even a month in advance, or both. However, whether borrowing is slightly up or down in cash terms is economically irrelevant. Either way, the bigger picture is that having fallen by roughly a quarter between 2009–10 and 2011–12, borrowing is forecast to be broadly constant through to 2013–14.
Women working in their sixties: why have employment rates been rising?
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