Schools

The allocation of public spending is one the most direct levers for ‘levelling up’ health, wealth and well-being. But is policy aligned with the government’s stated aims?

This report looks at annual education spending in the UK.

There are important inequalities in the development of children well before they start school. By forcing nurseries to close and dramatically altering the lives of most families with young children, the pandemic may have exacerbated existing inequalities and possibly created new ones.

In most of our analysis of education spending, we focus on spending in England to ensure comparability. In this observation, we expand our analysis to show the level and changes to school spending per pupil across the four nations of the UK.

In this report, we examine how the learning experiences of English school children evolved over the course of the first 12 months of disruption, from the beginning of the first lockdown in March 2020 until the end of the second period of school closures in March 2021.

This briefing note provides an update on school spending trends over time, covering the most recent sets of data, forecasts and policy announcements.

"Please government, stop putting good, professional, public servants in an almost impossible situation by forcing them to choose between two incompatible versions of doing the right thing." Paul Johnson in The Times.

In this note, we analyse how participation in and spending on 16–18 education have evolved over recent years.

'It is an abiding failure of our system of governance that, with an average tenure of less than two years, secretaries of state barely have time to understand the problems, let alone put in place lasting and effective reform.' Paul Johnson on education reform in The Times.