Skills

We investigate the role of training in reducing the gender wage gap using the UK-BHPS which contains detailed records of training. Using policy changes over an 18 year period we identify the impact of training and work experience on wages, earnings and employment.

Early exposure to adversity, such as abuse or neglect, is associated with poorer outcomes across social, education and health domains. Children in care (referred to as looked-after children in the UK) are a vulnerable group who experience adversity serious enough for the state to intervene in family life and place them under the supervision of child protection services within the home or, more frequently, to remove the child and place them in out-of-home care (OHC).

James places Tinbergen’s work in context and discusses Tinbergen’s approach to using supply and demand to interpret the pricing of skills – a fundamental conceptual achievement. He shows how his work is related to the modern literature on hedonics and how it was and still is used to integrate the roles of technical change and supply side policies into a common equilibrium framework. Tinbergen’s research is then discussed on educational planning and his work on optimal inequality. In the final section, James assesses his contributions and discusses why they are relevant today. He speculates about why his work was neglected by many of his contemporaries.

We document employment rates of older men and women in the UK over the last forty years. In both cases growth in employment since the mid 1990s has been stronger than for younger age groups. On average, older men are still less likely to be in work than they were in the mid 1970s although this is not true for those with low education. We highlight issues with using years of schooling as a measure of educational achievement for analysing labour market trends at older ages, not least because a large proportion of men who left school at young ages without any formal qualifications, have subsequently acquired some.

This report provides new estimates of total spending by the government on children in England, including benefits, education spending,services for vulnerable children and healthcare. In the most recent year of data (2017–18), total spending was over £120 billion or over £10,000 per child under 18.

This note was submitted as evidence to the Education Committee Inquiry on School and College Funding.

We summarise the recent evidence produced by the IFS which relates to the post-18 funding review.