Education and skills

Using inflation as a cover, the government is cutting maintenance loans, increasing student loan repayments and lowering maximum tuition fees.

This report looks at annual education spending in the UK.

The next few years are likely to be particularly challenging for schools, colleges, universities and nurseries. This event examined how education spending can be best set to support levelling up and narrow inequalities.

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.

We investigate the extent to which individual universities, subjects and courses promote intergenerational mobility.

As part of this year’s Festival of Social Science, IFS delivered a public economic talk on "The economics of higher education" aimed at final year undergraduates studying economics.

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.

We have constructed a new student finance calculator, based on our detailed analysis of graduate earnings and the student finance system, which allows users to look at the effects of changing any parameter of the system.

In this report, we study the link between higher education, geographical mobility and outcomes for individuals and regions.