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The UK government has expressed a desire to increase social mobility, with policies to help achieve this aim focused on reducing inequalities in educational attainment. This paper draws together established and new information about the contribution that higher education can make to social mobility using a life-course approach, considering differences by family background in terms of university attendance and achievement, as well as occupation and earnings following graduation. We find substantial socio-economic differences at each stage. Young people from poorer backgrounds are, on average, less likely to go to university than their richer peers. Even among the selected group who do go to university, they are less likely to attend the highest status institutions, less likely to graduate, and less likely to achieve the highest degree classes. These differences in degree outcomes contribute to the lower average earnings of graduates from poorer families, but earnings differentials go well beyond those driven purely by degree attainment or institution attended. The evidence strongly suggests that, even after taking these factors into account, graduates from affluent families are more likely to obtain a professional job and to see higher earnings growth in the labour market. We discuss the implications of these findings for the prospects of higher education as a route to greater social mobility.

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Summary.  The paper makes use of newly linked administrative education data from England to understand better the determinants of participation in higher education (HE) among individuals from low socio‐economic backgrounds. The data are unique in being able to follow the population of two cohorts of pupils in England—those who might have entered HE between 2004–2005 and 2006–2007—from age 11 to age 20 years. The findings suggest that, although large differences in HE participation rates and participation rates at high status universities by socio‐economic background remain, these differences are substantially reduced once prior achievement is included. Moreover, these findings hold for both state and private school pupils. This result suggests that poor achievement in secondary schools is more important in explaining lower HE participation rates among pupils from low socio‐economic backgrounds than barriers arising at the point of entry to HE. These findings are consistent with the need for earlier policy intervention to raise HE participation rates among pupils from low socio‐economic backgrounds.

Executive summaryIt is well known that children born at the start of the academic year tend to achieve better exam results, on average, than children born at the end of the academic year. This matters because educational attainment is known to have long-term consequences for a range of adult outcomes. But it is not only educational attainment that has long-lasting effects: there is a body of evidence that emphasises the significant effects that a whole range of skills and behaviours developed and exhibited during childhood may have on later outcomes. There is, however, relatively little evidence available on the extent to which month of birth is associated with many of these skills and behaviours, particularly in the UK.The aim of this report is to build on this relatively limited existing evidence base by identifying the effect of month of birth on a range of key skills and behaviours amongst young people growing up in England today, from birth through to early adulthood. This work will extend far beyond the scope of previous research in this area -in terms of both the range of skills and behaviours considered, and the ability to consider recent cohorts of children -enabling us to build up a more complete picture of the impact of month of birth on children's lives than has previously been possible. In particular, we consider month of birth differences in the following outcomes: national achievement test scores and post-compulsory education participation decisions;  other measures of cognitive skills, including British Ability Scale test scores;  parent, teacher and child perceptions of academic ability;  children's perceptions of their own well-being, including whether or not they have been bullied;  parent and teacher perceptions of children's socio-emotional development;  children's engagement in a range of risky behaviours.We also consider whether parents respond differently to children born in different months of the year, particularly in terms of the investments they make in their child's home learning environment.To do so, we use simple regression models including month of birth dummies (i.e. a series of variables indicating whether or not a child was born in a particular month, relative to being born in September) alongside controls for a range of individual and family background characteristics. Our analysis pieces together information from three UK cohort studies -the Millennium Cohort Study, the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, and the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England -to enable us to consider month of birth differences in these outcomes from birth through to early adulthood. All three data sets contain rich information on the skills and behaviours outlined above. They have also all been linked to administrative data on national achievement test scores, allowing us to compare month of birth differences amongst cohort members of these surveys with those based on national cohorts.In line with previous literature, we find evidence of large and significant differences be...

Previous research has found that children who are born later in the academic year have lower educational attainment, on average, than children who are born earlier in the year, especially at younger ages; much less is known about the mechanisms that drive this inequality. The paper uses two complementary identification strategies to estimate an upper bound of the effect of age at test by using rich data from two UK birth cohorts. We find that differences in the age at which cognitive skills are tested accounts for the vast majority of the difference in these outcomes between children who are born at different times of the year, whereas the combined effect of the other factors (age of starting school, length of schooling and relative age) is close to zero. This suggests that applying an age adjustment to national achievement test scores may be an appropriate policy response to overcome the penalty that is associated with being born later in the academic year. Age at test does not, however, explain all of the difference in children's view of their own scholastic competence. Age adjusting national achievement test scores may help to overcome differences in ability beliefs between children who are born at different times of the year, but our results suggest that additional policy responses may be required.

As in many European countries, labour productivity in the UK has been stagnant since the start of the Great Recession. This article uses individual data on employment and wages to try to understand whether real wage flexibility can help shed light on the UK's productivity puzzle. It finds, perhaps unsurprisingly, that workforce composition cannot explain the reduction in wages and hence productivity that we observe, even compared to previous recessions; instead, real wages have fallen significantly within jobs this time round. Why? One possibility we investigate is that the labour supply in the UK is higher compared to previous recessions. The Macroeconomic ContextThe UK has recently experienced its deepest recession since the Second World War, with real GDP falling by over 6% (see Figure 1). At the same time, there have been substantially smaller falls in employment and hours -decreasing by just over 2% and 4% respectively -leading to falling output per worker and stagnating output per hour. These changes are very different to what happened in previous recessions in the UK in the late 1970s/early 1980s and the early 1990s. For example, Figure 2 shows that, nearly five years later, real output per hour remains 3% lower than it was at the start of the recession in 2008, while it was nearly 15% higher following the recession in the early 1990s and nearly 13% higher following the recession in the early 1980s. This has given rise to a so-called 'productivity puzzle' in the UK.The aim of this article is to try to shed light on this puzzle. In a competitive economy, one would expect individuals' wages to reflect their marginal productivities, thus one might anticipate changes in productivity to be correlated with changes in wages at some micro level. We thank participants in the CEP/IFS workshops and the 2013 Royal Economic Society special session on the productivity puzzle for helpful comments and discussion, Rowena Crawford for allowing us to use the data on wealth shocks that she constructed for respondents in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing and for providing useful comments and advice, and Jonathan Cribb for producing the counterfactual employment rates for men and women as a result of the increase in the state pension age for women. The article is based partly on data accessed through the Secure Data Service and uses data sets which may not exactly reproduce aggregate

The use of fixed (FE) and random effects (RE) in two-level hierarchical linear regression is discussed in the context of education research. We compare the robustness of FE models with the modelling flexibility and potential efficiency of those from RE models. We argue that the two should be seen as complementary approaches. We then compare both modelling approaches in our empirical examples. Results suggest a negative effect of special educational needs (SEN) status on educational attainment, with selection into SEN status largely driven by pupil level rather than school-level factors.