Research

This paper studies intergenerational links in home ownership, an increasingly important wealth marker and a measure of economic status in itself. Repeated cross sectional UK data show that home ownership rates have fallen rapidly over time, most markedly amongst younger people in more recent birth cohorts. Evidence from British birth cohorts data supplemented by the Wealth and Assets Survey show a significant rise through time in the intergenerational persistence of home ownership, as home ownership rates shrank disproportionately among those whose parents did not own their own home. Given the close connection between home ownership and wealth, these results on strengthening intergenerational persistence in home ownership are therefore also suggestive of a fall in intergenerational housing wealth mobility over time.

This paper studies the origins of what has become one of the most radical and encompassing programmes of school reform seen in the recent past in advanced countries—the introduction of academy schools to English education. Academies are independent state funded schools that are allowed to run in an autonomous manner outside of local authority control. Almost all academies are conversions from already existent state schools and so are school takeovers that enable more autonomy in operation than was permitted in their predecessor state. Studying the first round of conversions that took place in the 2000s, where poorly performing schools were converted to academies, a focus is placed on legacy enrolled pupils who were already attending the school prior to conversion. The impact on end of secondary school pupil performance is shown to be positive and significant. Performance improvements are stronger for pupils in urban academies and for those converting from schools that gained relatively more autonomy as a result of conversion.

The English education system has undergone large-scale restructuring through the introduction of academy schools. The most salient feature of these schools is that, despite remaining part of the state sector, they operate with more autonomy than the predecessors they replaced. Two distinct periods of academy school introduction have taken place, under the auspices of different governments. The first batch was initiated in the 2002–03 school year by the Labour government of the time, and was a school improvement programme directly aimed at turning around badly performing schools. The second batch involved a mass academisation process following the change of government in May 2010 and the Academies Act of that year, which resulted in increased heterogeneity of new academies. This paper compares the two batches of introduction with the aim of getting a better understanding of their similarities and differences, and their importance for education policy. To do so, we study what types of schools were more likely to change to academy status in the two programmes, and the impact of this change on the quality of new pupil enrolments into the new types of school. Whilst we do point out some similarities, these are the exception rather than the norm. For the most part, our analysis reveals a number of marked dissimilarities between the two programmes, in terms of both the characteristics of schools that became academies and the changes in pupil intakes that occurred post-conversion.

The UK change of government in 2010 provoked a large structural change in the English education landscape. Unexpectedly, the new government offered primary schools the chance to have ‘the freedom and the power to take control of their own destiny’, with better performing schools given a green light to fast track convert to become an academy school. In England, schools that become academies have more freedom over many ways in which they operate, including curriculum design, budgets, staffing issues and the shape of the academic year. However, the change to allow primary school academisation has been controversial. This paper reports estimates of the causal effect of academy enrolment on primary school pupils. While the international literature provides growing evidence on the effect of school autonomy in a variety of contexts, little is known about the effect of autonomy on primary schools (which are typically much smaller than secondary schools) and in contexts where the converting school is not deemed to be failing or disadvantaged. The key findings are that English primary schools did change their mode of operation after the exogenous policy change, utilising more autonomy and changing spending behaviour, but this did not lead to improved pupil performance.

The relationship between school reforms, specifically those involving the introduction of new school types, and pupil performance is studied. The particular context is the introduction of academy schools in England, but related evidence on Swedish free schools and US charter schools is also presented. The empirical evidence shows a positive causal impact of the conversion of disadvantaged schools to academies on end of school pupil performance and on the subsequent probability of degree completion at university. There is heterogeneity in this impact, such that more disadvantaged pupils and those attending London academies experience bigger performance improvements.

School reforms featuring the introduction of new types of schools have occurred in the education systems of a number of countries. The most well-known of these new school types to be recently introduced are charter schools in the United States, free schools in Sweden and academy schools in England. We review the evidence on the impact of the introduction of these new schools on pupil outcomes and present new evidence for the case of England, whose introduction of academy schools has been one of the most radical changes in the school landscape of the recent past. The analysis of academies, charter and free schools concludes that, in certain settings, they can improve pupil performance.