Rather than being a handicap, the proposals to introduce top-up fees will prove aboon to students.[...]

Universities, parents and poorer students will allbenefit under the Government’s plans for top-upfees.[...]

How best to widen university access - by abolishing fees, as the Tories suggest, or byenhancing student loans, as the government plans?[...]

Universities need cash, students need support and there are too few working-classentrants. After a two-year extension, Charles Clarke and the class of '73 are all set todeliver answers to these problems. Nicholas Barr offers a guide to how you, theexaminers, should mark their responses.[...]

The Lisbon summit of the European Council in March 2000 declared the number ofpeople living in poverty and social exclusion in the European Union to beunacceptable, and called for steps to tackle the issue, beginning with the setting oftargets for particular indicators. The targets suggested...

This paper reviews the achievements of the Labour Government’seducation policy between 1997 and 2001. Tony Blair claimed that hisGovernment would make education a priority. The first part of thepaper reviews the scale of education spending in relation to theeconomy at large and within the...

In order to assess the roles of schooling and educational qualifications inthe emergence of adult social exclusion, a series of detailed regressionmodels were explored separately for men and women for each of a widerange of indicators of adult disadvantage at both ages 23 and 33,...

A review of research evidence suggests that low levels of educationalattainment are crucial in generating and sustaining social exclusion. Testscores at school are the most effective predictor of many adult outcomes.School attendance and soft skills are also important. Reviewing the...

Childhood poverty and early parenthood are both high on the politicalagenda. The key new issue addressed in this research is the relativeimportance of childhood poverty and of early motherhood as correlatesof outcomes later in life. How far are the ‘effects’ of early motherhood onlater...

This paper examines the impact of the transition from a planned toa market economy on living standards and welfare in the fiveRepublics of former Soviet Central Asia – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, along with the Republicof Azerbaijan. A broad definition of...