Raising Education Achievement and Breaking the Cycle of Inequality in the United Kingdom

Globalisation, together with skill-biased technical change, is changing the composition of jobs inadvanced economies and raising the level of skills required to do them. This has increased the importanceof educating a large proportion of the population to much higher standards than in the past. Thegovernment in the United Kingdom has responded to this challenge by raising education spending andexpanding the capacity of the education system in key areas such as pre-primary education and increasingparticipation in education beyond the age of 16. Nevertheless, performance on international tests ofcognitive ability remains significantly below the standards of the best performing OECD countries and theeducation system seems to be particularly poor at ensuring good performance of pupils in the middle tobottom half of the education performance distribution. A renewed sense of urgency, together with somenew approaches, is required to address the United Kingdom’s relative underperformance in literacy andnumeracy. This paper proposes a number of avenues for encouraging a higher level of educationalattainment, without significant further increases in expenditure.