As the Covid-19 crisis progresses, the consequences for the UK’s higher education sector are gradually becoming clearer. All universities face a hit to their finances, but it is mostly institutions with weak pre-crisis finances that are at risk of insolvency. The Covid-19 crisis has caused major disruption to the UK higher education sector. Universities are […]
Category: Schools, universities & training
The weeks of missed schooling for the younger generation due to coronavirus would lead to lower growth and greater inequality if left unaddressed. An extensive but time-limited programme of small group tutoring could help to repair some of the educational damage. Younger generations will pay a heavy price for the policy response to coronavirus: missed […]
School closures in response to Covid-19 are expected to widen gaps in educational attainment, including literacy, for disadvantaged children. One way to mitigate this risk is through high quality reading programmes. How do schools know which interventions will be most effective? Children from disadvantaged backgrounds are facing widening educational achievement gaps as a result of […]
Arrangements for GCSE and A-level exams in 2021 will again be challenging – but the alternatives look worse. Flexible exams may create resilience to further disruption. Universities should boost efforts to consider the full context of applicants’ educational experience. In the summer of 2020, in the face of great controversy, the UK government cancelled both […]
It is widely understood that what happens in the early stages of life – from conception to the age of 5 – can have long-lasting effects. How might the experience of lockdown and the Covid-19 recession influence future outcomes for the very young? The lockdown constitutes a major disruption to the usual way of life […]
The Covid-19 crisis is causing potentially large-scale financial problems for UK universities. It is likely to result in big changes in the way that the country’s higher education system is structured. UK universities rely heavily on overseas students, and this has increased rapidly over the past few years with almost all of the growth coming […]
The Covid-19 pandemic and the ensuing economic uncertainty are causing interruptions to apprenticeship training. This is putting the future of apprenticeships at risk just at the time when they will be most needed to protect employment and sustain the recovery. Apprenticeships offer a mix of training on the job and additional off-the-job training. This is […]
Even before the Covid-19 crisis, online learning was becoming increasingly prevalent in higher education. Now it is happening in schools during lockdown, what do we know about its impact on students’ performance? And is there a danger it will widen educational inequalities? In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, we are seeing significant shifts towards online […]
First-year undergraduate students of economics across the world have regularly been asked what they think are the most pressing problems that economists should be addressing. Now more than ever, they point to inequality and climate change – plus this year’s newcomer: Covid-19. The new cohort of first–year economics undergraduates is having an initial university experience […]
Countries in Europe and elsewhere have taken very different strategies to getting children back to school after closures. What are the difficulties in making decisions about re-opening? And why is there so much variation among national approaches? The Covid-19 crisis has required governments to make many difficult decisions, all fraught with risk. Among them is […]