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The aim of this comparative study is to provide insight into the views of transnational corporations about higher education. Little appears to be known about how employers based in different countries perceive higher education in their countries, what skills and attributes they are seeking in their graduate recruits, what the aims of higher education should be and what changes are needed to the higher education system to meet the needs of employers. The increasingly globalised economy means that such a perspective can enhance our understanding of employers as a major stakeholder in higher education. This report provides the findings from a qualitative survey of transnational corporations and other major companies from different employment sectors in four countries – Australia, Malaysia, the UK and the USA.

The public funding of early years education and care in England has been transformed. Historically, local councils had the main responsibility for decisions regarding nursery education and child daycare, but in 1996 the Conservative government introduced a nursery education voucher scheme. Parents of four-year-olds could exchange the voucher for three terms of ‘pre-school provision’ in a maintained nursery or primary school, or in a private, voluntary or independent (PVI) provider of child daycare; in 1998 the Labour government replaced the voucher with an entitlement to free part-time ‘early education’. The entitlement was expanded progressively and in 2017 the Conservative government introduced 30 hours free ‘childcare’ for some children together with an Early Years National Funding Formula. Funding goals and policy have shifted over time, underpinned by the idea of ‘a level playing field’ between providers in maintained and PVI sectors. However, there is no statutory requirement for PVI settings to employ qualified teachers, militating against a genuine ‘level playing field’ and the integration of education and care.

In the UK and the US significant numbers of university graduates live with their parents, but little is known about expectations regarding parental support. This article focuses on a sample of British middle-class families and their co-resident young adult children. It explores the extent to which parents and their graduate children have consistent expectations regarding co-residence and financial support, and how this is negotiated. Fifty-four in-depth interviews with parents and adult children were conducted. The findings reveal that expectations regarding co-residence were broadly consistent across parents and graduate children. Furthermore, within families there was broad consistency regarding expectations of financial support, although there was variation between families. The nature and ways in which financial arrangements were negotiated varied between families, between parents and between children. Expectations appear to be shaped by the child’s circumstances and norms, with negotiations of different types enabling a way forward to be agreed.

Young graduates in England often return to the parental home after a period of living away during their university studies. Little is known, however, about why they return and how coresidence with parents fits within a life trajectory. This paper reports upon an in-depth cross-sectional qualitative study of young graduates’ coresidence with their parents. It identifies a five-part typology of the purpose of coresidence as perceived by the graduates: a base camp for exploration before settling into adulthood; a launch pad for careers; a savings bank, in particular for future property purchases; a refuge for respite and reflection; and a preferred residence, whether on account of comfort, cultural practice or to support parents. The paper further explores how far these purposes were associated in young adults’ accounts with social structures, individual agency or some combination of these. It concludes that the default understanding of graduates’ return and coresidence as a residual function when other options fail is insufficient. Such a generalisation obscures the different purposes which the return can enable; it overplays some notion of a broken biography rather than the positive contribution of coresidence to graduates’ trajectories towards adulthood and to their life experiences.

Finishing full-time higher education is one of the main reasons for returning home to live. Graduates who return to co-residence with their parents experience a delay in achieving full adult independence, which may pose problems for them and for their parents. In this article we use face-to-face interview data to explore the feelings and perceptions of 27 co-resident graduate 'returners' and one of their parents. We classify parent–returner dyads into groups according to whether the members of each dyad are positive, negative or ambivalent about co-residence and identify the salient issues for each group. We find that more parents are negative about co-residence than adult children and that almost half the sample is ambivalent. We also discuss the factors accounting for differences between groups of dyads and between parents and adult children.

Responsibility for meeting the costs of higher education in England has moved inexorably away from the government toward the family with the introduction of tuition fee and maintenance loans. Although an important public policy issue, there is limited research on how the policy impinges on the private sphere of the family. This paper focuses on financial support given by parents, including difficulties and constraints along with their perspectives of and responses to student loan debt, and students’ views of their financial independence. In-depth interviews with 28 parent-student dyads revealed different patterns of support. Some parents, contrary to policy assumptions, felt responsibility for their children’s student loan debt and acted to avoid, minimise or cushion the debt. There was evidence of financial stress for less affluent families. However, students with no parental support and high levels of government funding felt financially independent. The findings suggest that more affluent families were able to protect their children from student loan debt in different ways, whilst those with lower incomes were not able to do so, apparently creating a new form of inequality.

This research revisits the contested issue of ethnic minority access to higher education. It is well established that candidates from black and minority ethnic groups go to university in good numbers, but we also know that candidates from some minority groups tend to be concentrated in less prestigious institutions. Access to high status institutions is important for several reasons, not least because it is likely to affect candidates’ subsequent destinations and their ability to access elite professions.

Despite entering higher education in good numbers, candidates from some black and minority ethnic groups are concentrated in less prestigious institutions. A similar pattern is evident in candidates' applications, raising important questions about the role of 'self-exclusion'. Statistical analysis confirms that candidates from some minority ethnic groups tend to target lower-ranking institutions, but these differences are almost entirely explained by other variables, particularly academic attainment, type of school attended, number of A-levels taken and subject mix. It follows that some minority ethnic groups appear to be indirectly disadvantaged by patterns of schooling that do not prepare candidates for elite higher education. Similar processes are evident in relation to social class, although candidates from less privileged family backgrounds remain less likely to target high-status institutions even when other variables are taken into account.

This report provides key findings from a two part research project funded by the Sutton Trust and the LSE focusing on secondary school admissions in England. The research analyses secondary schools’ admissions criteria and practices in England in 2012/13 and illustrative examples of how some local authorities and schools use pupil banding as part of the Year 7 admissions process. The report provides a brief overview of the historical and policy context relating to secondary school admissions, identifying in particular the latent concerns regarding academic selection persisting from the transition from a selective to a comprehensive system and during the period of the educational quasi-market since 1988. Previous research has suggested that a significant minority of secondary schools, and in particular those responsible for their own admissions, used a variety of oversubscription criteria that could be socially selective. We examined oversubscription criteria used by 3,001 publicly-funded secondary schools in England. Our findings relating to secondary school admissions for 2012/13 show that there have been some changes since 2008. Virtually all schools now give top priority to children in local authority care, in accordance with legislation. Most of the changes from 2008 to 2012 reflect an increase in the objectivity and transparency of oversubscription criteria.

The UK Resilience Programme (UKRP) aims to improve children’s psychological well-being by building resilience and promoting accurate thinking. Three local authorities launched it in the 2007 to 2008 academic year with workshops delivered to year 7 pupils in secondary schools. This report presents findings from the UKRP evaluation, commissioned by the Department for Children, Schools and Families (now the Department for Education). The evaluation aims to investigate whether the programme (previously trialled in small samples) can be delivered at scale and whether it has an impact on children’s well-being, behaviour, attendance and academic attainment. Information on pupils’ well-being was collected through questionnaires administered to pupils who had participated in the first year of UKRP workshops and to a control group. Pupils were surveyed before and after the programme. The quantitative work examines the impact on the original cohort of pupils (those in workshops in 2007-08) over a three year period. In addition, interviews with pupils, facilitators (workshop leaders) and school managers were carried out in 10 of the 22 secondary schools involved in the programme at the end of the 2007-08 academic year, and follow-up interviews were carried out in 9 of these 10 schools in the autumn term of 2009-10. .

There has been a focus on policies relating to early years education and care across the developed world and particularly in Europe. In the UK, there has been a raft of policy changes alongside increased investment. However, this paper argues that these changes may not be sufficient to meet EU objectives in terms of quality or the government's policy goals of high quality, affordable and accessible early years education and care. There are major issues that appear to militate against achieving these goals; these relate to the levels of government funding and to the regulatory context. There are also divergences between the providers in terms of their own objectives and underlying values which mean that quality may be variable and access to certain types of providers restricted. These factors appear to militate against the delivery of universal provision of high quality early years education and care.

Area-based polices have become a significant part of the new Labour Government’s approach to tackling social exclusion. This paper reviews the long-running debate about whether area-based policies can make a significant impact on poverty and social exclusion. There is a strong tradition of academic work that argues that this is a misguided strategy. The authors argue that recent work, both in the US and the UK, suggests that there may be causal factors at work which derive from area-based problems that suggest area-based solutions. However, too little is understood about what these factors are and how they might be addressed. Deeper local studies are required to tease out these effects. The paper then goes on to describe how the authors have gone about choosing twelve areas for particular study. In the course of doing so, much has been learned about the characteristics of the most deprived areas in the country and where they are.