Search

The mental health and well‐being of teachers is an issue of great policy concern. This is particularly true in England, where high workload and the associated stress is thought to be leading to a recruitment and retention crisis within the education profession. But do individuals who decide to leave teaching for another career actually see their well‐being and mental health improve? We provide new evidence on this matter for individuals aged between 40 and 65, using the rich information gathered as part of the UK Biobank study. Our analysis shows that individuals who choose to leave teaching are somewhat happier in their work, but do not generally experience any improvement in their general well‐being or mental health. We hence caution those middle‐aged teachers who are thinking of leaving teaching that the grass may not necessarily be greener on the other side. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

England is currently facing a crisis in the recruitment and retention of teachers, with one-in-three newly qualified staff leaving the profession within five years of completing their training. This paper investigates several different aspects of the lives of recently qualified teachers in England, including their life satisfaction, mental health, working hours and their social lives. Recently qualified teachers are found to have higher-levels of life-satisfaction than their peers working in other professional/graduate jobs, despite working longer hours for little extra pay. They are also less likely to believe that Britain is a place where hard work gets rewarded. Yet there is no evidence that recently qualified teachers have worse mental health outcomes, or have a less active social life, than young people working in other jobs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider whether certain countries are particularly adept (or particularly poor) at getting children from disadvantaged homes to study for a bachelor's degree. A series of university access models are estimated for four English-speaking countries (England, Canada, Australia and the USA), which include controls for comparable measures of academic achievement at age 15. Our results suggest that socioeconomic differences in university access are more pronounced in England and Canada than Australia and the USA and that cross-national variation in the socioeconomic gap remains even once we take account of differences in academic achievement. We discuss the implications of our findings for the creation of more socially mobile societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Trends in Mathematics and Science Study are two highly respected studies of school pupils' academic achievement. English policy-makers have been disappointed with school children's performance on these tests, particularly in comparison to the strong results of young people from East Asia. In this paper, we provide new insight into the England-East Asia gap in school children's mathematics skills. We do so by considering how cross-national differences in math test scores change between ages 10 and 16. Our results suggest that, although average math test scores are higher in East Asian countries, this achievement gap does not increase between ages 10 and 16. We thus conclude that reforming the secondary school system may not be the most effective way for England to 'catch up' with the East Asian nations in the PISA math rankings. Rather, earlier intervention, during pre-school and primary school, may be needed instead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]