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Many students still leave school without a good grasp of basic literacy, despite the negative implications for future educational and labour market outcomes. We evaluate a programme that involves changing how resources are used within classrooms to reinforce the teaching of literacy. Specifically, the programme involves training teaching assistants to deliver a tightly structured package of materials to groups of young children. Further, we compare the effectiveness of computer-aided instruction using available software with the paper equivalent. We implement the experiment in the context of a Randomised Control Trial in English schools. Both interventions have a short-term impact on children's reading scores, although the effect is bigger for the paper intervention and more enduring in the subsequent year. This paper shows how teaching assistants can be used to better effect within schools, and at a low cost.

We investigate the rapid influx of overseas students into UK higher education and the impact on the number of domestic students. Using administrative data since 1994/5, we find no evidence of crowd out of domestic undergraduate students and indications of increases in the domestic numbers of postgraduate students as overseas enrolments have grown. We interpret this as a cross-subsidisation and establish causal findings using two methods. Firstly, we use the historical share of students from a sending country attending a university department as a shift-share instrument to predict enrolment patterns. Secondly, we use a change in Chinese visa regulations and exchange rates in combination with strong subject preferences as a predictor of overseas student growth. The following are appended: (1) Additional Figures and Tables; and (2) Data Description. [This paper was produced as part of the Centre's Education & Skills Programme. The Centre for Economic Performance is financed by the Economic and Social Research Council.]

Education is an area that is highly devolved in the UK, and the fact that all four constituent countries have pursued very different policies in the recent past provides a good testing ground to undertake a comparative review of the merits or otherwise of the education reforms that have taken place. There is, of course, an important policy context to such an analysis. Examining the performance of children educated in the devolved Scottish system in comparison to those educated in England, Wales and Northern Ireland has potential to offer a unique and valuable insight into the impact of Scottish devolution in a high profile area of public policy. When deciding whether or not to seek independence from the UK, the Scottish electorate will need to consider how a devolved Scotland has fared in educating its nation under its own terms--and hence how they might fare when taking ownership of other policy areas. In examining the key differences in attainment bearing in mind these differences, this report will help answer this question.