The current study investigates the economic impact of education on health behaviour and health outcomes, specifically targeting the Raymond Mhlaba and Buffalo City municipalities in the Eastern Cape region, South Africa. The study employs and modifies the National Income Dynamic Study (NIDS) data by combining all five waves to create a panel data. The study investigates an analytical objective which explored the relationship between education, health behaviours and health outcomes. This objective is addressed using a multivariate regression analysis (multinomial logistic regression) which offers the advantage of the ability to handle categorical outcomes with more than two categories. The current study uses marginal effects (dy/dx) to analyse how education affects health outcomes in each category of health outcomes. The results for the probability of predictor variables belonging to category 3 “good” [coded 3 on the dummy variable (DV)] are positive and significant [dy/dx = 0.328; p = 0.029], showing that the marginal effects of having an undergraduate degree and belonging to category 3 are higher (33pp) than in any other category. The empirical findings suggest that education can be an important determinant of behavioral transformation and later changes in health-related outcomes. Thus, it is the policy implications and recommendations of this study that improving health outcomes requires more than health sector solutions. As such, given that education shapes health behaviours and health outcomes across the course of life, policies must move beyond silos and intergrade health education in South Africa’s education system in order to rule out health illiteracy as a root cause of health inequality and poor health outcomes.

The ambition of policymakers to ‘raise aspirations’ among young people from disadvantaged backgrounds as a means for improving social mobility in Britain has been a mainstay of political rhetoric for the last three decades. Reports such as Higher Education in the Learning Society in 1997, Unleashing Aspiration in 2009, and Success as a Knowledge Economy in 2016 are all underpinned by an ideology of neoliberal meritocracy that has transcended political parties and governments since the Thatcher administration. Even those who lean more to the left of the Labour Party within contemporary Britain have perpetuated this narrative by reframing it as ‘working-class ambition’. This paper advances an alternative view which reconceptualises the way in which young people from non-privileged backgrounds experience and perceive the world, and their place within it. Drawing upon our work on Connected Belonging in 2025 and our research on the From the Centre to the Periphery project in 2025, we suggest that ‘hopeful optimism’ offers a more realistic lens through which to understand what is needed to address the ‘personal troubles and public issues’ that young people face. Unlike aspiration, which has an inherently individualistic and future-orientated framing, with value systems directed by dominant hegemonic notions of ‘success’ that are commonly positioned in economic terms, we recognise optimism as being a holistic and relational process that resides in the present as well as looks to the future. Optimism, grounded within principles of hope, allows young people the freedom to be and to dream; by celebrating who they are and their interconnectedness, it protects them from fears of failure; by reimaging what success might mean, it liberates them as creators.

This paper contributes to the literature on the earnings returns to university graduation. Recent evidence using administrative earnings data from England suggests a zero return to graduation for men and positive returns to graduation for women in annual earnings at age 26. We show that once hours worked are taken into account-typically not available in administrative tax data-returns to graduation in hourly wages are considerably smaller for women than returns in annual wages at this age. Graduate women work more hours than comparable non-graduate women; thus, not taking hours worked into account leads to overestimating returns to graduation for women by more than two-fold. This highlights the importance of using both survey and administrative data sources when estimating the returns to university graduation.

The reduction of hospital deaths is a policy priority in most developed countries. However, health and social care systems experience difficulties in delivering this outcome. Moreover, studies of place of death fail to identify barriers to dying in the community. To address this gap, this study estimates the unique effects of disease diagnosis and care provider type on the probability that ill adults aged 50 and older die in a private home, care home, hospital, or hospice. It does so by applying multinomial logistic regression analysis to data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing. Crucially, the analysis controls for sociodemographic factors, disability, and prognostic uncertainty by accounting for whether relatives anticipated the death. Cancer predicts hospice death, while non-cancer diagnosis and care provision by a partner predict hospital death. Dementia is a barrier to dying in a private home, while it is associated with a care home death. This suggests that community palliative care referral pathways cater to cancer diagnoses, while private home-based palliative care services struggle to support adults with dementia to die at home, regardless of prognostic accuracy. Including cancer-free adults in community palliative care referral pathways, and supporting their partners in care provision, would likely reduce hospital deaths.

The educational solutions put forward in the 2019 Conservative Government's Levelling Up programme privileged higher-level skills training delivered through further education, sidelining traditional university degrees, reflective of broader critiques levelled at the higher education sector in terms of the value for money of some degrees. It goes without saying that further education provides crucial opportunities for many people and our analyses of Linked Educational Outcomes Data (LEO) presented here support previous research on the returns to further education study. However, it also underlines the way returns are contingent upon race, gender, socio-economic status, subject of study and, most importantly, geographic location of employment. This is reflective of the broader spatial division of labour that is the characteristic of the UK economy, which the educational components of Levelling Up did little to disrupt. We argue that the Levelling Up programme maintained the status quo with economically less prosperous localities seen as 'places of labour' - serving the controllers of capital in existing prosperous places, where the degree educated must continue to flock to take up the strategic control functions of economic production.

Over recent decades it has consistently been shown that disabled adults in the UK fare worse in the labour market and have lower levels of wellbeing than non-disabled adults. However, this is in part due to the selection into dis-ability of those with existing socio-economic disadvantages. In this article, we use panel data from the combined British Household Panel Survey and Understanding Society, covering the 27 years from 1991 to 2018, to distinguish between the effect of selection, the effect of dis-ability onset and the effect of dis-ability duration on a range of labour market and wellbeing outcomes. We show that there is important selection both into dis-ability and into longer experience of dis-ability on the basis of observable characteristics. We also show the importance of controlling for time-invariant unobservable individual characteristics that similarly affect selection into dis-ability and duration of dis-ability. Even after controlling for both forms of selection, we find significant negative effects of dis-ability onset and duration, and offer policy solutions to address them.

Background: Participation in higher education has significant and long-lasting consequences for people's socioeconomic trajectories. Maternal depression is linked to poorer educational achievement for children in school, but its impact on university attendance is unclear.Methods: In an English longitudinal cohort study (N = 8952), we explore whether young people whose mothers experienced elevated depressive symptoms are less likely to attend university, and the role of potential mediators in the young person: educational achievement in school, depressive symptoms, and locus of control. We also examine whether maternal depressive symptoms influence young people's choice of university, and non-attendees' reasons for not participating in higher education.Results: Young people whose mothers experienced more recurrent depressive symptoms were less likely to attend university (OR = 0.88, CI = 0.82,0.94, p < 0.001) per occasion of elevated maternal depressive symptoms) after adjusting for confounders. Mediation analysis indicated this was largely explained by educational achievement in school (e.g., 82.7 % mediated by age 16 achievement) and locus of control at 16. There was mixed evidence for an impact on choice of university. For participants who did not study at university, maternal depressive symptoms were linked to stating as a reason having had other priorities to do with family or children (OR: 1.17, CI = 1.02,1.35).Limitations: Lack of data on the other parent's depression, loss to follow-up, possibly selective non-response.Conclusions: Young people whose mothers experience elevated depressive symptoms on multiple occasions are less likely to participate in higher education; educational achievement in secondary school, but not the young people's own depressive symptoms, substantially mediated the effect.

ObjectivesThis paper estimates the effect of continuing in education post-16 on the probability of experiencing youth custody at ages 17 and 18, addressing the issue of non-random selection into continued participation to derive a causal estimate. MethodsWe exploit the natural experiment created by the ‘raising of the participation age’ (RPA) in England. Unlike previous cohorts who could leave education aged 16, young people starting the final year of compulsory schooling in September 2012 were required to continue in education or training until the end of the school year in which they turned 17, and those starting the final year in September 2013 were required to continue until age 18. Using linked National Pupil Database and National Client Caseload Information System data we utilise the variation in participation between cohorts that the RPA induced to estimate the causal effect of continued participation on custody outcomes at ages 17 and 18. ResultsThe effect of the law change was to increase the proportion of young people participating in education at age 17 by 1.7pp (1.2pp) for boys (girls), from a base of 82.1% (85.0%) prior to the reform. Despite this increase in participation, there was no effect on the probability of custody when aged 17 or 18. This suggests that the 0.64pp (0.04pp) reduction in probability of custody associated with continued participation for boys (girls) estimated without addressing the selection issue, is actually capturing the effect on custody probability of the unobservable characteristics of those who choose to continue in education beyond 16. Results are robust to different estimation methods and different treatment specifications. ConclusionThe negative relationship between education and crime is well documented but the decision to remain in education beyond the compulsory age is not random. Evidence here suggests that the cross-sectional reduction in probability of custody associated with continued education is driven by the unobservable characteristics of those who voluntarily continue their education rather than reflecting a causal effect of education.

Background On average, educated people are healthier, wealthier and have higher life expectancy than those with less education. Numerous studies have attempted to determine whether education causes differences in later health outcomes or whether another factor ultimately causes differences in education and subsequent outcomes. Previous studies have used a range of natural experiments to provide causal evidence. Here we compare two natural experiments: a policy reform, raising the school leaving age in the UK in 1972; and Mendelian randomization. Methods We used data from 334 974 participants of the UK Biobank, sampled between 2006 and 2010. We estimated the effect of an additional year of education on 25 outcomes, including mortality, measures of morbidity and health, ageing and income, using multivariable adjustment, the policy reform and Mendelian randomization. We used a range of sensitivity analyses and specification tests to assess the plausibility of each method's assumptions. Results The three different estimates of the effects of educational attainment were largely consistent in direction for diabetes, stroke and heart attack, mortality, smoking, income, grip strength, height, body mass index (BMI), intelligence, alcohol consumption and sedentary behaviour. However, there was evidence that education reduced rates of moderate exercise and increased alcohol consumption. Our sensitivity analyses suggest that confounding by genotypic or phenotypic confounders or specific forms of pleiotropy are unlikely to explain our results. Conclusions Previous studies have suggested that the differences in outcomes associated with education may be due to confounding. However, the two independent sources of exogenous variation we exploit largely imply consistent causal effects of education on outcomes later in life.

In England, the compulsory age of participation in education or training was raised to 17 in 2013 and then 18 in 2015. In Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, the school leaving age is 16. The idea of raising the age of participation in education or training is gaining traction in the Scottish context, as well as in Wales. The Wales Centre for Public Policy (WCPP) conducted research for the Welsh Government to explore the implications of pursuing this policy in Wales. The research considered how raising the participation age (RPA) might interact with ongoing reforms to school age and post-16 provision in Wales, and explored alternative policies which concentrate on reducing early school leaving as opposed to policies that legally require young people to remain in learning for longer periods of time.

We use a large and novel administrative dataset to investigate returns to different university 'degrees' (subject-institution combinations) in the United Kingdom. Conditioning on a rich set of background characteristics, we find substantial variation in returns across degrees with similar selectivity levels, suggesting students' degree choices matter a lot for later-life earnings. Returns increase with university selectivity much more at the top of the selectivity distribution than further down, and much more for some subjects than others. Returns are poorly correlated with observable degree characteristics other than selectivity, which could have important implications for student choices and the incentives of universities.

The rapid widening of intergenerational wealth inequalities has led to sharp differences in living standards in Great Britain. Understanding which components of wealth are driving such inequalities is important for improving wealth and social mobility. We show the change in the intergenerational persistence in wealth in Great Britain is due to inequality in offspring housing wealth and that offspring homeownership has become increasingly stratified by parental wealth even after controlling for individual’s own characteristics. Our findings imply the intergenerational wealth elasticity in housing wealth is set to double in approximately one century and highlight the increasingly important role parental wealth has for determining whether offspring hold and the rate at which they accumulate particular types of wealth.

Good health is positively related to children’s educational outcomes, but relationships may not be causal. Demonstrating a causal influence would strongly support childhood and adolescent health as important for education policy. We applied genetic causal inference methods to assess the causal relationship of common health conditions at age 10 (primary/elementary school) and 13 (mid-secondary/mid-high school) with educational attainment at 16 and school absence at 14–16. Participants were 6113 children from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC). Exposures were symptoms of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorder (ASD), depression, asthma, migraines and BMI. Genetic liability for these conditions and BMI was indexed by polygenic scores. In non-genetic, multivariate-adjusted models, all health conditions except asthma and migraines were associated with poorer attainment and greater school absence. School absence substantially mediated effects of BMI (39.9% for BMI at 13) and migraines (72.0% at 10), on attainment with more modest mediation for emotional and neurodevelopmental conditions. In genetic models, a unit increase in standardized BMI at 10 predicted a 0.19 S.D. decrease (95% CI: 0.11, 0.28) in attainment at 16, equivalent to around a 1/3 grade lower in all subjects, and 8.7% more school absence (95% CI:1.8%,16.1%). Associations were similar at 13. Genetic liability for ADHD predicted lower attainment but not more absence. Triangulation across multiple approaches supports a causal, negative influence on educational outcomes of BMI and ADHD, but not of ASD, depression, asthma or migraine. Higher BMI in childhood and adolescence may causally impair educational outcomes.

Grammar schools are secondary schools that select pupils based on their performance on a test at age 11 - those pupils above a certain threshold attend state-funded grammar schools, while those below the threshold attend state-funded comprehensive or secondary modern schools depending on the area (with the other alternatives being religious or private schools). Inequalities exist in who attains places at grammar schools by socio-economic status, with more disadvantaged children far less likely to attend a grammar school that their more advantaged peers. This is true even when comparing those with similar levels of academic achievement. Numerous factors contribute to this inequality in access, many of which will be exacerbated during the current COVID-19 pandemic. This briefing note summarises the empirical evidence on socio-economic inequalities in who goes to grammar schools, the drivers behind these, and some implications, including the likely impact of the current school closures on inequality in access, if the usual selection procedure (the `11 plus' exam) continues to be used this year.

Abstract Background Obesity is a key public health issue worldwide. Accurate estimates of its full impacts on health, social, and economic outcomes are required, but are difficult to obtain due to bias from confounding and reverse causality (the impact of social and economic factors on obesity). Methods Using data from the UK Biobank and ALSPAC, we applied a genetic causal inference approach (Mendelian Randomization, MR) to estimate the impact of body mass index (BMI) on key social and economic outcomes. Because genetic variants are assigned before birth and cannot change, estimates from MR studies are less liable to confounding and reverse causation. Results Effects of higher BMI were often larger in MR than conventional (non-genetic) models, suggesting previous studies may have underestimated the impact of BMI. For example, in adolescents, MR models implied a standard deviation increase in BMI led to exam scores around 1/3 of a grade lower in all subjects at age 16, and 8.7% (CI: 1.8% to 16.1%) more school absence. In adults a 5kg/m2 increase in BMI corresponded, among other negative outcomes, to £2,778 less annual household income (CI: £1,864 to £3,693), less chance of owning one's home (-1.6%, CI: -2.4% to -0.8%), and higher chance of being lonely (2.4%, CI: 1.4% to 3.5%). At £21.22 (CI: £14.35 to £28.07) per person per marginal kg/m2 per year, MR estimates for inpatient hospital costs were around 40% higher than conventional estimates. Conclusions Findings from causal inference based on genetic variation indicate that high BMI has negative impacts on social and economic outcomes that may be larger than previously estimated. This evidence highlights the potential social and economic value of preventing high BMI across the life course. Key messages High BMI has considerable negative impacts not only for health, but for individuals’ education and socioeconomic outcomes, and overall health care costs. Previous attempts to quantify these effects may have underestimated BMI’s full impact.

Postgraduate education has expanded rapidly in the last couple of decades, with more than 350,000 students now starting a postgraduate course in the UK each year, compared with only around half this number 20 years ago. As increasing numbers of students consider postgraduate study, accurate information on the returns to the different options they face is essential for allowing them to make an informed decision on whether, where and what to study. Previous evidence on the returns to postgraduate study in the UK has generally implied that the returns are quite large and positive. However, the current evidence on postgraduate returns has faced serious limitations, primarily due to data availability. This report provides estimates of the earnings returns to completing postgraduate degrees for British and Northern Irish students studying in Britain. It uses the Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) dataset to account for differences in individuals' background and prior university attainment to estimate the impact of postgraduate qualifications on earnings at age 35, relative to having an undergraduate degree and not proceeding onto further study.

Background: We aimed to estimate the causal effect of health conditions and risk factors on social and socioeconomic outcomes in UK Biobank. Evidence on socioeconomic impacts is important to understand because it can help governments, policy makers and decision makers allocate resources efficiently and effectively. Methods: We used Mendelian randomization to estimate the causal effects of eight health conditions (asthma, breast cancer, coronary heart disease, depression, eczema, migraine, osteoarthritis, type 2 diabetes) and five health risk factors [alcohol intake, body mass index (BMI), cholesterol, systolic blood pressure, smoking] on 19 social and socioeconomic outcomes in 336 997 men and women of White British ancestry in UK Biobank, aged between 39 and 72 years. Outcomes included annual household income, employment, deprivation [measured by the Townsend deprivation index (TDI)], degree-level education, happiness, loneliness and 13 other social and socioeconomic outcomes. Results: Results suggested that BMI, smoking and alcohol intake affect many socioeconomic outcomes. For example, smoking was estimated to reduce household income [mean difference = -(sic)22 838, 95% confidence interval (CI): -(sic)31 354 to -(sic)14 321] and the chance of owning accommodation [absolute percentage change (APC) = -20.8%, 95% CI: -28.2% to -13.4%], of being satisfied with health (APC = -35.4%, 95% CI: -51.2% to -19.5%) and of obtaining a university degree (APC = -65.9%, 95% CI: -81.4% to -50.4%), while also increasing deprivation (mean difference in TDI = 1.73, 95% CI: 1.02 to 2.44, approximately 216% of a decile of TDI). There was evidence that asthma decreased household income, the chance of obtaining a university degree and the chance of cohabiting, and migraine reduced the chance of having a weekly leisure or social activity, especially in men. For other associations, estimates were null. Conclusions: Higher BMI, alcohol intake and smoking were all estimated to adversely affect multiple social and socioeconomic outcomes. Effects were not detected between health conditions and socioeconomic outcomes using Mendelian randomization, with the exceptions of depression, asthma and migraines. This may reflect true null associations, selection bias given the relative health and age of participants in UK Biobank, and/or lack of power to detect effects.