Research

Our cutting-edge research seeks to inform evidence-led policy and practice to equalise opportunities.

Inequalities in educational attainment open early and widen throughout school, and this inequality has consequences for adult outcomes. But childhood circumstances still remain an important predictor of adult success, over and above educational attainment.  

Our research explores how the education system, and the wider practices of universities and employers, can be improved to equalise opportunities. 

Research themes

Early years
Toddler with soft toys

Early years

Our work in early years seeks to understand and evaluate how children and families can be best supported to develop their skills.

Schools
Two students smiling in classroom. Image: Phil Meech for UCL Institute of Education

Schools

Our schools research explores how and why educational inequalities widen through the school years.

Tertiary education
Reading on the UCL quad

Tertiary education

Our tertiary work team focuses on the role of universities and further education providers in providing opportunities for all young people.

Adulthood
street of people

Adulthood

Our adulthood work stream aims to understand the nature and extent of inequalities in adult outcomes.

COSMO

Navigate to COVID Social Mobility and Opportunities Study (COSMO)
Logo of shades of green and white with the words "COSMO COVID Social Mobility & Opportunities Study"

COVID Social Mobility and Opportunities Study (COSMO)

This major new youth cohort study is providing vital new evidence on how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected socio-economic inequalities in life chances.

Our approaches

To deliver our aim of identifying and reducing inequalities in opportunities across the life course, we will take multiple approaches using rigorous quantitative methods.

Our approaches take three main strands:

CREATE champions the development and application of expertise in the use of randomised evaluations and related methods to understand policies and programmes in the work of CEPEO and beyond.

We focus on how to understand the effect of complex and multi-component interventions that are conventional in our field.

We carry out evaluations and critique the approaches taken by studies of this type. Also, we are developing innovative approaches aiming to understand not only what works, but how.

One of the ways we do this is by facilitating informed and critical engagement between stands of education research. This does not often occur, encouraging innovation and robustness of evaluation work in the field of education.

Achieving the aims of CEPEO is not always possible using traditional sources of data.

Our innovation strand identifies and collates alternative sources of data needed to address previously unanswerable questions. These are vital to understanding barriers to opportunities within and beyond education.

This includes:

  • How to best work in a sensitive but ethical manner with organisations - to access and analyse data which is typically unavailable to researchers.
  • Innovative approaches to primary data collection.
  • Use of data from different institutional contexts (other countries) to address issues relevant to education policy in the UK.

Our researchers have world-leading expertise in working with linked longitudinal population administrative data and the rich birth cohort studies.

This includes knowledge of and access to the UK Government's Longitudinal Educational Outcomes (LEO) data - an innovative resource for understanding links between educational opportunities and long-term labour market outcomes at the population level.

We also work closely with the Centre for Longitudinal Studies to make best use of their internationally renowned cohort studies:

  • National Child Development Study
  • British Birth Cohort Study
  • Millennium Cohort Study
  • Next Steps.

We learn from current datasets by working closely with expert researchers and survey methodologists who run these outstanding resources.