We explore the effects of the COVID-19 crisis and the associated restrictions to economic activity on paid and unpaid work for men and women in the United Kingdom. Using data from the COVID-19 supplement of Understanding Society, we find evidence that labour market outcomes of men and women were roughly equally affected at the extensive margin, as measured by the incidence of job loss or furloughing. But, if anything, women suffered smaller losses at the intensive margin, experiencing slightly smaller changes in hours and earnings. Within the household, women provided on average a larger share of increased childcare needs, but in an important share of households fathers became the primary childcare providers. These distributional consequences of the pandemic may be important to understand its inequality legacy over the longer term.

Most students do not follow the 'academic track' (i.e. A-levels) after leaving school and only about a third of students go to university before the age of 20. Yet progression routes for the majority that do not take this path but opt for vocational post-compulsory education are not as well-known, which partly has to do with the complexity of the vocational education system and the difficulty of deciphering available data. If we are to tackle long-standing problems of low social mobility and a long tail of underachievers, it is essential that post-16 vocational options come under proper scrutiny. This paper is a step in that direction.We use linked administrative data to track decisions made by all students in England who left compulsory education after having undertaken the national examination -the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE)-at age 16 in the year 2009/10. We track them up to the age of 21, as they progress through the education system and (for some) into the labour market. We categorise the many different types of post-16 qualifications into several broad categories and we look at the probability of achieving various educational and early labour market outcomes, conditional on the path chosen at age 17. We also take into account the influence of demographics, prior attainment and the secondary school attended. Our findings illustrate the strong inequality apparently generated by routes chosen at age 17, even whilst controlling for prior attainment and schooling up to that point.2

School reforms featuring the introduction of new types of schools have occurred in the education systems of a number of countries. The most well-known of these new school types to be recently introduced are charter schools in the United States, free schools in Sweden and academy schools in England. We review the evidence on the impact of the introduction of these new schools on pupil outcomes and present new evidence for the case of England, whose introduction of academy schools has been one of the most radical changes in the school landscape over the past decade. The analysis of academies, charter and free schools concludes that, in certain settings, they can improve pupil performance.

The relationship between school reforms, specifically those involving the introduction of new school types, and pupil performance is studied. The particular context is the introduction of academy schools in England, but related evidence on Swedish free schools and US charter schools is also presented. The empirical evidence shows a causal positive impact of the conversion of disadvantaged schools to academies on end of school pupil performance and on subsequent probability of degree completion at university. There is heterogeneity in this impact, such that more disadvantaged pupils and those attending London academies experience bigger performance improvements. JEL Keywords: Academies; School reform; School autonomy; Pupil Performance. JEL Classifications: I20; I21; I28. AcknowledgementsWe would like to thank Rafael Lalive, Mikael Lindahl and participants in the 2015 EALE/SOLE world conference for a number of helpful comments. In parts, this paper draws on and further develops some of our other work on academy schools (Eyles,