This paper examines the continual increase in the proportion of ‘good’ honour degrees awarded by UK universities since the mid-2000s. This trend has brought with it the charge of ‘grade inflation’ that may reflect falling standards in UK higher education. This issue has been raised in the national press and in government which brings into question the usefulness of the current degree classification system. Using a stochastic frontier strategy and university-wide data, we find evidence of grade inflation in UK higher education from 2009 onwards after controlling for changes in university efficiency in improving degree outcome and factors associated with degree performance. The data employed allow several other sub-themes to be explored. We confirm the findings from previous research that a student’s pre-entry A-level score, region of domicile and previous schooling impact on degree performance. This paper contributes to the relatively thin UK literature that exists on ‘grade inflation’

British Educational Research AssociationAdvanced skills teacher grade "works"A scheme designed to provide greater recognition, pay and influence to England's best teachers is widely being seen as a success, the largest research study of its kind has revealed.The Advanced Skills Teacher grade, introduced by the Labour government in 1998, has improved the status of most of those acquiring it and thus appears to be succeeding in its aim of keeping more talented performers in the classroom.However, this recognition may be under threat, as most staff supervising teachers in the role believe that its future funding under the coalition is uncertain.

This paper uses ALIS data to compare academic performance in two subjects often viewed as relatively close substitutes for one another at A-level. The important role of GCSE achievement is confirmed for both subjects. There is evidence of strong gender effects and variation in outcomes across Examination Boards. A counterfactual exercise suggests that if the sample of Business Studies candidates had studied Economics nearly 40% of those who obtained a grade C or better in the former subject would not have done so in the latter. The opposite exercise suggests that 12% more Economics candidates would have achieved a grade C or better if they had taken Business Studies. In order to render a Business Studies A-level grade comparable to an Economics one in terms of relative difficulty, we estimate that a downward adjustment of 1.5 UCAS points should be applied to the former subject. This adjustment is lower than that suggested by correction factors based on conventional subject pair analysis for these two subjects.

The pay of university managers (vice chancellors, VCs) in the UK has risen sharply in recent years. This paper considers the extent to which VC pay awards are related to university performance measures based around institution mission and financial probity using an individual fixed effects strategy based on data covering academic years 1998-99 to 2008-09. In contrast to earlier studies on this theme, we find evidence that VCs are rewarded for observable mission-based performance measures. Specifically, our results suggest that success in widening participation for students from comprehensive schools and those from areas with low university participation exerts a positive effect on VCs' pay. Securing income flows from university funding council grants also impacts positively on their remuneration. However, even after controlling for a rich array of observable and unobservable factors, there have been sizeable increases in real pay in recent years that cannot be readily explained.

The enlargement of the European Union (EU) in May 2004 produced a very significant wave of immigration to the United Kingdom that is likely to continue to impact its labour market in forthcoming years. Polish migrants were by far the largest cohort of the new entrants. This paper complements previous work that has begun to establish the characteristics and labour market performance of migrants from the new member states who have entered the United Kingdom. This paper uses a unique microlevel data base to investigate the labour market evolution of Polish migrants in the UK labour market. We find that in the first UK job returns to human capital were negligible. However, for the current job an extra year of education increases the weekly gross wage by 3.2 per cent. There is evidence of a gender differential in pay in both jobs and that older workers are paid more than their younger counterparts but this effect becomes insignificant in the current job. We find that hours worked is a significant factor in wage determination. However, the influence of hours worked on wages declined by approximately 38 per cent between the first and current job. Results from multinomial logit models suggest that overtime there is some ''match'' between the occupational groupings that these workers were attached to in Poland and the United Kingdom. We also find evidence that the use of employment agencies by some of these workers increases the likelihood of employment in skilled manual and nonmanual occupations. Workers who have had supervisory responsibility in the United Kingdom are more likely to be in professional or intermediate occupations.