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The famous events of May 1968, starting with student riots, threw France into a state of turmoil. As a result, normal examination procedures were abandoned, and the pass rate for various qualifications increased enormously. The lowering of thresholds at critical stages of the education system enabled a proportion of students to pursue more years of higher education than would otherwise have been possible. For those on the margin of passing their examinations, additional years of higher education increased future wages and occupational levels. Interestingly, the effect is also transmitted across generations and is reflected in the educational performance of children.

Executive SummaryIn recent years the role of investment in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) as an effective tool to raise educational standards has attracted growing attention from both policy makers and academic researchers. While the former tend to express enthusiastic claims about the use of new technologies in schools, the latter have raised concerns about the methodological validity of much of the research undertaken.The view that ICT could help to raise educational standards dates back to the Fifties, and builds on some of the original findings by the Harvard psychologist Skinner (1954Skinner ( , 1958. More recently, support for the effectiveness of ICT as a teaching and learning device comes from the educational literature. Yet results are generally inferred from simple correlations between ICT and pupil performance, without taking full account of other factors (such as school characteristics, resources and quality) that may be related to both ICT resources and pupil outcomes. These methodological short-comings cast serious doubt on the validity of most of the existing research which finds a positive relationship between computers (and/or computer software) and student outcomes. In contrast, the small number of economic studies that address these issues by applying more rigorous methods of analysis, report no evidence for a positive impact of ICT on pupil outcomes.In recent years, and in parallel with the widespread belief that new technologies account for much of the productivity resurgence in workplaces in the Nineties (see Jorgenson and Stiroh, 2000), the UK government has motivated its sizable ICT investment in schools by stressing the importance of ICT in raising educational standards and creating opportunities for every child. The positive rhetoric about ICT in the UK has been backed up by considerable government investment.Starting from 1997, the government has encouraged the widespread use of ICT for teaching and learning in schools: formal plans were set-up under the 'National Grid for Learning' in order to equip schools with ICT facilities and train teachers to make an effective use of ICT. Between 1998 and 2002, ICT expenditure in England almost doubled in secondary schools, and increased by over 300 percent in primary schools.In this paper, we ask whether this considerable increase in ICT investment has made any difference to educational standards. More specifically, we evaluate whether changes in ICT investment had any causal impact on changes in educational outcomes in English schools over the period from 1999 to 2003. To do this, we mainly rely on administrative data at the level of Local Education Authority. We also make use of detailed information contained in a survey about ICT use in English schools to help interpret our findings. To identify the causal impact of ICT use on pupil achievement, we exploit a policy change that occurred in 2001, using an Instrumental Variable (IV) approach. Specifically, we consider how a change in the rules governing ICT investment in differe...

There has been an increase in the number of children going to school in England who do not speak English as a first language. We investigate whether this has an impact on the educational outcomes of native English speakers at the end of primary school. We show that the negative correlation observed in the raw data is mainly an artefact of selection: non-native speakers are more likely to attend school with disadvantaged native speakers. We attempt to identify a causal impact of changes in the percentage of non-native speakers. Our results suggest zero effect and rule out negative effects.