Education

Our research seeks out an objective view of standards of education in Britain. By doing so, we aim to offer an improved perspective on how best to deliver equitable and high standards of education for all.

We aim in particular to generate evidence-based policy, with realisable strategies for implementation. This includes a commitment to giving parents greater control over how government invests in their child’s education, as well as supporting independent teaching combined with a flexible curriculum.

This complements the practical education projects we run: Civitas Schools, for children who want out-of-hours support but do not have access to expensive private tuition, and Core Knowledge UK, our curriculum project which is being developed in partnership with a number of English primary schools.

Academic Freedom in Our Universities: the Best and the Worst

Civitas research team, December 2020

This report analyses over three years of campus censorship (January 2017–August 2020), examining the multiple policies and actions of all the 137 registered UK universities – including their students’ unions – to provide a detailed understanding of the state of free speech across UK academia. This study employs a unique approach, methodology and data to measure restrictions on free speech. We would like to acknowledge previous… [Full Details]

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How we think about disparity: and what we get wrong

Richard Norrie, December 2020

A government-appointed Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities has been set up to address disparity between ethnic or racial groups in outcomes relating to health, education, employment and other areas. This follows numerous reviews conducted by various governments since 2010. Drawing on the full array of existing reviews, this report by the Director of the Statistics and Policy Research Programme at Civitas, Richard Norrie… [Full Details]

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What price lockdown?

Tim Knox and Jim McConalogue, December 2020

As the UK government publishes its cost-benefit analysis of lockdown, Tim Knox and Jim McConalogue attempt to quantify the estimated costs that have been incurred in a new Working Paper, The cost of the cure. Their estimates can be used as a benchmark against which the government analysis can be measured. They find that the cost per year of life saved (QALY) ranges from… [Full Details]

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The Racialisation of Campus Relations

Ruth Mieschbuehler, November 2020

The author of this report, Ruth Mieschbuehler, argues that there is a real danger that campus relations at universities will become racialised. The term ‘racialisation’ – referring to the process of emphasising racial and ethnic grouping – is discussed to show how higher education policies and practices implemented to address the ‘ethnic’ attainment gap are driving this trend. The result of these interventions is that students are… [Full Details]

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Covid Kids: The response of schools to coronavirus

Joanna Williams, July 2020

In response to coronavirus, schools closed to all but the children of key workers on 20 March 2020. The majority of children did not return before the end of the academic year, meaning they will have spent over five months out of the classroom. Schools remained closed to most pupils for such a long time because of government social distancing requirements and the teaching unions… [Full Details]

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The Corrosive Impact of Transgender Ideology

Joanna Williams, June 2020

In less than two decades ‘transgender’ has gone from a term representing individuals and little used outside of specialist communities, to signifying a powerful political ideology driving significant social change. At the level of the individual, this shift has occurred through the separation of gender from sex, before reclaiming biology through an innate sense of ‘gender-identity’. In this report, Joanna Williams argues that this… [Full Details]

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Social Mobility Truths

Peter Saunders, November 2019

Politicians of all parties repeatedly tell us that Britain’s social mobility rate is very low, much worse than in other advanced western countries, and that very few children from working class backgrounds succeed in landing good jobs. They claim the professions and our top universities are largely closed to people from humble origins, that opportunities for bright working class children are even worse today… [Full Details]

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Why Academic Freedom Matters: A response to current challenges

Cheryl Hudson and Joanna Williams (Eds.), September 2016

The issues of freedom of speech on campuses and academic freedom have become major talking points. Student politics, once something people left behind upon graduation, is now the daily fare of national, and even international, news coverage. Terms like ‘microaggression’, ‘trigger warning’, and ‘safe space’, virtually unheard of a decade ago, have entered mainstream vocabulary. Campus bans on everything from tabloid newspapers and fancy dress… [Full Details]

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The Ins and Outs of Selective Secondary Schools: A Debate

Anastasia de Waal (ed.), March 2015

Should secondary schools be allowed to select, and if so, on what basis? These questions have long been a battleground of the English education system and have too often yielded answers that reduce the issue to oversimplified dichotomies. The Ins and Outs of Selective Secondary Schools: A Debate gathers a diverse range of key thinkers to evaluate the modern scope of secondary school selection in… [Full Details]

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Progressively Worse: The burden of bad ideas in British schools

Robert Peal, April 2014

Since 1953, education spending in Britain has increased by nine times in real terms but levels of numeracy and literacy among school leavers have hardly changed. Today, Britain is the only country in the developed world where literacy and numeracy levels amongst 16 to 24-year-olds are no higher than amongst 55 to 65-year-olds. In this historical analysis, Robert Peal argues that… [Full Details]

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Prisoners of The Blob: Why most education experts are wrong about nearly everything

Toby Young, April 2014

What is "The Blob" and what has a 1950s sci-fi movie got to do with education policy? In this hard-hitting pamphlet, the journalist and free school founder Toby Young explains how the education establishment has been sucked into a thoughtworld which will not permit reasonable discussion of the best ways to school our children. The adherence of teaching unions, local education authorities and… [Full Details]

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Boxing Clever

Tom Ogg, September 2012

Boxing Clever is Tom Ogg’s account of teaching teenagers who had been expelled from school at the London Boxing Academy Community Project (LBACP) in Tottenham, North London. The aim of the project was to make use of the strong relationships that boxing coaches have with wayward young men. "The prose is strong, the story compelling and the political implications profound... Tom Ogg has made… [Full Details]

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Liberal Education and the National Curriculum

David Conway, January 2010

Professor David Conway traces the history of proposed school curricula from the liberal reformers of the 1860s to modern times. All children, whatever their backgrounds, should be introduced to 'the best that has been thought and said… [Full Details]

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From Two Cultures to No Culture: C. P. Snow's 'Two Cultures' Lecture Fifty Years On

Robert Whelan, March 2009

In 1959, C.P. Snow delivered a lecture in Cambridge entitled 'The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution'. Snow warned of a gap that had opened up between scientists and literary intellectuals. The latter were not only ignorant of science, but contemptuous of it - as if scientific knowledge were unnecessary for a good education. In 1962, an influential literary critic, F.R. Leavis, launched an… [Full Details]

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The Butterfly Book

December 2008

The Key to Early Reading Success 'The Butterfly Book' offers a self-contained course in reading and writing that introduces the 44 sounds of the English language and teaches children how to blend them into syllables and words. By the end of this course, a child will not just have learnt an essential vocabulary but will also have all the keys to unlocking the whole… [Full Details]

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Inspecting the Inspectorate: Ofsted under scrutiny

Anastasia de Waal (ed.), November 2008

Today's cheap, short and 'sharp' inspection is by definition restricted to a superficial one-size-fits-all snapshot of school provision. Ofsted's tick-box criteria, drop-in mentality and frequently poorly-trained inspectors prevent the inspectorate from truly gauging the quality of schools. This collection of essays by educational insiders, including a practising Ofsted inspector, sets out the weaknesses in the current school… [Full Details]

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Swedish Lessons: How schools with more freedom can deliver better education

Nick Cowen, June 2008

What we can learn from the experience of Sweden, a country with strong egalitarian values that has successfully incorporated the mechanism of choice into its educational provision? "As a primer for serious debate, it really is one of the best and more thought-provoking pieces of work you’ll read in a very long time." Sunny Hundal, Liberal Conspiracy… [Full Details]

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The Corruption of the Curriculum

Robert Whelan (ed.), June 2007

Subjects in the school curriculum used to be regarded as discrete areas of knowledge which would be imparted to pupils by teachers motivated by a love of learning. The contributors to this book argue that we need to return to the traditional view of education as a means of transmitting a body of knowledge from one generation to the next, and that academic rigour and… [Full Details]

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Inspection, Inspection, Inspection!: How Ofsted crushes independent schools and independent teachers

Anastasia de Waal, December 2006

Since 2003 Ofsted has been tasked with inspecting many independent schools. Although private schools are theoretically free to devise their own curriculum and teaching methods, Ofsted can and does pressure these schools into conforming to a standardised template. Looking into the way independent schools inspected by Ofsted are penalised for operating outside the Ofsted box, Inspection, Inspection, Inspection exposes the inspectorate's inability to truly… [Full Details]

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