Golo Henseke

University College London | UCL · Education, Practice and Society

Access to Britain’s highly-resourced private schools matters because of concerns surrounding social mobility. Using the UK Family Resources Survey, we document a high and mostly stable income concentration of private school access since 1997. Nevertheless, some low-income participation persists. Bursaries are income-progressive but cannot account f...

The COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately affected young people aged 16–25 years and has brought about a major increase in mental health problems. Although there is persisting evidence regarding SES differences in mental health status, there is still little knowledge of the processes linking SES to young people's mental health, in particular during...

Previous research has shown that there is a small but significant cumulative private school advantage in terms of educational attainment in Britain. However, research on how school type influences non-educational outcomes is more scarcer. This paper aims to identify the extent to which school type influences satisfaction with life and mental health...

This paper examines the perceived effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the learning of job skills and on education. The context is post-Brexit Britain. We find that 47% of young people in a representative sample perceive a loss of learning of job skills, while a sizeable minority (17%) judge that the pandemic improved matters. The perception of skil...

While there is ample evidence of the decline in mental health among youth during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, less is known about the determinants of recovery, which is the focus of this study. Drawing on a stress process framework, this study examines the associations of changes in direct, pandemic-related, and indirect, lockdown-related st...

Young people navigate an increasingly uncertain and precarious employment market. They have to mobilise and use psychosocial resources necessary to adapt to a changing career landscape and employment opportunities. Guided by career development theories, this study asks if school-based career preparation activities can support the development of car...

This paper explored differences in youth life satisfaction across and within countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. A central finding was the flattening, or even the reversal, of the U-shaped age pattern in life satisfaction in some countries. Life satisfaction declined to a greater extent among youth aged 15 to 30 years than among people aged 31...

From the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, there were widespread concerns about young people’s labour market prospects. The COVID-19 youth economic activity and health monitorNote (YEAH) project at University College London (UCL) in collaboration with Statistics Canada and other institutes in Europe aimed to shed light in this area by examining the p...

For most students the aspiration to gain employment in a graduate job is the main motivation for going to university. Whether they fulfil this aspiration depends considerably on national graduate labour markets. We analyse the comparative evolution of these markets across Europe over the decade leading up to 2015, focusing on supply, graduate/high-...

UK universities are world leaders in transnational education. In 2019-20 alone 156 UK providers reported 453,390 students based in 225 countries and territories worldwide. Underpinning this success is the reputation of UK higher education. In the eyes of overseas students and their families, accessing a UK education is a means to a successful caree...

The need to promote fairness at work, as a way of both enhancing employee well‐being and raising productivity, has become increasingly central to political discourse. There has been little research, however, on perceptions of fairness across the diverse spectrum of employees in the workforce—the extent to which they regard their organisations as fa...

Despite economic and institutional differences, youth unemployment figures in Germany and the United Kingdom rose during the Covid-19 pandemic and reached a peak in August 2020. Since then they have tended to decrease in both countries. Three aspects are important in this regard: the total number of unemployed youth, the inflow pattern of young peo...

This briefing presents new evidence regarding young people’s career readiness during the COVID-19 pandemic, examining their career expectations and how well their education has prepared them for navigating the transition from education to employment.

We distinguish between “task-warranted” and “task-unwarranted” graduate jobs. For both types, a degree is required but task-warranted graduate jobs involve carrying out typical graduate-level tasks. We operationalize the distinction, using representative surveys of resident Singapore workers. We find that the ongoing fast expansion of higher attain...

Singapore has been of long-standing interest worldwide for those interested in skills issues. This small city state has broadly succeeded over decades in maintaining a balance between the skills demanded in the economy at successive stages in its development and the skills being supplied through schools, polytechnics and workplace training, supplem...

This briefing presents new evidence surrounding young people’s employment, learning, well-being, and future expectations during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how these are connected. It does so through the reports of a representative sample of young people themselves at the beginning of February 2021 in the midst of a strict lockdown throughout the UK...

The authors use data from the British Skills and Employment Surveys to document and to try to account for sustained work intensification between 2001 and 2017. They estimate the determinants of work intensity, first using four waves of the pooled cross-section data, then using a constructed pseudo-panel of occupation–industry cells. The latter appr...

For those who grew up in Britain in the latter half of the twentieth century, there is known to be a strong association between social class or family income and attending a private school. However, increasing private school fees and promotion of school choice in the state sector have potential implications for the predictors of participation in pr...

Innovation is traditionally viewed as an activity which involves a small band of highly skilled workers. By examining the results of a British survey of employees, this article breaks with this approach. It makes two distinctive contributions. First, it provides new insights into the extent to which employees of all kinds come up with ideas about i...

This article presents new British evidence that suggests that cutting working hours at short notice is twice as prevalent as zero‐hours contracts and triple the number of employees are very anxious about unexpected changes to their hours of work. The pay of these employees tends to be lower, work intensity higher, line management support weaker and...

Changing Higher Education for a Changing World draws on the outcomes of the cutting-edge research programmes of the UK-based Centre for Global Higher Education, the world’s largest social science research centre focused on higher education and its future. In countries with incomes at European levels, the majority of all families now have connection...

With approximately three times the resources per pupil in private compared with state schools, Britain’s private sector presents an interesting case of what could be expected from schools that are extremely well resourced. This paper studies the links between private schooling and educational performance in upper secondary school, as measured throu...

Policy discourse surrounding Britain’s unusually well-resourced private schools surrounds their charitable status and their relationship with low social mobility, but informative evidence is scarce. We present estimates of the extent to which private and external benefits at age 25 are associated with attendance at private school in England in the...

The government has accepted the Taylor Review's recommendation that it should report annually on job quality in the UK. This article argues that three principles need to be followed in choosing the right measures and shows how these principles have been used to create a short job quality quiz (www.howgoodismyjob.com).

Applying work by Green and Henseke (in IZA J Labor Policy 5(1):14, 2016a), this study examines changes in the German graduate labour market in the twenty-first century. To do so, it deploys a new statistically derived indicator of graduate jobs, based on job skill requirements obtained from worker-reported task data in the German Employment Surveys...

Using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, this study presents new evidence on the effects of job quality on the occurrence of severe acute conditions, the level of cardiovascular risk factors, musculoskeletal disorders, mental health, functional disabilities and self-assessed health among workers aged 50+. By combining...

This article critically assesses the assumption that more and more work is being detached from place and that this is a ‘win-win’ for both employers and employees. Based on an analysis of official labour market data, it finds that only one-third of the increase in remote working can be explained by compositional factors such as movement to the know...

We address the question of how the supply and demand for graduates is changing in western, northern and southern Europe in the 21st century. We find that the proportion of the population with tertiary qualifications is increasing everywhere. But only in the Anglo and Nordic countries has the share of high-skill employment grown fast. The prevalence...

Utilizing work task data drawn from the OECD's Survey of Adult Skills of 2011-2012 and 2014-2015, we derive a new skills-based indicator of graduate jobs, termed ISCO(HE)2008, for 31 countries. The indicator generates a plausible distribution of graduate occupations and explains graduates' wages and job satisfaction better than hitherto existing in...

The article examines the implications of direct participation for employees' organisational commitment, job satisfaction and affective psychological well-being. It focuses on both task discretion and organisational participation. Applying fixed effect models to nationally representative longitudinal data, the study provides a more rigorous assessme...

2016 The Authors. British Educational Research Journal published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Educational Research Association. Though a relative small part of the school sector, private schools have an important role in British society, and there are policy concerns about their negative effect on social mobility. Other studies sho...

In this article we explore the implications for young people’s life opportunities of rising levels of qualifications in England, drawing on a range of sources, including the OECD’s 2014 Survey and Adult Skills (SAS) and the UK Labour Force Survey. We find that increasing rates of participation in post 16 education and training in England has led to...

Through their social exclusivity, private schools are held to have contributed negatively to social mobility among older generations educated in the 20th century. But with huge fee rises, increased income inequality, increased wealth-income ratios, fluctuating public and private means-tested support for fees, and a greater emphasis in public policy...

To assess potential public concerns, this paper examines theory and evidence surrounding graduate educational underemployment (overeducation) in this era of mass higher education. Using a new, validated, index of graduate jobs, we find that the prevalence of graduate underemployment across 21 countries is correlated with the aggregate supply–demand...

Though a relative small part of the school sector, private schools have an important role in British society, and there are policy concerns about their negative effect on social mobility. Other studies show that individuals who have attended a private school go on to have higher levels of educational achievement, are more likely to secure a high-st...

This paper examines differentiation in the recent evolving graduate labour market in Britain. Using a novel statistically derived indicator of graduate jobs, based on job skill requirements in three-digit occupations obtained from the British Skills and Employment Survey series, we analyse trends in the labour market between 1997/2001 and 2006/2012...

Employers, workers and governments all have a stake in improving intrinsic job quality since it can help to raise worker well-being and lower the social costs of ill-health. This article provides a unique insight into factors triggering changes to two key aspects of intrinsic job quality – the skills used and developed at work, and the pressures un...

This paper overviews key findings concerning the evolution of job skill requirements in Britain, and their relationship to technology and work organisation, based on surveys dating from 1986. The use of skills has been rising, as indicated by several indicators covering multiple domains. Technological change is robustly implicated in these rises, b...

A recurring issue for education policy-makers is the labour market effect of the long-term global mass expansion of higher education, particularly on what is a “graduate job”. The traditional assumption is that graduate jobs are virtually coterminous with professional and managerial occupations. A new indicator of graduate jobs, termed ISCO(HE)2008...