The Impact of State-Provided Education: Evidence from the 1870 Education Act

Benjamin Milner

The Economic Journal, 2025, vol. 135, issue 671, 2302-2337

Abstract: How does access to public education affect occupational outcomes and intergenerational mobility? The UK’s 1870 Education Act, which introduced a public education system in England and Wales, provides a unique historical context in which to explore these questions. Using newly digitised historical records, I find that the Act resulted in significant improvements in school supply and attendance, which in turn improved adult outcomes. In particular, analysis using a regression kink design suggests that public school access improved a child’s chance of obtaining an occupation requiring literacy in adulthood by as much as 17 percentage points. I use a triple difference specification to show that the effect extended to children further removed from the kink, and that the quality of occupational outcomes increased with each additional year of schooling. To study the reform’s effect on intergenerational mobility, I link father-son pairs across time, matching nearly 4 million individuals using full-count historical censuses. I find that, by targeting the lower classes, public school introduction significantly improved intergenerational mobility across numerous measures, with the adult outcome gap between high- and low-class children decreasing by over 10% in some cases.

Date: 2025
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