This book is partly based on my inaugural lecture at Durham University in 2015, and for the most part, on my most recent research, especially the two Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) studies listed below. It therefore covers 20 years of ongoing policyrelated research, around L20 million of charitable and research council funding, published in around 1,000 papers, chapters, books, other articles and invited plenary presentations. I have worked and published on pre-school to the third age, using ideas and techniques from economics, geography, family and childhood, sociology, psychology and philosophy. I have given advice to policy-makers of all persuasions, advice that has been both acted on and ignored in equal measure.

Despite this range, many people see me as that person who writes about methods, for example, or who is solely concerned with widening participation, or the supply of scientists, or who focuses on school intakes, or who criticises school effectiveness work, and so on. In fact, I do all of these and more, and felt that it was time to put all of this material together with the newest findings into one book, although there is not enough space to cover my work on randomised control trials (RCTs) of attainment in maths and English, in crime prevention or health promotion, most of my work on the use of technology in education, or on research methods.

Each substantive chapter of this book represents part of a theme or strand of my research, covering education from early life to later adulthood. The book looks at recent, current and likely future policies in the UK in particular (it has to focus on somewhere, because actual laws are context-specific), with reference to related developments internationally. The research is both large-scale and in-depth, based on evidence from the home countries of the UK, and on work in all EU28 countries, as well as the US, Pakistan and Japan. It deals with worldwide themes such as school choice and school improvement. Underlying each theme is a series of systematic reviews funded by the Department for Education (DfE), Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Nuffield, European Union (EU), Brookings Institute and ESRC, considering over 100,000 research reports in aggregate. The research includes consideration of population data for all students since 1976, large-scale international surveys, focus groups with children and thousands of household interviews with individual learners.