Globalisation, together with skill-biased technical change, is changing the composition of jobs in advanced economies and raising the level of skills required to do them. This has increased the importance of educating a large proportion of the population to much higher standards than in the past. The government has responded to this challenge by raising education spending and expanding the capacity of the education system in key areas such as pre-primary education and increased participation in education beyond the age of 16. The United Kingdom has also pioneered the use of school benchmarking techniques and the use of targets to raise school quality. However, targets may also have biased some measures of education performance. Socio-economic background plays an important role in explaining education performance, and the government has addressed this by the use of funding formulas which direct additional resources to areas with a higher proportion of pupils from deprived backgrounds. There has been some improvement in the most disadvantaged schools but pupils in the middle and lower half of the distribution continue to perform particularly poorly relative to students in countries with the best performing education systems. Overall, the socio-economic gaps remain large. One explanation may be that local authorities and schools are not distributing deprivation funds as intended by the central government, resulting in outcomes which can be seen as inequitable. Stronger measures may be required to correct this imbalance. This chapter proposes a number of avenues for encouraging higher educational attainment, without significant further increases in expenditure.