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Both challenges and opportunities are inherent with a growth in Chinese international students in UK Higher Education. However, teachers from the West may not understand the differences in Chinese educational practices, which can lead to negative stereotyping of these students as passive and problematic. This paper rejects this deficit perspective, focusing on the views of Chinese students as to what might need to change about the UK teaching and campus environment to improve their learning experience. Two focus groups were held with Chinese social science Masters' students in a UK university. Some of their key requests included to reduce class sizes; to provide more guidance around study skills; to offer more timely and accessible information; to provide a more flexible range of services and learning support; and to create more social time with staff and other students. The discussions particularly brought out the importance of 'relational pedagogy'. These requirements will need more staff time and institutional flexibility which will necessitate adequate funding. The authors conclude that, despite Chinese students' significant contribution to the local economy and to University finances, there does not seem to be a commensurate investment in protecting their wellbeing and ensuring they receive a quality education. We consider it is important to listen to and act on the students' suggestions outlined here if UK Higher Education is to remain the destination of choice for many Chinese and other international students.

Social science research on polio has been centred in the global south, where countries that remain endemic or vulnerable to outbreaks are located. However, closely-related strains of poliovirus were detected in the sewage systems of several New York State counties and London boroughs in 2022. These detections constituted the first encounters with polio in the United States and United Kingdom for a generation – for both public health agencies and publics alike. This paper takes the transnational spread of poliovirus in 2022 as an opportunity to critique how public health memories of twentieth-century polio epidemics were mobilised to encourage vaccine uptake among groups considered vulnerable to transmission, notably Orthodox Jewish families. The study integrates data collected in London and New York as part of academic engagement with health protection responses to the spread of polio. Methods in both settings involved ethnographic research, and a total of 59 in-depth semi-structured interviews with public health professionals, healthcare providers, and Orthodox Jewish community partners and residents. Analysis of results demonstrate that narratives of epidemiological progress were deployed in public health responses in London and New York, often through references to sugar cubes, iron lungs, and timelines that narrate the impact of routine childhood immunisations. While memories of polio were deployed in both settings to provoke an urgency to vaccinate, vulnerable publics instead considered the more recent legacy of the COVID-19 pandemic when deciding whether to trust recommendations and responses. Critical attention to memory places analysis on the divergences between institutional (public health agencies) and peopled (publics) responses to disease events. Responses to re-emerging infectious disease outbreaks engender a temporal dissonance when historical narratives are evoked in ways that contrast with the contemporary dilemmas of people and parents. • Memories of past polio outbreaks were deployed to encourage vaccination in 2022. • Vulnerable publics were instead concerned with the legacy of Covid-19 mis/management. • Memory provokes diverging concerns for public health agencies and communities. • Learning from community experiences of outbreaks may inform engagement strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Problems in intrapartum electronic fetal monitoring with cardiotocography (CTG) remain a major area of preventable harm. Poor understanding of the range of influences on safety may have hindered improvement. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective, we sought to characterise the everyday practice of CTG monitoring and the work systems within which it takes place, with the goal of identifying potential sources of risk. Methods Human factors/ergonomics (HF/E) experts and social scientists conducted 325 hours of observations and 23 interviews in three maternity units in the UK, focusing on how CTG tasks were undertaken, the influences on this work and the cultural and organisational features of work settings. HF/E analysis was based on the Systems Engineering Initiative for Patient Safety 2.0 model. Social science analysis was based on the constant comparative method. Results CTG monitoring can be understood as a complex sociotechnical activity, with tasks, people, tools and technology, and organisational and external factors all combining to affect safety. Fetal heart rate patterns need to be recorded and interpreted correctly. Systems are also required for seeking the opinions of others, determining whether the situation warrants concern, escalating concerns and mobilising response. These processes may be inadequately designed or function suboptimally, and may be further complicated by staffing issues, equipment and ergonomics issues, and competing and frequently changing clinical guidelines. Practice may also be affected by variable standards and workflows, variations in clinical competence, teamwork and situation awareness, and the ability to communicate concerns freely. Conclusions CTG monitoring is an inherently collective and sociotechnical practice. Improving it will require accounting for complex system interdependencies, rather than focusing solely on discrete factors such as individual technical proficiency in interpreting traces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how the fragmentation of work time influences subjective time pressure, and how this relationship varies across gender and parenthood status. This is an important question that has been neglected by previous studies. Using the latest UK time-use data (N = 620) from 2020 to 2021 and Ordinary Least Squares regressions, the study finds that work time fragmentation generally predicts more subjective time pressure. Specifically, work time fragmentation is found to increase subjective time pressure more among women without children than mothers. However, this effect is inverted among men, as the fragmentation of work time predicts more subjective time pressure among fathers but not among men without children. These findings provide a nuanced understanding of the adverse consequences of 'role switching' and 'work schedule instability' and their interaction with gender and parenthood. Accordingly, future research should consider work time fragmentation as a vital indicator of job and life quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article problematises whether organisational commitments impact the representation of ethnic minorities in the university workforce. In doing so, it considers the institutional context and the broader restructuring of universities' personnel. The analysis is based on a longitudinal dataset of 120 universities, including university-level indicators of organisational commitments, institutional characteristics and ethnic minority staff numbers. The findings reveal that while on average, universities that are members of the Race Equality Charter exhibit higher shares of minority ethnic staff in higher-level contracts compared with those universities that are not members, joining the charter does not make a university more inclusive. Importantly, the share of minority ethnic staff is substantially lower in elite universities compared with all other universities, which indicates tensions between inclusion and university reputation. The results are discussed in terms of their relevance to sociological institutionalist and organisational theories, and to higher education policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]