Search

Domestic and family violence (DFV) is a pervasive social problem that social workers often encounter in practice. Responses to DFV require specialist and non-specialist services. Research suggests that first contact social workers can experience a lack of confidence, both in engaging with men who use violence and working with women and children who disclose experiencing violence. This article reports on the findings of an Australian survey (N = 100) that sought to identify the knowledge and practice skills that social workers draw on when they are the first responders to DFV. The survey invited qualified social worker participants from all sectors across Australia through the national online bulletins of the Australian Association of Social Workers (AASW) and Child Family Community Australia (CFCA). Whilst 28% of the respondents demonstrated working in specialist DFV and child protection sectors, 72% worked in other sectors. The research found that most participants recognised signs of DFV, but responses were mainly focused on referring women victims to practical or accommodation support, and children to psychological support. Responding to perpetrators was rarely mentioned. Equipping non-specialist DFV practitioners with knowledge and skills to respond safely can create an opportunity for engagement, earlier intervention, and increased interagency collaboration with specialist services. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Concern that children are not engaging in enough physical activity (PA) to bring about health benefits is a crisis globally. This paper aims to examine primary school-based PA initiatives from with...

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated networking within and across schools in an unprecedented way. It has demanded new forms of leadership and leadership practices that are network based and techn...

Many accounts of Anglo-American relations during the early 1970s stress the tensions with Washington that marked the premiership of Edward Heath, as Britain moved to become a member of the European Economic Community, with particular attention given to the Year of Europe dispute during 1973. Over the issue of the American war in Vietnam, however, Heath’s Conservative Government stood out from other West European states in offering a grateful Nixon administration wholehearted support, even in the face of domestic political criticism, when American air power was used during 1972 with an intensity and scope not seen before. Although prepared to offer firm diplomatic backing for American actions, British officials were still keen to avoid any direct involvement, repudiating the kind of role they had played in the settlement of the French Indochina War in 1954. By early 1973 the Nixon administration, influenced by Heath’s recent public support over Vietnam, looked upon the British Government as a firm ally, a context which helps in understanding the disappointment experienced over the subsequent Year of Europe dispute.

This article outlines the findings from a contemporary review of the evidence base on system leaders and system leadership. This article provides analysis, commentary, and insights about system lea...

Despite much anticipation of a far better new year, 2021 has started with that deja vu feeling. In many countries, teachers welcomed pupils in early January but as the COVID 19 virus regained its g...

Over the last four years, initial teacher education in Wales has been fundamentally reformed. The stimulus for those reforms were concerns about the quality of current provision, but more important...

A great deal 1 has been written, espoused, and claimed in the name of professional enquiry. Like motherhood and apple pie, it is generally assumed to be a good thing. Yet a quick look at the intern...

To examine the usefulness of the Edinburgh Cognitive and Behavioral Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) Screen (ECAS) as a cognitive screening tool for the detection of behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). A secondary aim was to determine whether people with FTD combined with ALS (ALS-FTD) exhibit a similar ECAS profile to that of people with bvFTD alone. Methods: Patients with ALS-FTD and bvFTD and healthy controls were recruited. Participants were administered the ECAS, which comprises tests of language, verbal fluency, executive functions, memory, and visual-spatial functions. They also carried out analogous, full-length cognitive tests that examine naming, spelling, sentence completion, and social cognition skills. Results: The study cohort comprised 20 ALS-FTD patients, 23 with bvFTD, and 30 controls. Highly significant group differences were elicited for all cognitive domains, reflecting poorer performance in patients compared to controls. No significant differences in overall test scores were found between ALS-FTD and bvFTD patients, although ALS-FTD patients showed a higher frequency of impairment on verbal fluency. Correlative analyses revealed inter-relationships in patients (but not controls) between scores in different domains, most marked in bvFTD. There were strong correlations between performance on ECAS subtests and analogous cognitive tasks. Conclusion: The ECAS is a sensitive and valuable tool for the assessment of FTD. Executive, language and behavioral breakdown may, however, compromise performance in other cognitive domains, reducing the specificity of the ‘frontotemporal’ cognitive profile. Subtle differences observed between ALS-FTD and bvFTD raise questions regarding the precise relationship between bvFTD with and without ALS.

This article draws upon the educational leadership knowledge base to explore central concepts, questions, and issues of relevance to the contemporary policy context in Wales. The article is not a r...

The idea of the teacher as a leader is far from new. There is a wealth of evidence underlying the pivotal importance of leadership at the classroom level, illuminating how teachers actively contrib...

Leadership is an essential contributor to effective professional networking within education. In the pursuit of school and system improvement, leaders at all levels are being challenged to collabor...

The Mentelle Basin, located off the southwestern continental Australian margin, is an under-explored deep-water basin that developed during the breakup of eastern Gondwana in the Middle Jur...

The purpose of this article is to explore the development of the knowledge base on middle leadership in schools. Since the seminal reviews conducted by Bennett a contemporary scan only of the scholarly literature on middle leaders/leadership in schools has not been undertaken. Consequently, this article looks at outputs relating to this topic by examining research papers indexed in the Web of Science and in SCOPUS between 2003 and 2017. The prime purpose of this review is to offer some reflections on the development of the empirical base on middle leadership in schools since 2003 and to highlight some of the implications for future research. The article concludes that middle leadership in schools remains an ongoing focus of research inquiry in a growing number of countries but suggests that the knowledge base would benefit from more sophisticated empirical studies and greater theoretical analysis.

Earlier this year, COVID19 slammed the door firmly shut on all aspects of everyday life. It interrupted international travel, it devastated economic growth, and it disrupted schooling globally. In ...

Informal best fit lines frequently appear in school curricula. Previous research collectively illustrates that the adjective informal does not translate to cognitive simplicity. Using existing literature, we create a hypothetical framework of cognitive processes associated with studying informal best fit lines. We refine the framework using data from a cycle of design-based research about building students’ understanding of covariation. The refined framework includes student thinking processes for signifying observations as data, signifying data with scatterplots, perceiving aggregates in scatterplots, perceiving trends in aggregates, signifying trends with straight lines, and using straight lines as estimation tools. We explain how students’ perceptions of aggregates can proceed from the inside-out as well as from the outside-in. We also demonstrate how the amounts of variation encountered at different points in time and the extent to which students perceive straight lines to be abbreviations of ...

The educational leadership field has accumulated findings, from a wide range of international, empirically-based studies, highlighting the positive impact that leadership has on organisational lear...

This article provides a review of the contemporary instructional leadership research base in Malaysia. The core aim of this review is to assess the recent knowledge base on instructional leadership in Malaysia and to evaluate its current contribution to the existing international literature. The article explores a range of published material that has focused explicitly on instructional leadership and instructional leadership practices in Malaysia, including that written in Bahasa Malaysia. The article outlines the findings from the review and highlights certain strengths and limitations. The article concludes by identifying areas for further enquiry and investigation.

By foregrounding positive and productive capacities of fat, we explore experiences of expanding, maintaining, or diminishing body sizes to accommodate the different meanings and enactments of fat. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in a South Australian community that has experienced significant socioeconomic disadvantage, we detail how the "problem" of fat in public health discourse is countered in the lived experience of people targeted for obesity intervention. In so doing, we attend to the multiple meanings and practices of fat that differ to the focus within public health interventions on the negative health consequences of overweight and obesity.

This article considers responses to the Mass Observation Project’s Gulf Crisis sub-directive. It argues firstly that observers’ responses show how a potential war within Iraq in 1990/1991 was frame...

Equity has finally caught up with excellence in the minds and priorities of policy-makers around the world. Manifestos, papers and directives are increasingly being littered, like confetti, with th...

The challenges of securing educational change and transformation, at scale, remain considerable. While sustained progress has been made in some education systems (Fullan, 2009; Hargreaves & Shirley...

The contemporary field of educational leadership and management is replete with accounts of transformational leadership, instructional leadership, distributed leadership, and turnaround leadership ...

The centrality of teachers’ professional learning in securing better outcomes for students is widely acknowledged and accepted. There is evidence about the teacher practices that have the largest e...

The centrality of education in the pursuit of better economic and social prosperity is now well established. The dominance of human capital theory, which provides a strong argument for better education as a key factor in fuelling economic growth, has encouraged policy makers, in various countries, to focus on education reform as a key priority and to borrow policy solutions from other countries. This special edition explores one policy solution in depth. It investigates the preparation and training of school leaders in very different countries and takes a comparative perspective. This article argues that the limitations of standardized strategies are clearly visible when taking a comparative view and, most importantly, that context matters significantly in shaping, defining and explaining differential educational performance.

The thesis that meaning is normative has come under much scrutiny of late. However, there are aspects of the view that have received comparatively little critical attention which centre on meaning’s capacity to guide and justify linguistic action. Call such a view ‘justification normativity’ (JN). I outline Zalabardo’s (1997) account of JN and his corresponding argument against reductive-naturalistic meaning-factualism and argue that the argument presents a genuine challenge to account for the guiding role of meaning in linguistic action. I then present a proposal regarding how this challenge may be met. This proposal is then compared to recent work by Ginsborg (2011; 2012), who has outlined an alternative view of the normativity of meaning that explicitly rejects the idea that meanings guide and justify linguistic use. I outline how Ginsborg utilises this notion of normativity in order to provide a positive account of what it is to mean something by an expression which is intended to serve as a r...

Particles (representing customers, or species) arrive to a general space according to a Poisson process and are removed randomly upon future arrivals based on randomly assigned attributes. These systems are similar to the Matern II generalizations in Teichmann et al. [12], but evolve temporally as Markov processes on spaces of marked point processes. We analyze their limiting behavior by viewing them as transformations of marked point processes and obtain expressions for their mean measure and Laplace functional. Such models are popular with applications to include spatial service systems, species competitions, and wireless networks.

Over its 30-year history, the field of school effectiveness and improvement has faced challenge, criticism, and controversy. However, the quality of the empirical base has ensured that most trials ...

Twenty years ago Mark Burke's pioneering research into homosexuality and policing evidenced widespread prejudice and hostility toward lesbian, gay and bisexual police officers in nine forces across England and Wales. These serving officers were felt to represent the most serious kind of contamination and threat to the integrity of the British Police Service by their heterosexual colleagues. Twenty years on this research, which represents one of the largest ever surveys of LGB police officers in England and Wales (N=836), evidences that just under one-fifth reported experiencing discrimination, with those in small and large forces, those in senior ranks and non-uniformed positions, and those who identify as gay male and Black, Minority Ethnic experiencing the highest levels of victimisation in training, deployment and promotion. Like Brown and Woolfenden, the authors conclude that a central aim of the diversity reform agenda must be a renegotiation of the psychological contract between staff and the organisation. A relational setup must be sought where mutual expectations of exchange are established and efforts are made to create a rich working environment that draws upon and invests in the subjective and intersubjective identity characteristics of LGB police officers.

This article utilizes the panel element of the UK Labour Force Survey (LFS) to identify for individual regions total inflows and outflows and hazards for those individuals paid at or below the National Minimum Wage (NMW). In particular, it examines the extent and direction of the correlation between low-pay inflows and outflows and the economic cycle. Further, it examines the impact of regional variations in the bite of the NMW on regional flows into and out of the NMW.

This article explores the implications of the knowledge society for education and education systems. It focuses on how education systems in Asia are contributing to the development and sustainability of the knowledge society through creating powerful professional learning communities. The article explores how professional collaboration, at scale, is being used to generate social capital in order to promote educational transformation and improvement. The article draws upon a range of theoretical perspectives to examine how professional learning communities are contributing to educational improvement and the construction of new knowledge. The article concludes by arguing that disciplined, collective and inter-dependent learning is critical for the knowledge society to be sustained.

The Year of Europe initiative, publicly launched by President Richard M. Nixon's Assistant for National Security Affairs, Henry Kissinger, with a speech delivered to an annual Associated Press gath...

Those leading schools and school systems face unprecedented and unpredictable challenges in the next few years. The political, social and economic shifts that are occurring globally, and nationally...

The Epipalaeolithic Foragers in Azraq Project is a multi-disciplinary research programme exploring landscape change and prehistoric occupation in the Azraq Basin, Eastern Jordan. Excavations at several Epipalaeolithic sites and geomorphological survey and investigations throughout the basin over the last four years provide a rich record of the interplay between climate, human-induced landscape change, and past settlement and land-use. Here we explore some of these findings with specific attention to changing issues of water availability and sustainable land-use activities in the area.

This article examines the self-employment decision for disabled and nondisabled workers in the UK. Using Labour Force Survey (LFS) data, it is found that self-employment may provide an important means by which those with work-limiting disabilities can accommodate their impairment.

The circadian clock modulates the expression of approximately one-third of Arabidopsis genes and as such plays a central role in the regulation of plant metabolism and responses to the environment. We have recently identified a novel component of the Arabidopsis circadian clock, JMJD5, based on its coexpression with TOC1, an evening-phased component of the molecular oscillator. We now examine the genetic interaction between TOC1 and JMJD5 in greater detail and demonstrate that toc1 is not epistatic to jmjd5, suggesting that these two proteins act in closely linked but parallel genetic pathways. The human homolog of JMJD5, KDM8, has been shown to have histone demethylation activity and is able to partially rescue the plant jmjd5 circadian phenotype. The potential role of JMJD5 as a histone demethylase within the circadian clock is discussed.

The process by which British ministers and officials took the gradual series of steps that eventually led to the momentous decisions of 1967–68 to withdraw UK forces altogether from Southeast Asia ...

This article investigates the little-known plans formulated by Harold Wilson's Labour government to deploy Polaris submarines in the Indo-Pacific region. The scheme was first proposed in 1965 as a response to several problems faced by British policy-makers, including China's acquisition of a nuclear capability, Britain's wish to maintain a meaningful position ‘East of Suez’ at reduced cost, and German pressure for equal treatment within NATO on nuclear matters. Despite extensive high-level discussion, the plans were finally abandoned in mid-1968, as Labour moved more decisively to forsake the world role.

The aim of this study was to assess the effect of caffeine ingestion on 8 km run performance using an ecologically valid test protocol. A randomized double-blind crossover study was conducted involving eight male distance runners. The participants ran an 8 km race 1 h after ingesting a placebo capsule, a caffeine capsule (3 mg x kg(-1) body mass) or no supplement. Heart rate was recorded at 5 s intervals throughout the race. Blood lactate concentration and ratings of perceived exertion were recorded after exercise. A repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) identified a significant treatment effect for 8 km performance time (P0.05); caffeine resulted in a mean improvement of 23.8 s (95% confidence interval [CI] = 13.1 to 34.5 s) in 8 km performance time (1.2% improvement, 95% CI = 0.7 to 1.8%). In addition, a two-way (time x condition) repeated-measures ANOVA identified a significantly higher blood lactate concentration 3 min after exercise during the caffeine trial (P0.05). We conclude that ingestion of 3 mg . kg(-1) body mass of caffeine can improve absolute 8 km run performance in an ecologically valid race setting.

The three fixed effects estimators of a treatment,difference are compared under conditions of random enrollment in a multicenter clinical trial. These comparisons are performed by assuming five different enrollment schemes. The estimators are compared via simulation using their expected mean squared errors. Unlike previous discussions of these three estimators, we take explicit account of the effect of centers that fail to enroll patients to one or both treatment arms. Within each center, we assume enrollment follows a Poisson process and consider the two situations in which the mean rate of this process is the same in every center and in which the mean rates are sampled from a gamma distribution. The effect of patient dropout is studied as well as the effect of increasing the number of centers. Simulations show that for many sound scenarios, the simpler estimator corresponding to the simplest model works better, even for the cases when data are generated by more complex models.

This article looks at the emergence of nuclear planning assumptions within the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) during the mid-1950s. It does so by examining US strategic concepts for the defence of the treaty area, and the ways these produced major problems for the Australian Government as it switched the emphasis in its defence policy toward a permanent commitment of forces to the South East Asian mainland. At the same time, Britain was struggling to reconcile its membership of SEATO with the need to effect economies in defence spending that would not alarm their Australian Commonwealth partners. As dissatisfaction within SEATO grew, both the US and Britain moved toward a more overt acceptance of nuclear planning assumptions that would reassure their allies without producing a greater call on their resources.

There is growing emphasis in public policy on involving young people in the development of health promotion campaigns and information resources on substance misuse. To date there has been little literature that explores the level and nature young people's involvement in such initiatives. This paper reports on an evaluation of a substance misuse communications campaign that sought to involve young people in the project process and the production of locally focused media products.The findings from this study indicate potential benefits in terms of the production of credible and locally appropriate messages on substance misuse. It also found that there were wider benefits associated with the promotion of young people's citizenship and participation in local service delivery. Young people's involvement needs to be understood as part of a process across a range of different types of activities. Participation by young people vulnerable to substance misuse may contribute to agendas on inclusion and targeted welf...

Taking as its central focus the contents of the September 1957 Anglo-American Working Group Report on Syria, this article examines the background to the covert action plans that were drawn up to topple the incumbent regime in Damascus. By drawing on the contents of the report, it shows how US and British officials hoped to stir up unrest within Syria and instigate border incidents that would provide a pretext for armed intervention by the pro-Western governments of Iraq and Jordan (with possible Turkish support). The article also brings to light the fact that the 'elimination' of named Syrian figures was included as a recommendation in the report. The article concludes by explaining why the report's so-called 'Preferred Plan' was never implemented and reflects on the 'special political action' culture that still prevailed in SIS during the latter 1950s.

The publication of the final volume in the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series covering John F. Kennedy's tenure of the White House provides us with an opportunity to sample some o...

The Health Education Authority (Biddle et al., 1998) has published primary and secondary guidelines for physical activity in young people. The primary guideline recommends an hour of physical activ...