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Attempts to change national education systems are recognized internationally as extremely challenging. This is particularly true when the success of a potential innovation requires support from wider society. Reform of high stakes qualifications and assessment is such a case; where success depends not only on the commitment of learners and teachers but also on the active support of wider groups such as parents, policy makers, employers, universities, and colleges. This article presents a case study of a policy process, the Independent Review of Qualifications and Assessment in Scotland, commissioned by Scottish Government. The methodology attempted to co-construct policy with all those whose support would be crucial to the successful enactment of policy proposals. First establishing the context for change, the article introduces the theoretical model that underpinned the policy process and how that influenced the development to the point when the report, ‘It’s Our Future’, was submitted to the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills in Scotland. The Review advocates significant reform to qualifications and assessment in Scotland, moving from qualifications that are principally subject-based to “The Scottish Diploma of Achievement”, an inclusive, baccalaureate-style graduation diploma. The article concludes by reflecting on challenges in reform of national high-stakes qualifications and assessment and tensions inherent in deeply collaborative approaches to national policy development.

The current influenza vaccine provides narrow protection against the strains included in the vaccine, and needs to be reformulated every few years in response to the constantly evolving new strains. Novel approaches are directed towards developing vaccines that provide broader protection by targeting B and T cell epitopes that are conserved between different strains of the virus. In this paper, we focus on developing mathematical models to explore the CD8 T cell responses to influenza, how they can be boosted, and the conditions under which they contribute to protection. Our models suggest that the interplay between spatial heterogeneity (with the virus infecting the respiratory tract and the immune response being generated in the secondary lymphoid organs) and T cell differentiation (with proliferation occurring in the lymphoid organs giving rise to a subpopulation of resident T cells in the respiratory tract) is the key to understanding the dynamics of protection afforded by the CD8 T cell response to influenza. Our results suggest that the time lag for the generation of resident T cells in the respiratory tract and their rate of decay following infection are the key factors that limit the efficacy of CD8 T cell responses. The models predict that an increase in the level of central memory T cells leads to a gradual decrease in the viral load, and, in contrast, there is a sharper protection threshold for the relationship between the size of the population of resident T cells and protection. The models also suggest that repeated natural influenza infections cause the number of central memory CD8 T cells and the peak number of resident memory CD8 T cells to reach their plateaus, and while the former is maintained the latter decays with time since the most recent infection.