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This paper explores the influences of design on the perceptions and actions of students and teachers at four UK secondary schools. Typical post occupancy evaluations focus on environmental issues such as acoustics, lighting and temperature, using predominantly quantitative methods that often fail to explore how different environmental and social factors interact dynamically with users through time. There is also a lack of attention to the ways in which the processes of occupation may shape the experience of such spaces. This paper reports on one area of a wider study that involved case study profiling to document a range of key issues experienced by teachers and students at each of these schools, thus extending previous evidence on the ways in which habitation alters or rejects original design. These findings contribute to the development of a more holistic understanding of the ways in which design may contribute to processes of pedagogic transformation.

This article draws on findings from the first cross-national study of school exclusions in the four jurisdictions of the UK. It sketches factors associated with the past research with reductions in exclusions. It then reports interview data gathered in England in 2018 from five specialist officers working in two Local Authorities and a senior officer working for a national voluntary organisation. The officers describe good practice but also national, local and school level developments contributing to a deteriorating situation. These developments include unhelpful government guidance and regulations; school accountability frameworks affecting curriculum and leading to the neglect of Special Educational Needs; loss of Local Authority powers and funding resulting in reductions in support services. Data gathered for this study in other UK jurisdictions suggests that in Scotland and Northern Ireland, and to a lesser extent in Wales, a practice that avoids school exclusions has persisted more than in England.

Recent policy initiatives in the UK have heightened the degree to which wellbeing can be considered a political construct: The acceptance of different policy options for wellbeing depends on the extent to which those options are responsive to popular wellbeing concerns. Drawing on the views of over 400 people gathered through a variety of methods and across the UK, we outline different stakeholder views of what wellbeing is and the priorities that stakeholders believe should be addressed to improve wellbeing. We draw out the implications for reframing policy debates around wellbeing, the practice of career guidance, academic debates around identified wellbeing priorities, and the best means of developing a policy and a practice-oriented and stakeholder-responsive approach to researching wellbeing.

Professionals working in a range of contexts are increasingly expected to engage in ongoing professional learning to maintain their skills and develop their practices. In this paper, I focus on professional learning in Higher Education and challenge the standardisation of professional learning that is becoming prevalent in a number of countries. I argue that professional learning must challenge accepted wisdom, and that this is possible while still adhering to the standards required for professional legitimacy. Developing praxis is suggested as a way of producing relevant and active professional learners while still addressing the professional standards required for quality assurance.

In this paper we present the findings of an investigation into the ways in which the discourses and practices of school design produce educational spaces which influence the discourses and practices of teaching and learning when the building is occupied. It expands notions of post occupancy evaluation (POE) research by exploring how the objects/motives of an educational vision which informed an initial school design, those of the final build, and those of the people who occupy that building interact in a way which influences experiences of the end users. Crucially we looked at the social interactions that arose within a building as it was used over time. The focus is on the changing relationships between design and practice through time.

The Equality Act 2010 will be implemented in full in 2011, and schools in the UK will have to provide special aids or services for children with disabilities where this provision is considered reasonable. This paper reports on staff perspectives on the use and usefulness of a parental questionnaire on disability from a sample of 49 schools (mainstream and special) located in 12 local authorities. Most schools found the process of administering the parent questionnaire undemanding; just under half of the sample indicated that they would take some action as a result of the data collected from the parental questionnaire (e.g., to inform plans for targeting or monitoring support for children, and to contact parents and follow-up issues they had mentioned); and about one-third of schools recorded unanticipated findings from the parental questionnaire, that is, the identification of children whose disabilities were not previously known to the school. Implications for schools are discussed.

The Equality Act 2010 further enshrines the duties on organisations set out in the Disability Discrimination Act 2005 to safeguard the rights of vulnerable children. However, disability is a complex phenomenon, which makes the collection of data, and the subsequent identification of children who might be classed as disabled, problematic. This article, written by Dr Jill Porter, Director of Studies for research students at the Department of Education, University of Bath, Professor Harry Daniels, Director of The Centre for Socio-cultural and Activity Theory Research, University of Bath, Dr Anthony Feiler, Reader in Education at the University of Bristol, and Dr Jan Georgeson, Research Fellow at the University of Plymouth, explores the findings of a nationwide survey with questions about multiple indicators of disability. The authors argue that methods for collecting disability data need to reflect the uncertainties surrounding the relationship between neurological conditions, their expression and the socially mediated nature of the impact of disability. In exploring the data the authors note that families have different expectations of their children and of family life and, as a result, the presence of an impairment has a differential impact; this argues, the authors suggest, for the need for parents' views to be privileged in the collection of disability data.

This article describes the development and national trial of a methodology for collecting disability data directly from parents, enabling schools and local authorities to meet their obligations under the "Disability Discrimination Act" (DDA; 2005) to promote equality of opportunity for all children. It illustrates the complexities around collecting this information and also highlights the dangers of assuming that special educational needs (SENs) equate to disability. The parental survey revealed children with medical and mental health needs, but no SENs, who were unknown to schools. It also revealed children with a recorded SEN whose parents did not consider that they had a disability in line with the DDA definition. It identified a number of children whose disability leads to absences from school, making them vulnerable to underachievement. These findings highlight the importance of having appropriate tools with which to collect these data and developing procedures to support their effective use. We also draw attention to the contextual nature of children's difficulties and the importance of retaining and respecting the place of subjective information. This is central to adopting a definition of disability that hinges on experience or impact. (Contains 6 tables.)

This article will consider the formative effect of boundaries between activities in directing and deflecting the attention of actors who are seeking to develop innovatory practice at these boundaries. Specific attention will be directed to practices of communication at these boundaries and also to the way in which these boundaries shape the practices of communication themselves. The concept of boundary strength will be developed and discussed. Its utility will be illustrated through reference to an investigation of the consequences of 3 very different examples of attempts at boundary crossing as Local Authorities in England attempt to develop integrated Children's Services from traditional collections of single service agencies (e.g., Education, Health, Social Services). The data will be drawn from a 4 year study of professional learning in and for interagency working directed by the authors and funded within the UK Economic and Social Research Council's Teaching and Learning Research Programme. (Contains 2 tables and 5 figures.)

The conservativeness of Georgian grammar schools used to be emphasised; however, as the case of geography teaching shows, this picture is complex with the growth of British trade and empire and the requirements of polite society and culture fostering a demand for "modern" subjects. Drawing on work in the history of education, Georgian society and culture and the history of geography, this paper argues that there was considerable change and development in geographical teaching in some grammar schools stimulated by changes in the nature and perceptions of "classical" education and increasing demands for "modern" subjects. It contends that Robert Mayhew's emphasis on the continuity of the early-modern humanist textual geographical tradition within grammar schools does not sufficiently account for changes in teaching practices that occurred in these institutions. It explores how and why geographical subjects were introduced in grammar schools, including the role of teachers such as John Clarke and John Holmes, institutional government and external bodies, and assesses the importance of opposition to this process. (Contains 71 footnotes.)

As more and more mature women return to vocational learning, the issues facing this group of learners are being acknowledged and attempts made to address these concerns. Many existing strategies, developed to address the needs of other groups of learners, are applied to mature women. These women are drawn into a formal learning environment in which their everyday lives and homeplace experiences are invisible or misunderstood. Based on research into the experiences of 12 mature-age women learners in Australia, this paper explores some issues for mature women returning to vocational education. I use the notion of women's "virtual handbags" to describe how, within the current framework of lifelong learning, women's homeplace experiences not only continue to be invisible, but can also be misconstrued to effectively create problems for women learners. (Contains 2 notes.)

This paper explores challenges arising from research (Daniels & Macnab, 2004), which sought to identify young people aged 14-16 years who were emotionally vulnerable and not in receipt of educational provision within two local UK authorities. Two particular challenges are identified in this research. The first was the challenge of defining the term used to identify the young people. Second, the research faced an almost insurmountable challenge in finding and obtaining data on a sample for which the outcomes of the research may pose a threat to those holding the data. Discussion focuses upon possible ways in which research can address these issues.

This study addresses the challenges faced by organisations and individual professionals, as new practices are developed and learned in multi-agency work settings. The practices examined in the paper involve working responsively across professional boundaries with at-risk young people. The paper draws on evidence from the Learning in and for Interagency Working Project, a four year ESRC Teaching and Learning Research Programme study of inter-professional learning which has examined the challenges involved in what Victor and Boynton (1998) term "co-configuration" work. In the context of professional collaboration for social inclusion, co-configuration involves on-going partnerships between professionals and service users to support young people's pathways out of social exclusion. This work demands a capacity to recognise and access expertise distributed across local systems and to negotiate the boundaries of responsible professional action with other professionals and with clients. The paper outlines the activity theory derived theoretical platform adopted by the project and describes the intervention methodology that is being developed, as we study the learning challenges identified by children's services practitioners in UK local authorities. (Contains 2 figures and 2 notes.)

In this article, we discuss the findings of a study about how patients who have been diagnosed with cancer learn about their disease. This is a form of learning that is not often thought of as learning, within the practices in which it takes place. It involves learners who neither possess specific forms of knowledge, nor are sure about what knowledge there is to possess. In medical practice, this form of learning is often referred to in terms such as "information seeking," and the implemented practices of providing information do not always seem to take account of current understandings of teaching and learning amongst educational and psychological researchers. Here we report the findings of a U.K. Department of Health project concerned with the acceptability and usefulness of the Internet as a cancer information source. Post-Vygotskian theory is deployed in the interpretation of the data and the development of a model of the learning. (Contains 1 table.)

This article is based on the text of the Gulliford Lecture given by Professor Harry Daniels at the University of Birmingham in October 2005. Professor Daniels takes, as his starting point, Ron Gulliford's assertion that teachers need to learn from their experience of trying to teach children who are "hard to teach". He goes on to look at the process of categorisation, which he identifies as a sociocultural and highly context-dependent process. Harry Daniels explores the pressures in favour of categorisation experienced by parents and professionals alike and notes some of the uses to which categorisations of learners are put. In concluding his article, Harry Daniels contrasts the current rhetoric about the personalisation of learning with the kinds of "simplistic protocols or magic answers" that are often assumed to follow from categorisation. He argues that glib responses like these run counter to the reflective and dialogic principles established by Ron Gulliford and colleagues two decades ago.

The use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) by adults with learning disabilities has been positively promoted over the past decade. More recently, policy statements and guidance from the UK government have underlined the importance of ICT for adults with learning disabilities specifically, as well as for the population in general, through the potential it offers for social inclusion. The aim of the present study was to provide a picture of how ICT is currently being used within one organisation providing specialist services for adults with learning disabilities and more specifically to provide a picture of its use in promoting community participation. Nine day and 14 residential services were visited as part of a qualitative study to answer three main questions: What kinds of computer programs are being used? What are they being used for? Does this differ between day and residential services? Computers and digital cameras were used for a wide range of activities and "mainstream" programs were used more widely than those developed for specific user groups. In day services, ICT was often embedded in wider projects and activities, whilst use in houses was based around leisure interests. In both contexts, ICT was being used to facilitate communication, although this was more linked to within-service activities, rather than those external to service provision.

The purpose of this investigation was to assess the effect of American Sign Language (ASL) instruction on typical hearing kindergarten children's literacy in four specific areas: receptive English vocabulary, expressive English vocabulary, ASL ability, and English emergent reading level. The research was specifically modeled after a 1997 United Kingdom Sign in Education project in which a deaf teacher delivered instruction to hearing students using British Sign Language (BSL). The findings from the current United States study indicate hearing kindergarten students receiving ASL instruction made statistically significant gains in their receptive English vocabulary, maintained an age appropriate use of expressive English vocabulary, acquired a sufficient level of ASL phonology and morphology to begin to communicate in the visual-gestural language, and tested higher than similar students on Marie M. clay's (1993) reading placement measures.

Describes Sign in Education, a pilot program in the United Kingdom that integrated Deaf children and hearing children in a hearing classroom with a culturally Deaf teacher who taught the national curriculum in British Sign Language one afternoon a week. Explores the advantage to the Deaf community, as well as the majority culture of adopting such a program in the Untied States. (Author/VWL)

This article examines gender issues in resource allocation for special needs students in mainstream schools in the United Kingdom. It reports on a survey of the allocation of special provision resources in 35 schools within one local education authority. Data are reported which show significant problems for management of special needs services in mainstream settings when analyzed in terms of gender equity. (Contains references.) (DB)

Basic values and beliefs of British education for students with special needs are addressed in terms of "3 R's", i.e., Rights for learners, Responsive pedagogy, and Research for special needs education. Models for addressing these three aspects of special education are offered. (DB)

Uses a hierarchical linear model to test the effect of birthdate on science ability in British schoolchildren, ages 11, 13, and 15. Reports that summer-born children scored lower than autumn-born children on science survey tests. Urges teachers to consider these artificial performance differences when grouping pupils according to ability for National Assessment Levels. (DB)

The article suggests use of a miscue analysis of mathematics problems in children with learning difficulties. Analysis of errors, past learning, and monitoring of progress are illustrated with a case study of a 10-year-old British learning disabled boy. (DB)

The article examines issues in inservice teacher training in special education in the United Kingdom in light of the implementation of "Grant Related Inservice Training" (Grist). It also looks at recent inservice innovations including the trend toward modular courses to gain qualifications at varying levels. (DB)

The article discusses the concept between innovation and commercialization in the science and technology industry in Great Britain such as presenting the Dowling Review of Business-University Research Collaborations. Also presents statistics including the number of research grant proposals to Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and information on several course programs related to science in the U.K. including the "Introduction to Rubber Technology" on March 15-16, 2016.

Abstract: In the UK, by far the largest CO2 storage opportunities lie offshore. The North Sea in particular has a long and complex geological history, with potential reservoirs geographically widespread and occurring at multiple stratigraphic levels. Diverse storage estimates have been made, using a range of working methods, and yielding different values, e.g. SCCS (2009); Bentham (2006). Consequently the UK Storage Appraisal Project (UKSAP), commissioned and funded by the Energy Technologies Institute (ETI), is undertaking the most comprehensive assessment to date, using abundant legacy seismic and borehole data. This study has a remit to use best current practice, consistent between locations, to calculate the CO2 storage capacity of the entire UK Continental Shelf (UKCS) within saline aquifers and hydrocarbon fields. The potential storage formations have been subdivided into units for assessment, and filtered to remove units with only a small estimated storage capacity to concentrate resources on more viable units. The size of potential storage units approximate to a power law distribution, similar to that of hydrocarbon fields, with a large number of small units and a small number of large units. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Recent growth in the accountancy sector has been accompanied by a series of structural changes, in particular the concentration, internationalisation and diversification of accountancy practice. At the same time, the future of the partnership structure of accountancy firms is in doubt because of litigation pressure. Within the UK internal structural change has been accompanied by the geographical expansion of the large accountancy firms that now dominate the national and regional accountancy markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interview with Natalie Daniels, a project manager of British engineering company Renishaw PLC, is presented. Topics include how she started her career in engineering, the factor which contributed to her decision of studying for a degree after her four-year apprenticeship in Renishaw, and her description of a typical day as a project manager.

Lysimeters located outdoors have been used to evaluate the decomposition of buried oily beach sand waste (OBS) prepared using Forties light crude oil and sand from different locations around the British coast. The OBS (5% oil by weight) was buried as a 12-cm layer over dune pasture sub-sand and overlain by 20 cm of dune pasture topsoil. Decomposition rates of oil residues averaged 2300 kg ha-1 in the first year and the pattern of oil decomposition may be represented by a power curve. Oil decomposition was strongly related to the temperature in the OBS layer, but was also significantly affected by rainfall in the previous 12 h. The CO2 flux at the surface of the treatment lysimeters followed the relationship [log10 CO2 (mg C m-2 h-1)=0.93+0.058x OBS temp. (deg. C)-0.042x 12 h rain (mm)]. There was considerable variationin the rate of oil decomposition in sands collected from different sites. Sand from Askernish supported most microbial activity whilst sand from Tain was relatively inactive. The decomposition process appeared to cease when the sand became saturated with water, i.e. temporarily anaerobic. However, decomposition recommenced when the soil driedout. The fastest rate of decomposition occurred in sand from one of the two sites predicted to have high populations of hydrocarbon-degrading bacteria. Larger particle size and higher Ca content may also besignificant factors governing the rate of decomposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prisons are susceptible to outbreaks. Control measures focusing on isolation and cohorting negatively affect wellbeing. We present an outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in a large male prison in Wales, UK, October 2020 to April 2021, and discuss control measures.We gathered case-information, including demographics, staff-residence postcode, resident cell number, work areas/dates, test results, staff interview dates/notes and resident prison-transfer dates. Epidemiological curves were mapped by prison location. Control measures included isolation (exclusion from work or cell-isolation), cohorting (new admissions and work-area groups), asymptomatic testing (case-finding), removal of communal dining and movement restrictions. Facemask use and enhanced hygiene were already in place. Whole-genome sequencing (WGS) and interviews determined the genetic relationship between cases plausibility of transmission.Of 453 cases, 53% ( n = 242) were staff, most aged 25-34 years (11.5% females, 27.15% males) and symptomatic (64%). Crude attack-rate was higher in staff (29%, 95% CI 26-64%) than in residents (12%, 95% CI 9-15%).Whole-genome sequencing can help differentiate multiple introductions from person-to-person transmission in prisons. It should be introduced alongside asymptomatic testing as soon as possible to control prison outbreaks. Timely epidemiological investigation, including data visualisation, allowed dynamic risk assessment and proportionate control measures, minimising the reduction in resident welfare.