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AbstractOne of the most significant features of society in the 21st century is the tendency for people in the later stages of their lives to want to play a more participative role. Seeking to be creative, offering community leadership, taking a second career are just some examples of what is becoming commonplace. However, one of the biggest problems we face is that those who are less visible in the community, such as older and retired people, or people living in isolated rural areas, usually have fewer opportunities to meet people and thus can easily find themselves disengaged from society. This can frustrate their desires to participate in society. Many may then become depressed and lonely, lacking the motivation to become re-engaged with their neighbourhood. They then gradually lose their identity as valuable and valued members of society, and often their health begins to suffer as well, producing personal distress and imposing additional demands on health care. This position paper proposes a qualitative study of an intervention aimed at improving the lives of older people in terms of issues raised by the literature, and describes appropriate methodology and methods for answering these questions, which we see as essentially educational questions within the framework of lifelong learning.

The research reported here is the result of a collaborative project between a group of teachers in a secondary school and two university lecturers. The group has been meeting for several years and the issue of trying to improve communication arose as a result of findings from a previous study in the school. After reviewing the literature, we were able to identify actions for teachers to trial in the school and, following data collection and analysis, we were able to refine those actions for widespread adoption in the school. We were also able to identify issues that required further exploration. The research exemplifies a way in which university and school staff can engage in collaborative, high quality research. It also identifies some of the complexities involved for schools and teachers as they try to improve practice.

Over a period of four years the special needs input to one university Postgraduate Certificate in Education one-year course was successively modified and evaluated. The aims of the changes were to make the students involved in these initial training courses more aware of special needs issues and to give them skills and strategies to deal with the most common difficulties with respect to the pupils' learning and behaviour in their own classes. The evaluation of each year's course was carried out to gain insights into the impact of different approaches to the presentation of special needs material and to guide the later phases of the course development. It is this sequence of development and related research which is reported here.

This paper examines ways in which two university lecturers worked with a group of teachers in a secondary school to help them address an issue which the teachers identified as problematic, namely that of meeting the needs of individual learners in their teaching. Within an action research stance adopted by the lecturers, the group together were able to work towards a manageable and acceptable solution to a part of this problem by developing materials which were, largely, within a mastery learning framework. These materials were developed in areas which were identified as cross-curricular in nature. By working in these areas, teachers were able to address the issue of transfer of learning from one curriculum area to another, which was another aspect of teaching which they identified as problematic. Whilst an examination of the success or otherwise of those materials is not within the scope of this paper, what does emerge here provides insights into the ways in which school-based research can be carried out with university lecturers acting as consultants.

This paper describes a piece of research carried out for the Department of Education and Science and administered by the University of Oxford. It looks into the effectiveness of teacher-based identification of 3rd form secondary pupils in four subjects (Mathematics, Physics, English and French). Subject specific identification was found to be more effective than previous research (identification of children with high general ability) has found. There were, however, indications that teachers did not always know their pupils sufficiently well for their identification strategies to be bias-free. The use of checklists as an aid to identification was studied.The paper describes how checklist-aided identification was no more effective than unaided identification. It also highlights where the problems lie and describes how checklists can be used effectively.

This paper describes part of a recent piece of research into the identification of pupils who have high potential for performance in specific areas of the academic curriculum in secondary schools. We discuss the relationship of this work to the broader definitions of giftedness which are now of considerable interest, and to the existing studies of identification, which tend to concentrate on high IQ children. We outline a test based method of identifying the pupils who have high potential in a specific subject, and report on the extend of the agreement between identification based on such a test procedure, and that based on teachers' judgements. Finally we draw out some implications of the findings for the way in which identification and provision should inter-relate.