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The article reports that the 2004 Bodycote International Paper Competition attracted entries from students in universities and industrial research laboratories across Great Britain, continental Europe and the U.S. Six papers were shortlisted and the authors were invited to submit full length papers, from which four were chosen by a panel of academics and industrial experts to give oral presentations in front of an invited audience. The prize winners were S. Sridharan and E.H. Jordan.

Practitioner research, as one example of research supported by universities, has developed in unexpected ways, some of them unhelpful and has not always generated the benefits predicted. This paper argues that practitioner research has become shaped more by the needs of universities than by the schools and teachers it was hoped it would serve. The paper goes on to explore the idea that the promise of practitioner research has been so beguiling that it has commandeered more than a wise share of attention in universities and that this has been at the expense of exploring some other avenues of engagement with schools. The paper notes that the evolution of practitioner inquiry has taken place at a time when regimes of accountability driven by central government have been visible globally and when universities and schools each had significant pressures to fulfil policy imperatives. The pressure towards performance has in England drawn the attention of universities and schools away from, rather than towards, each other: schools to revised curricula and performance, universities to research and funding. Practitioner research became developed as a skeleton for higher degrees and in that arena universities came to have a role in promoting and at the same time inhibiting and possibly damaging its development. Hopes that practitioner research would come to contribute to mainstream research were not fulfilled and both educational and more especially practitioner research remain problematic in the wider university research agenda. One response is to renew efforts to improve existing approaches and examples of this are now widespread. However, the paper observes that, at present universities’ support for schools seems to reflect only a small part of their much wider expertise and argues that education departments in universities might think much more radically about the range of expertise that they can offer schools, a more imaginative exploration. The paper continues by noting that the challenge for university departments of education of working together equally with schools and teachers is easy to aspire to, but not to fulfil, and this impacts on working with the authentic concerns of schools and on sharing expertise. Further opportunities are available: beyond education departments: for example, other university departments have expertise that education departments might link with which has hitherto remained unexplored. Additional areas which remain under-researched are the processes of incorporating educational change and in making judgments about educational initiatives. Readers are reminded that the accidental barriers produced by the categories of research, teaching and administration are accountancy categories and may demand creative and determined responses. The paper concludes that there is too much to lose by not exploring these or other wider possibilities and much to gain by doing so including opportunities in research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the role of schools, and more specifically school leadership, in the transition to a sustainable future for humankind? What different forms of leadership are needed to enable this role? The challenges are huge and complex and for those of us engaged in promoting sustainability learning, it is clear that the issue has never been more pressing. Action at government and corporate level is required, as well as an immense shift in patterns of consumption, especially in richer countries. This paper aims to explore the nature, challenges and opportunities of sustainability leadership within the context of formal education in the UK. A critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970; Gatto, 1992) lens is used to explore ways in which the formal education system is constructed on mental models that are inherently unsustainable, and that reinforce the principles of hierarchy, power and control, separation, competition and colonialism that are at the root of sustainability challenges. Drawing on interviews with school leaders, some possibilities will be explored, such as alternative pedagogies that create space for relaxed, collaborative, co-constructive learning, that encourage critical thinking, and reignite children’s sense of connection with each other and with the environment (Woodlin, 2014). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the experiences of young people on the autistic spectrum (AS) who attend a special unit within a mainstream secondary school in England. The paper feeds into contemporary debates about the nature of inclusive schooling and, more broadly, special education. Young people on the AS have been largely neglected within these debates. The paper focuses upon processes of normalisation and abnormalisation to which the young people on the AS are subject, and how these are interconnected with inclusion and exclusion within school spaces. At times, the unit is a container for the abnormally behaving. However, processes of normalisation pervade the unit, attempting to rectify the deviant mind-body-emotions of the young people on the AS to enable their inclusion within the mainstream school. Normalisation is conceptualised as a set of sociospatially specific and contextual practices; norms emerge as they are enacted, and via a practical sense of the abnormal. Norms are sometimes reworked by the young people on the AS, whose association with the unit renders them a visible minority group. Thus, despite some problems, special units can promote genuine 'inclusive' education, in which norms circulating mainstream school spaces are transformed to accept mind-body-emotional differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite receiving an unprecedented level of government funding to ensure young people have two hours of high quality physical education (PE) and sport, physical educators in the UK continue to decry poor motivation levels and disengaged youth in PE. The major purpose of this paper is to achieve a greater understanding of the factors that motivate young girls' engagement in PE. Throughout this paper we foreground the perspectives of 13 white pre-adolescent girls through an ecological analysis of naturally occurring talk and interviews with pupils in year 7 (aged 11 to 12 years) of a suburban town in the UK Midlands. The discussion that follows attempts to provide new vantage points for contemplating what motivates pre-adolescent girls' engagement in PE. This paper examines the ways that this group of girls position themselves around available discourses in a wider physical and popular culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks beyond an individualised type of parental involvement and discusses the role of the extended family in relation to school. We draw on the different social capital theories to explain its implications and also to discuss its efficacy. Our focus is on the Bangladeshi community and the Pakistani community in two towns in the North East of England. British South Asian parents are variously accused of having too high educational expectations of their children or not being interested at all and that Pakistani and Bangladeshi parents in particular have no or limited relationships with their children's schools. In this paper we demonstrate that parental involvement in these two communities resides not simply in the hands of the parents but within the wider family. We challenge the deficit model of British South Asian families as indifferent to the education of their children and we identify the potential resource of the extended family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little research has examined constructions of gender among young British-Chinese. This paper seeks to further understanding in this area, particularly in relation to notions of ‘laddism’ currently deployed in educational policy discourse around gender and achievement. As a group British-Chinese boys tend to very high achievement in the British Education system. The notion of ‘laddish behaviour’ as an explanation for boys’ apparent underachievement in comparison to girls at GCSE level was discussed with British-Chinese pupils. An overwhelming majority of British-Chinese pupils supported this explanation, and a majority of these pupils applied notions of ‘laddish behaviour’ to British-Chinese boys, to some extent contesting stereotypes of the Chinese as uniformly ‘good pupils’. However, the discourses of ‘the good Chinese pupil’ and ‘Chinese value of education’ were frequently drawn on by pupil respondents, with the result that the pupils often presented British-Chinese manifestations of ‘laddism’ as mild versions in comparison with pernicious ‘others’. The paper discusses different presentations of laddism among some of the male respondents. It concludes by analysing the impact of ‘raced’ and gendered discourses on British-Chinese constructions of masculinity. British-Chinese boys may be able to adopt versions of masculinity which do not impede their learning, but this tended to result in their masculinity being problematised in teacher discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Surgical site infections (SSI) account for 16% of healthcare associated infections, and are associated with considerable morbidity, mortality and increased costs of care. Ensuring evidence-based practice to prevent SSI is incorporated across the patient�s surgical journey is complex. OneTogether is a quality improvement collaborative of infection prevention and operating department specialists, formed to support the spread and adoption of best practice to prevent SSI. This paper describes the findings of an expert workshop on infection prevention in operating departments. Methods: A total of 84 delegates from 75 hospitals attended the workshop, comprising 46 (55%) theatre nurses operating department practitioners; 16 (19%) infection control practitioners and 22 (26%) other healthcare practitioners.Discussion focused on evidence, policy implementation and barriers to best practice. Responses were synthesised into a narrative review. Results: Delegates reported significant problems in translating evidence-based guidance into everyday practice, lack of local polices and poor compliance. Major barriers were lack of leadership, poorly defined responsibilities, and lack of knowledge/training. Conclusions: This workshop has provided important insights into major challenges in assuring compliance with best practice in relation to the prevention of SSI. The OneTogether partnership aims to support healthcare practitioners to improve the outcomes of patients undergoing surgery by reducing the risk of SSI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we argue that postgraduate education forms an important, but hitherto neglected, element in the distinctive institutional landscape of the City of London. In particular, and drawing on research into early-career financial and legal elites in the City, we show how postgraduate education tailored to the demands of employers within London plays an important role in indoctrinating early-career elites into situated, Cityspecific, working practices and, in so doing, helps to sustain the City's cultures and norms of financial practice. Specifying the role of postgraduate education in reproducing these situated City practices is significant because, although geographical variegation in working practices between international financial centres has been widely reported, less attention has been paid to how such institutionally embedded differences are created and sustained. By identifying education as one mechanism of creation and sustenance, our analysis enhances understanding of how the institutional landscapes that underlie financial centres might be maintained or, when necessary, challenged; challenge being significant in relation to attempts to reform practices and cultures in international financial centres in the wake of the 2007-08 crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background/Context: On January 29, 2008 the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) approved a city-wide Africentric elementary school under their Alternative School policy, sparking a contentious debate. Calls for Black-focused schools also arose in 2008 in London in response to the disengagement of African Caribbean youth. The historical record indicates, however, that community campaigns for Black educational programs stretch back over 40 years in both cities. Focus of the Study: This paper analyzes the development of Black-focused education in Toronto and London from 1968 to 2008 through the responses of Black parents and community activists to the historic underachievement of African Caribbean students (particularly males) in the public schools of both cities. Black-focused education is situated within the larger social, political, and national contexts and the critical incidents that fueled the development of race equality policy. The article explores how the "politics of place" influenced the trajectory of Black-focused education in each city. Research Methodology: Two parallel historical case studies were conducted using primary source material from community-based archives, secondary sources on the history of African Caribbean immigration and the development of Black community organizations, and oral history interviews with 10 Black education activists in Toronto and 7 activists in London. Conclusions: This comparative study conceptualizes this transnational phenomena as "resistance to racism" and examines how Black-focused curriculum and ideology was adapted to local conditions in Canada and Britain. Parents and community activists aimed to develop the citizenship rights of African Caribbean students, establish a diasporic sensibility, and promote the right of children of African descent to a quality education wherever they may reside. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses our ability to analyse progression rates into UK Higher Education (HE) using a range of data available at the individual and neighborhood levels. The then Department for Children, Schools and Families has recently released data which make it possible to profile national patterns of student educational progression from post-compulsory schooling through to university. However, the linked records lack detailed socioeconomic information, and thus a geodemographic classification is used to analyse the flows of students from different sociospatial backgrounds into the HE system. Rates of progression are shown to vary greatly between these groups, and a disaggregation of HE participants by courses of study demonstrates that the abilities of institutions to attract students from different backgrounds will be constrained by the mix of their course offerings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In their first year of work, newly qualified doctors will care for patients who have palliative care needs or who are dying, and they will need the skills to do this throughout their medical career. The General Medical Council in the United Kingdom has given clear recommendations that all medical students should receive core teaching on relieving pain and distress together with caring for the terminally ill. However, medical schools provide variable amounts of this teaching; some are able to deliver comprehensive programmes whilst others deliver very little. This paper presents the results of a mixed methods study which explored the structure and content of palliative care teaching in different UK medical schools, and revealed what coordinators are trying to achieve with this teaching. Nationally, coordinators are aiming to help medical students overcome the same fears held by the lay public about death, dying and hospices, to convey that the palliative care approach is applicable to many patients and is part of every doctors' role, whatever their specialty. Although facts and knowledge were thought to be important, coordinators were more concerned with attitudes and helping individuals with the transition from medical student to foundation doctor, providing an awareness of palliative medicine as a specialty and how to access it for their future patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The General Medical Council's call to modernize medical education prompted the University of Liverpool Medical School to develop a new undergraduate programme, integrating palliative medicine as 'core' curricula. Following successful piloting, the palliative medicine training programme was further developed and expanded. This paper examines whether the additional investment produces improved outcomes. In 1999, fourth year undergraduate medical students (Cohort 1, n=217) undertook a 2-week pilot education programme in palliative medicine. Subsequently, the training programme was refined and extended, incorporating advanced communication skills training, an ethics project and individual case presentations (Cohort 2, n=443). Congruent with the study's theoretical driver of self-efficacy, both cohorts were surveyed pre- and post-programme with validated measures of: (i) self-efficacy in palliative care scale; (ii) thanatophobia scale. No significant differences between cohorts' pre-programme scores were identified. Within each cohort, statistically and educationally significant post-education improvements were recorded in both scales. Further post-education analysis indicated that the extended programme produces significantly greater improvements in all domains of the self-efficacy in palliative care scale (communication, t=-7.28, patient management, t=-5.96, multidisciplinary team-working t=-3.77 at p<0.000), but not thanatophobia. Although improvements were recorded in both cohorts, participation in the extended education programme resulted in further statistically significant gains. Interpreted through the theoretical model employed, improved self-efficacy and outcome expectancies will result in behavioural change that leads to improved practice and better patient care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a contemporary shift in the institutional context of ‘disabled’ children's education in the United Kingdom from segregated special to mainstream schools. This change is tied to wider deinstitutionalised or reinstitutionalised geographies of disabled people, fragile globalised educational ‘inclusion’ agendas, and broader concerns about social cohesiveness. Although coeducating children is expected to transform negative representations of (dis)ability in future society, there are few detailed explorations of how children's everyday sociospatial practices (re)produce or transform dominant representations of (dis)ability. With this in mind, children's contextual and shifting performances of (dis)ability in two case study school playground (recreational) spaces are explored. The findings demonstrate that children with mind-body differences are variously (dis)abled, in comparison with sociospatially shifting norms of ability, which have body, learning, and emotional-social facets. The discussion therefore places an emphasis on the need to incorporate ‘intellectual’ and ‘emotional’ differences more fully into geographical studies of disability and identity. The paper has wider resonance for transformative expectations placed on colocating children with a variety of ‘axes of difference’ (such as gender, ‘race’, ethnicity, and social class) in schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘Ladettes’ are argued to be a sign, and product, of contemporary development and change; their fortunes are presented as inextricably related to the conditions of late modernity. Using the past to shed light on the present, this paper considers whether fears and claims about the behaviour of some contemporary young women in Britain are exclusive to the present. Two data sets inform the discussion: first, representations of ladettes in national and local newspapers from 1995 to 2005; second, materials relating to the ‘modern girl’ published in the popular print media between 1918 and 1928. Although there have been important changes in the conditions of girlhood since the 1920s, this historical comparison highlights continuities in the representation of ‘troublesome’ youthful femininities. We explore similarities and differences in the characteristics attributed to the modern girls of the twenties and the ladettes of recent years, and the dominant discourses that underpin popular constructions of troublesome young women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The police are legitimate, bureaucratically articulated organizations that stand ready to use force to sustain political order Anglo-American policing (AAP) is democratic policing: It eschews torture, terrorism, and counter-terrorism, is guided by law, and seeks minimal damage to civility. Research on AAP, a policing type developed by adaptation rather than conquest (refined by Peel and exported to Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States) in the United Kingdom and the United States, is reviewed. Police studies, like policing itself is based on material, political, and cultural interests that pattern the production and distribution of knowledge. Interests in the United States and the United Kingdom are summarized, and the origins, key figures in studies of policing, the emergence of police scholarship, and some differences between the United Kingdom and the United States in funding, education, and training are outlined. There remain tensions between public pressures for short-term-funded research and theoretically grounded scholarship. The paper ends with reflections on the future of police studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article challenges the narrow versions of literacy in current versions of early childhood education in the UK. The theoretical underpinning for the paper is drawn from sociocultural perspectives and what Kress (1997) defines as the `broad and messy area... of communication and representation'. It is argued that we need to broaden our understanding of literacy to include young children's representations in graphic and narrative versions, influenced by the media and `everyday' exchanges with siblings and significant adults, that characterize their journeys towards literacy in home settings. When they enter pre-school and start school the versions of representations they are encouraged to do are driven by a narrow emphasis on school versions of literacy and numeracy. The kind of personal and social drawings done at home are discarded. The argument is illustrated by examples of young children drawing in home and school settings taken from a three-year longitudinal study of seven young children's meaning making as they moved from home to pre-school and the beginning of schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article responds to Sara Delamont's paper in the February 2000 edition of Sociology which provides an account of the relationship between the sub-discipline, sociology of education, and parent discipline, sociology. Delamont argues that the hooligan is an anomalous beast for sociologists of education, who paradoxically revere him: while the sociology of education is an anomalous beast for the parent discipline, whose practitioners reject and fear it. Essentially, according to the author, the latter part of Delamont's argument amounts to the claim that the wider discipline of sociology has neglected sociology of education. The author notes that in this article, his response is concerned with Delamont's unsatisfactory characterization of British sociology of education. According to Delamont, sociology in Great Britain has two grand narratives, both male--one derived from the political arithmetic tradition is quantitative, empirical and focused on social mobility, and the other discursive and focused on anti-heroes: the portrayal of the rebellion or resistance of the hooligan. Delamont has attempted to characterize British ethnographic studies, which include some reference to anti-school/delinquent boys, and which have been conducted by male sociologists, as falling into the same category.

This paper examines the origins of state educational systems in Europe in the nineteenth century and the institutionalization of mass education throughout the world in the twentieth century. We offer a theoretical interpretation of mass state-sponsored schooling that emphasizes the role of education in the nation-building efforts of states competing with one another within the European interstate system. We show that political, economic, and cultural developments in Europe led to a model of the legitimate national society that became highly institutionalized in the European (and later, world) cultural frame. This model made the construction of a mass educational system a major and indispensable component of every modern state's activity. We discuss the usefulness of this perspective for understanding recent cross-national studies of education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International comparisons of engineering graduate numbers are frequently used as indices of industrial development and measures of the responsiveness of the educational system to industrial requirements. Such comparisons make implicit assumptions about quality by assuming that like institutions or like qualifications are being compared. In this paper the concept of 'best practice' engineering education is derived from engineering manpower reports of German engineering education in order to address issues of both quantity and quality in comparing engineering education in Britain and Japan. Japan is found to have associated engineering education with relatively more prestigious institutions and to have attracted a higher proportion of more able male pupils to broad based engineering education compared to Britain. Yet there are some interesting differences between the model of 'best practice' engineering education based on Germany and Japanese practice, particularly in curricula, which underline the importance of the division of labour between education and employment in the education and training of engineers. Examining the responsiveness of educational systems through propositions derived from a model of 'best practice' rather than through simple output statistics underlines the importance of different patterns of institutional development, the role of the state, educational and occupational selection, and status within the curriculum for understanding the variety of contemporary engineering education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines, with some reference to a content analysis of three British journals, the methodological orientation of current British sociology in order to argue that most graduate students as a consequence of their undergraduate socialization are unlikely to wish to take advantage of formal methodology courses at the graduate level, at least in so far as these are highly technical in content. Some of the implications of the argument for sociology in Britain generally, for undergraduate methods teaching and for the structure of graduate education are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]