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The value of social media in crises, disasters, and emergencies across different events (e.g. floods, storms, terroristic attacks), countries, and for heterogeneous participants (e.g. citizens, emergency services) is now well-attested. Existing work has examined the potentials and weaknesses of its use during specific events. Fewer studies, however, have focused on citizens' perceptions of social media in emergencies, and none have deployed a representative sample to examine this. We present the results of the first representative study on citizens' perception of social media in emergencies that we have conducted in Germany. Our study highlights, for example, that around half (45%) of people have used social media during an emergency to share and or look for information. In contrast, false rumours on social media (74%) are perceived as a threat. Moreover, only a minority of people have downloaded a smartphone app for emergencies (16%), with the most popular ones' weather and first aid apps.

Social media is increasingly being used during emergencies. Most available studies are focused on how citizens and/or authorities use these technologies in concrete events. However, larger quantitative studies with significant results on attitudes, needs and future plans of citizens in such events are not available - especially such of a comparative nature related to emergency services. As part of the EU project ‘EmerGent’ this article presents the findings of a survey of 1034 citizens across 30 European countries conducted between February and June 2015 to explore citizens' attitudes towards the use of social media for private purposes and in emergency situations. The article briefly compares these findings with a second survey conducted with 761 emergency service staff across 32 European countries from September to December 2014. The aim of the overall study is to discuss citizens' attitudes towards social media in emergencies in order to derive challenges and opportunities for social resilience.

Various studies show that social media is used in emergencies - and that in spite of possible challenges for emergency services, beneficial use cases can be identified. However, relatively little empirical data is available regarding the attitudes of emergency services towards social media, and almost none of a comparative nature. This article summarizes the findings of a survey conducted of the EU project 'EmerGent' with 761 emergency service staff across 32 European countries from September to December 2014. The main aims of the survey were to explore the attitudes expressed by emergency service staff towards social media for private and organizational use as well as the levels and main factors influencing the current and likely future use of social media in their organizations. Based on our results, we discuss possible enhancements of the emergency management cycle using social media. We did a survey with 761 emergency service staff across 32 European countries.The majority of emergency services has positive attitudes towards social media.It is more used to share information (44%) than to receive messages (19%).A future increase is expected (74%), even more for organizations already using it.There is a huge gap between rhetoric (66%) and reality (23%) in social media use.

Finding a way to ensure an effective use of social media has become increasingly important to emergency services over the past decade. Despite all efforts to determine the utility of social media for emergency organisations, it is necessary to benefit from such institutions' staffs’ opinions to establish effective use. To provide empirical evidence we present a comparison of two surveys, conducted across Europe with emergency services in 2014 and 2017 respectively, with a total of 1169 answers. The analysis shows that personal experience has an effect on how organisational usage of social media is perceived and how emergency service staff view the future use of social media. Furthermore, the use has increased. This article not only shows emergency services what their staff think about their social media usage but also discusses challenges and future directions for the design of systems that can be useful for further development of optimized organisational social media usage.

•Almost half of respondents (45%) have used social media during emergencies.•Dutch and Italian respondents use social media comparatively frequently.•German use is moderate; British have relatively low interest in future use.•Risk cultures of social media use may account for the countries' diverging behavior.•Same barriers and advantages of social media were identified across risk cultures.

During a large-scale crisis, many people use social media to share information. However, emergency services are unable to use this information easily due to data quality and quantity issues. We use Twitter data generated during a recent flooding crisis to gain insights into this problem, evaluating techniques that could be used in real-time to provide actionable intelligence to emergency services. Our work also includes an exploratory analytical study of the data.

National value‐added datasets have recently become available that record a pupil’s progress from Key Stage 2 right through to GCSE. Such a dataset is clearly a useful tool for assessing the impact various characteristics of secondary schools have on pupil performance. This paper reports on a research project which involved the use of a variety of statistical techniques, including multi‐level modelling, to explore the impact of single‐sex education and school size on pupils’ progress and opportunities. The analysis suggests that single‐sex education is particularly beneficial to girls in comprehensive schools and to boys in selective schools. Furthermore, girls’ schools were found to counter traditional sex‐stereotyping in subject choices. In terms of school size, the results show that medium‐sized schools obtain slightly better results than very large or very small schools. The paper concludes by exploring alternative explanations of the identified effects.

This article presents the results of a qualitative study that examined the views and experiences of 12 large city employers of modern apprenticeships (MAs). Given the government's target that by 2004 at least 28 per cent of young people should enter an apprenticeship before the age of 22, it is imperative that large employers are fully involved in taking on young people as apprentices. However, this study found that many such employers are either not aware of these qualifications or do not see them as relevant to their businesses. The paper concludes by providing suggestions, based on the findings of this study, for different ways of raising the status of MAs and getting more large employers to take up the award.

This article discusses the results of a qualitative research study that examined clerical workers' experiences of National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs) in two retail banks, which were piloting Level 2 NVQs in Customer Services and Banking. The research suggests that the implementation of NVQs within the two banks did not bring about the kind of changes in work-based learning envisaged by advocates of the qualification framework. NVQ candidates conceptualised the process of doing an NVQ as ‘writing stories’ about routine work tasks in order to accredit existing skills. The potential for learning new skills and developing greater flexibility in the workplace was found to be very limited. On a more encouraging note, the research also identified a number of positive outcomes of doing an NVQ.