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Interviews were carried out with nine young people placed in the Alternative Provision (AP) sector in one Local Authority (LA) in South Wales, UK. The interviews focused on exploring participants’ lived experiences of the AP sector. Interview questions were purposely broad to reflect the exploratory nature of the research and encourage participants to speak freely about ideas that were relevant to them when thinking about their education. In keeping with the focus on holding central the voices of participants, Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis was used to analyse the interview transcripts. Interpreted by the researcher through an inductive lens, three superordinate themes are presented. These relate to social identity, self-agency and change. The themes are discussed in relation to wider literature and also considered through the lens of social identity theory and social constructionism. The findings highlight that AP is a place where young people can be supported to grow and develop as individuals, but moving into AP can bring about questions and challenges for some learners. How individuals make sense of their journey in AP arguably can be influenced by the dominant deficit discourses they describe hearing about the sector from other people. Arguably, these deficit discourses may have implications for many areas of their development including: social identity, self-esteem, engagement and motivation. It is suggested that changing the dominant discourses about AP and those who attend may lead to changes in young peoples’ experiences. Practice implications are offered for the wider education systems when thinking about the future of AP in Wales and for Educational Psychologists, who play a role in supporting young people and education systems. Implications include a need to provide further information to young people about what AP is and why some learners are placed there. This should give more consideration to the situational and systemic factors and challenge the dominant deficit discourses about learners in AP. Implications for policy makers and LAs include a need to facilitate greater involvement of young people in decision making. Also, to review how local/national policies may be challenging or contributing to the deficit discourses related to AP and young people, who experience iv SEBD. Consideration is given to how EPs may be able to support these complex and challenging changes.

This thesis examines the reliefs of Trajan's Column in Rome (dedicated A. D. 113). It explores sculptural processes and provides a full and critical commentary on the relief content. Section 1 reviews prior work on the column and explains how the present research was conducted whilst taking advantage of scaffolding erected in conjunction with conservation studies. Section 2 examines the role of the column as a propaganda monument, exploring the value of the depictions of Trajan's wars as a source of historical information. This runs parallel to an enquiry into the imperial propaganda functions of the project. These two lines of approach are set against the column's immediate architectural environment which suggests how the reliefs were observed by the public audience. Section 3 is a technical enquiry into the methods by which the column was fabricated, and the sculptures were planned and executed, based on minute observation and computer-assisted recording of the reliefs. Section 4 deals with each of the potential sources of information concerning historical events, warfare, architecture and the Roman army available to, and employed by the sculptors working in Rome. It concludes that input from the war zone on the Danube was minimal in comparison with models and verbal information available in the capital. In Section 5, the sixteen categories of human figures on the spiral frieze ('Figure Types') are dealt with in turn and examined in the light of comparative textual, artefactual and representational evidence with regard to their accuracy. Relationships with other contemporary monuments are also examined. The last Section reviews the place of Trajan's Column in Roman monumental art, examining its innovative features and-its influence on later works.

Standards for stud strength in composite joists are presently not available. Existing standards for composite design are targeted for composite beam design while design of a composite joist requires more emphasis on stud strength to fully develop the joist bottom chord. Stud placement in the deck flute is investigated. Thirty-six push-off specimens were tested with three different deck geometries. A normal load apparatus models gravity loading in an attempt to represent full-scale joist behavior during the push-off test procedure. The results illustrate that the current AISC specifications (ASD 1989; LRFD 1986) do not accurately predict stud strength for studs placed in ribbed metal deck when the deck is perpendicular to the shear loading.

This thesis will argue that the development of early Rome can be described using a sequence of large, socio-political dichotomies based on Rome's activity in the sphere of warfare. The use of dichotomies in early Roman history is not new,and indeed the confrontation between two opposing groups, typically the patricians and plebeians, can be found at the heart of even the earliest extant histories of the period. The problem which plagued these early models, and indeed many subsequent models based on their premise, is that they assumed that the same prescriptive set of social and political divisions which existed in the late Republic and early Empire also existed in early Rome. This study will discard this highly anachronistic assumption and redefine the dichotomies present in early Rome using active characteristics (i.e. behavior), rather than the prescriptive labels assigned by late republican authors. In particular, this study will attempt to view early Rome through the lens of warfare, where the formation of distinct 'in-group' and 'out-group' biases is most evident, in an effort to redraw the divisions of early Roman society. The end result of this redefining process will be an entirely different, albeit related set of socio-political groupings; for example 'mobile' vs. 'sedentary' and 'Roman' vs. 'Latin', whose interaction is visible behind much of Rome's early development.