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Fifty years since Dr Tudor-Hart's publication of the 'Inverse Care Law', all-cause mortality rates and COVID-19 mortality rates are higher in more deprived areas. Part of the solution is to increase access and availability to healthcare in underserved and deprived areas. This paper examined how socio-economically representative the undergraduate general practice placements are in Northern Ireland (NI). A quantitative study of general practices involved in undergraduate medical placements through Queen's University Belfast, comparing practice lists by deprivation indices, examining both blanket deprivation and deprivation quintile trends for teaching and non-teaching practices. Deprivation data for 135 teaching practices were compared against the 323 NI practices. Teaching practices had fewer patients living in the most deprived quintiles compared with non-teaching practices. Fewer practices with blanket deprivation were involved in undergraduate medical education, 32% compared with 42% without blanket deprivation. Practices in areas of blanket deprivation were under-represented as teaching practices, 10%, compared to 14% of NI general practices that met this criterion. Practices with blanket deprivation were under-represented as teaching practices. Exposure to general practice in deprived areas is an essential step to improving future workforce recruitment and ultimately to closing the health inequalities gap. Ensuring practices in high-need areas are proportionately represented in undergraduate placements is one way to direct action in addressing the 'Inverse Care Law'. This study is limited to NI and further work is required to compare institutions across the UK and Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores affective dimensions to the positioning of teachers within persistent educational inequalities. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s concept of ‘affective economies’, we argue that inequalities are not maintained through how teachers and student teachers ‘feel about’ ‘different’ students per se. Rather, the very possibility of becoming a particular subject and object of feeling is itself already part of the production of learner differences and inequalities. We examine how affects circulate to shape particular objects (e.g. a teacher’s physical body) and collective attachments to particular signs (e.g. ‘the national teaching body’). We argue that contemporary changes to Irish and European teacher education policy reinforce rather than question educational inequalities. They produce and align ‘shock’ at student underachievement with teachers’ physical and collective bodies, while ‘sympathetically’ responsibilising teachers to professionalise in order to cope with or compensate for persistently ‘different’ and/or underachieving students. To explain how this process is lived and resisted, an analysis of interviews with our own student teachers explores how the affective economy which constitutes teacher education may become contingently directed in socially just or unjust ways. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The 2011Forum on Patronage and Pluralism in the Primary Sectorpresented Ireland with an opportunity to rethink the issue of patronage in Irish primary schools, as well as to consider how ‘religious education’ might be approached in such schools in the future. This paper suggests that, for the first time since 1831, Ireland had an opportunity to provide ‘state schooling’ for all children, regardless of their religious beliefs or lack thereof. The paper proposes educatingallchildren in the state in non-denominational secular settings, leaving faith formation to the private domain of parents and communities. Although the concept of ‘secularism’ has negative connotations for those who belong to a religious community, this paper suggests that it provides a framework for inclusive and egalitarian education, offering children and young people the opportunity to learn alongside their peers, irrespective of religious backgrounds. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The status of school placement in the Republic of Ireland has recently been elevated in importance within a reconceptualisation of initial teacher education (ITE). This paper shares the findings from one case study of a school–university partnership enacted in this regard. The partnership involved a researcher-in-residence at the school championing the concept of a structured authentic democratic partnership. The findings show the impact of a champion at the school site in developing professional conversations among a multiplicity of policy actors. An unexpected finding was the depth of higher order peer cooperation achieved in this first iteration of a structured setting by student teachers. However cultural and contextual challenges abound in seeking to build the trust required to enact authentic partnerships in this regard. The findings have significance for the Teaching Council as they build capacity for new and innovative models of the practicum in ITE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]