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This paper applies a posthumanist lens, informed by the work of Hollett and Ehret and of Ingold, to consider children's playful affective entanglements with the human and the more-than-human during fluctuating periods of social distancing in the COVID-19 pandemic. Through this refracting theoretical lens, I (re)examine a selection of play and leisure experiences of an emergent subject -- the pandemic child -- during the national U.K. lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. Via a national online, qualitative survey, children and families were invited to share examples of their play and leisure experiences during the pandemic to the Play Observatory, a U.K. research project that ran from 2020 to 2022. These survey contributions provide portals through which to (re)consider children's connection, participation and emergent becomings, attuning analytical attention towards children's affective place-event entanglements during pandemic times. A posthumanist (re)telling of children's Play Observatory contributions demonstrates how children were imbricated in constantly emergent affects, meanings, becomings and potentialities, that waxed and waned, intensified and dissipated, transcending the physical locus of lockdown. This paper contributes to the field by unsettling discourses of rupture, loss and deficit that have tended to dominate public and policy discussions of children's experience of lockdowns. It contributes to ongoing, collective attempts to interrupt policy responses to the pandemic that centre individualising practices of curriculum 'catch-up' and fail to invite into the debate consideration of the potential richness of experiences and events encountered by the pandemic child outside of the strictures of normal schooling and curriculum.

The COVID-19 lockdown in the UK during the spring of 2020 led to the closure of schools and school premises to most students, including complementary school pupils; yet while the lockdown in autumn 2020 allowed state schools to remain open, Polish complementary schools found themselves in an ambiguous position. This paper explores the experiences of eight Polish complementary school heads, focusing on their response to lockdown and the measures they took to provide online learning through the year. The paper also examines how changing lockdown policies impacted the running of their schools. Key findings suggest a creative approach was taken to learning, and that students were eager to respond. Meanwhile, there was increasing cooperation between different schools and support from external organisations. However, the challenges of online learning were also highlighted. Additionally, heads expressed concern about student retention and recruitment, and the potential long-term effects on their school. There was also discussion about the position of complementary schools within the broader education system. The paper argues that these findings highlight questions of inequality between the complementary and mainstream sectors, which has been exacerbated by the pandemic.

This paper focuses on the epistemic inequality of international students as a "new" inequality that is under-represented in the current debates about decolonisation (albeit shaped by colonial discourses depicting international students as in deficit and incapable of meeting the standards of (colonial) universities). In this theoretical context, the paper reflects on a multi-modal digital methodology used in a research project that aimed to understand how international students deploy their epistemological resources to learn the curriculum. The paper describes selected artefacts submitted by the students around which their epistemic frames were expressed, suggesting where these may be concealed by epistemological situatedness of the lecturers. Based on the analysis of these artefacts, the paper develops and interrogates an epistemology for support towards interrogating the role of our own epistemological binaries in adversely affecting students' epistemic frames in the curriculum. As such, it contributes to a gap in the literature around decolonial pedagogy, and its role in tackling educational inequalities.

Background: Nurses, midwives and paramedics are the largest collective group of clinical staff in the National Health Service and have some of the highest prevalence of psychological ill-health. Existing literature tends to be profession-specific and focused on individual interventions that place responsibility for good psychological health with nurses, midwives and paramedics themselves., Aim: To improve understanding of how, why and in what contexts nurses, midwives and paramedics experience work-related psychological ill-health; and determine which high-quality interventions can be implemented to minimise psychological ill-health in these professions., Methods: Realist synthesis methodology consistent with realist and meta-narrative evidence syntheses: evolving standards' reporting guidelines., Data Sources: First round database searching in Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online Database ALL (via Ovid), cumulative index to nursing and allied health literature database (via EBSCO) and health management information consortium database (via Ovid), was undertaken between February and March 2021, followed by supplementary searching strategies (e.g. hand searching, expert solicitation of key papers). Reverse chronology screening was applied, aimed at retaining 30 relevant papers in each profession. Round two database searches (December 2021) targeted COVID-19-specific literature and literature reviews. No date limits were applied., Results: We built on seven key reports and included 75 papers in the first round (26 nursing, 26 midwifery, 23 paramedic) plus 44 expert solicitation papers, 29 literature reviews and 49 COVID-19 focused articles in the second round. Through the realist synthesis we surfaced 14 key tensions in the literature and identified five key findings, supported by 26 context mechanism and outcome configurations. The key findings identified the following: (1) interventions are fragmented, individual-focused and insufficiently recognise cumulative chronic stressors; (2) it is difficult to promote staff psychological wellness where there is a blame culture; (3) the needs of the system often override staff well-being at work ('serve and sacrifice'); (4) there are unintended personal costs of upholding and implementing values at work; and (5) it is challenging to design, identify and implement interventions to work optimally for diverse staff groups with diverse and interacting stressors., Conclusions: Our realist synthesis strongly suggests the need to improve the systemic working conditions and the working lives of nurses, midwives and paramedics to improve their psychological well-being. Individual, one-off psychological interventions are unlikely to succeed alone. Psychological ill-health is highly prevalent in these staff groups (and can be chronic and cumulative as well as acute) and should be anticipated and prepared for, indeed normalised and expected. Healthcare organisations need to (1) rebalance the working environment to enable healthcare professionals to recover and thrive; (2) invest in multi-level system approaches to promote staff psychological well-being; and use an organisational diagnostic framework, such as the NHS England and NHS Improvement Health and Wellbeing framework, to self-assess and implement a systems approach to staff well-being., Future Work: Future research should implement, refine and evaluate systemic interventional strategies. Interventions and evaluations should be co-designed with front-line staff and staff experts by experience, and tailored where possible to local, organisational and workforce needs., Limitations: The literature was not equivalent in size and quality across the three professions and we did not carry out citation searches using hand searching and stakeholder/expert suggestions to augment our sample., Study Registration: This study is registered as PROSPERO CRD42020172420. Available from: https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/display_record.php?ID=CRD42020172420., Funding: This award was funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Health and Social Care Delivery Research programme (NIHR award ref: NIHR129528) and is published in full in Health and Social Care Delivery Research ; Vol. 12, No. 9. See the NIHR Funding and Awards website for further award information.

This paper explores tensions and ambiguities for UK HE teachers during COVID-19. It analyses changed behaviours and routines for existing hybrid workers experienced in online pedagogy through three core axes of "precarity and security;" "time and perceptions of time;" and "communication." Twelve participants supplied photographs and written narratives depicting their teaching during the pandemic. To understand working lives at this liminal time, we undertook three-level photographic and content analysis, examining the interplay between homeworking challenges and extremities with an accompanying range of emotional responses. Findings include changed routines, new independence, and tensions around resulting autonomy in a liminal lockdown phase when everyday life was anything but. Recommendations for HE management are to ensure that effective communication and collaboration are privileged between management and academic staff. Moving forward, the value of academic judgement and voice should be acknowledged as much as teaching capacity in strategic planning and tuition delivery.

In response to the spread of COVID-19 in early 2020, schools across the UK moved to virtual teaching arrangements for the majority of their learners. Some localized school closures occurred in England in February 2020, with a national lockdown following in March 2020. Although relaxed in June 2020, concerns about rising cases of the virus led to a second period of enforced school closure across the UK in January 2021. With no sign of the pandemic abating, we wanted to gain insights into teachers' experiences at this unique time. We used a solicited diary method with teachers over a 4-month period to reflect on workload and wellbeing issues related to their changing teaching practices. The diaries were supplemented by a series of teacher interviews. In this paper, we carry out a critical reflection of diary use. We observe how diaries provide a structure for eliciting ideas in an ordered way, and which then become a resource for a teacher's professional reflection. This process also appears to strengthen some of the social connections that were compromised during the social distancing periods of the pandemic, and which has benefits for teachers' wellbeing.

Objective: This review summarizes evidence pertaining to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the psychological health of children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Materials and Methods: An electronic search was conducted using four major databases--PubMed, ScienceDirect, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. Using an umbrella methodology, the reference lists of relevant papers were reviewed, and citation searches were conducted. The study included articles written in English between January 2020 and March 2021 that focused on the psychological health of autistic children and adolescents. Results: All eight studies included in the final review were cross-sectional. Three of the eight studies were conducted in Italy, two in Turkey, and one study each in Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom, with a total of 1,407 participants. All studies used a mixture of standardized and non-standardized questionnaires to collect data. The total number of patients were 1407 at a mean age of 9.53 (SD = 2.96) years. Seven studies report gender; male 74.7% (657/880) and female 25.3% (223/880). The finding showed that behavioral issues in children and adolescents with ASD have significantly increased; 521 (51.9 percent) of the 1004 individuals with ASD presented with behavioral changes, including conduct problems, emotional problems, aggression, and hyperactivity. Some studies also found increased anxiety and difficulties managing emotions. Only one study reported clinical stabilization in children with ASD during COVID-19. Finally, 82.7% of families and caregivers of children with ASD (544 out of 658) faced challenges during COVID-19. Conclusion: Although the studies in this review suggest a general worsening of ASD children's clinical status, it remains difficult to draw definitive conclusions at this moment, with newer COVID-19 variants on the rise worldwide. During this difficult pandemic period, caregivers, families, and healthcare professionals are recommended to pay more attention to the ASD patients' health and care needs.

This paper reports on a study of Chinese parents' involvement in their children's heritage language (HL) development during the COVID-19 lockdowns in the UK. Involving seven transnational families, we examined the roles parents played during the online learning sessions and the factors shaping their involvement. Employing a netnographic approach, this study incorporates online classroom observations, semi-structured and focus group interviews with parents, and analysis of their Instagram posts. The study underscores the critical role of parental involvement (PI) in enhancing children's HL education, offering insights into distinct parental roles, including as emotional supporters, co-educators, teaching assistants, and technical supporters. The study introduces a three-dimensional PI model within the framework of family language policy (FLP), enhancing our understanding of FLP by concretely manifesting what, how and why parents get involved in their children's HL development. This study contributes to the discourse on PI and FLP, shedding light on the evolving roles of parents and the complexity of their involvement during the unique circumstances of the pandemic.

This paper troubles the narrative around childhood as a 'timeless zone' (James and Prout 2015), which is particularly evident in the performative culture of education. Conversational-style interviews -- and in some cases, re-interviews -- were conducted with four UK Mums during their time of COVID-19 home-schooling. Subsequent interpretive analysis highlighted a paradoxical problem; in many ways, Mums' new responsibilities to their children's education conflicted with their caring responsibilities. I suggest that this illustrates ways in which Mums have unwittingly learned to prioritise hypothetical futures over subjective experiences. Their stories also demonstrate the importance of embracing human experience in an educational context.