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Headteachers of Catholic schools in England in the early twenty-first century are facing unprecedented challenges in exercising their role. In addition to concerns about funding and recruitment, le...

Within the context of a national shortage of high quality applicants for senior leadership posts, there is a need to nurture future leaders in Catholic primary and secondary schools and to promote their professional development and formation. If they are to be fully effective, teachers in Catholic schools need continually to develop their leadership skills and, crucially, they need to understand how they can best support the educational mission of the Catholic Church. This paper tells the story of the establishment and continuing development of a unique M-level programme, which sets out to combine a Catholic philosophy of education with the principles and practice of effective school leadership.

In spite of their academic and social success, Catholic schools in England have been subject to a variety of challenges and changes in recent years. This paper draws on the findings of an investigation based on interviews that the writer carried out among a number of headteachers working in Catholic schools in the Midlands and south-east England. The intention of the investigation was to elicit their views about the leadership challenges they face in their experience of headship. In considering the challenges that headteachers in Catholic schools face, the writer concludes that it seems they encounter significant and increasing tensions in attempting to fulfil the faith mission of the Catholic Church within a prevailing secular culture and a competitive educational environment.

Techniques are described for optimising the Ewald sum in the simulation of systems containing large numbers of charged particles. Expressions are given for the best choice of parameters to maximise performance for a specified accuracy. The algorithm for the real-space sum uses a “small-cell” version of the link-cell method. Various other computational details are discussed. In the simulation of real systems there is considerable scope for speeding the calculation by redcing cutoffs, without loss of accuracy.

A study is made of four algorithms which integrate the rotational equations of motion for rigid linear molecules. They are leapfrog algorithms in the sense that the quantities saved between time steps are the on-step orientation and the mid-step angular velocity. Thermostatted versions of the algorithms as well as conventional energy-conserving versions are described. The algorithms are extensively tested in simulations of liquid nitrogen, the aim being to study the effect of increased time steps on a range of measured properties. The most successful algorithm, based on applying a lenght constraint to the axis vector, shows remarkable stability and can be used with very large time steps.

The truncated octahedron (TO) and the rhombic dodecahedron (RD) are two space filling shapes, which have special advantages as simulation cells for molecular dynamics [1, 2]. This article addresses the particular problem of how to incorporate the Ewald sum [3, 4] in simulations employing these unusual boundary conditions.

A new implicit rotational integrator for the orientation of rigid molecules is introduced, and compared with an existing explicit integrator. Both algorithms are categorised as leapfrogs since the quantities saved between time steps are on the on-step orientation and the mid-step angular momentum. Orientations may be expressed in terms of principal axis vectors or, as in the implementations used here, quaternions. Thermostatted versions of the algorithms as well as conventional energy-conserving versions are described. The algorithms are extensively tested in simulations of liquid water, the aim being to study the effect of increased time steps on a range of measured properties. The implicit algorithm is superior to the explicit algorithm, and can be used with time steps up to 3 fs with energy-conserving dynamics. When thermostatted, it may be used with time steps up to at least 6 fs.

A systolic loop method for parallel molecular dynamics, previously written in Occam, is reimplemented in Fortran using a general message-passing library. The method is extended to include a conventional neighbour list, fully distributed over the processors. A modification of the systolic loop method, called systolic replication, permits a parallel implementation of the fastest known sequential algorithm, in which a link-cell spatial decomposition is used to form the distributed neighbour list. The performance of each method, for a liquid argon simulation, is measured on a Transputer system and analysed in terms of the concept of scaleability. Some measurements are also made using i860 processors. The best performance achieved is 5000 particle moves per second, using 28 Transputers.

It is evident that secondary schools organise themselves in different ways for the purposes of pastoral organisation. In general these can be characterised as either horizontal or vertical structures, depending on whether a Year or House system has been adopted. From a survey of secondary schools in one particular local education authority, it appears that the most common and popular approach for secondary schools to organise pastoral care is based on a Year (horizontal) system in which Heads of Year have overall responsibility for pupils in one age‐group. However, one potential problem is that such an arrangement may give rise to an artificial separation of pastoral and academic concerns. In comparing and contrasting the respective advantages of Year and House systems of pastoral organisation and management, David Fincham examines a model in which a school sets out to combine pastoral and academic concerns by establishing a vertical (House) system. Whilst acknowledging that pastoral care implies...

(1982). The Implications of the Concept of Lifelong Education for the Secondary School in the United Kingdom. International Journal of Lifelong Education: Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 223-235.

(1989). Towards an Evaluation of Pastoral Care. Pastoral Care in Education: Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 30-38.

The term “molecular simulation” covers a variety of techniques that can be applied to many problems in classical statistical mechanics, ranging from lattice spin models to the dynamics of protein molecules. Two well-established techniques. Metropolis Monte Carlo and molecular dynamics, serve to illustrate the computational problems involved. The requirement for powerful and cost-effective computing has led to an interest in parallel computers in this field. Parallel computers are defined as computers having several processors working simultaneously under the control of an application program. The processors may obey common (SIMD) or individual (MIMD) instruction streams. The ICL DAP is an example of the former; the Intel hypercube is an example of an MIMD or concurrent machine employing conventional microprocessors. The INMOS Transputer is a high-performance microprocessor designed specifically for concurrent processing. SIMD computers may be programmed in versions of Fortran extended to include ...