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Special Olympics promotes the health of their athletes year-round and offers their athletes options to obtain free health screenings. Following screening events, athletes often have difficulties finding needed referral care. Obstacles to finding a healthcare provider (HCP) for a referral is what necessitates the need for a state-wide HCP referral list in South Dakota. Creation of a HCP referral list was done via an online two-part survey and sent to HCPs throughout the state of South Dakota. Currently, this is the only database of healthcare providers that is accessible to individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) that are members of Special Olympics South Dakota (SOSD). While the created referral list offers increased opportunities to access HCPs in South Dakota, there are still limits to ensuring easy access to HCPs throughout the entire state.

In this paper we explore the concept of the middle tier in education systems, outlining how it is a crucial element that links high-level education policy to the practices that are carried out in schools. Reflecting on the similarities and differences in the profiles of the middle tiers of the four nations of the United Kingdom (UK), we observe how they are part of a complex educational ecosystem. While noting that there are variations in the profiles of the middle tiers we also highlight how they share some common functions that are key to mediating the way that policy links with schools. Using a four nations comparative approach to analyse the middle tier allows us a more nuanced understanding of how education policy works in general, but also how policy works in each particular national context.

The concept of educational recovery is relevant to many systems, both those that experience some form of sudden disruption as well as those that historically have been prone to disruption. Our involvement in developing a curriculum framework for displaced learners in the Learning Passport project (UNICEF, 2020) made us more aware of the field of Education in Emergencies. An educational emergency is a situation where "man-made or natural disasters destroy, within a short period of time, the usual conditions of life, care and education facilities for children and therefore disrupt, deny, hinder, progress or delay the realisation of the right to education" (Committee on the Rights of the Child, 2008, p. 1). The COVID-19 pandemic has made the concept of emergency and recovery more relevant to even more education systems. The literature review described in this article was carried out to identify what recovery curricula are (e.g., what they seek to achieve, what information they cover, etc.), as well as to consider any evidence for their efficacy. By exploring the recovery curricula literature, we also wanted to consider the extent to which the concept is a singular, generalisable one, or whether it is tied to specific contexts.

There is a pressing need to develop processes to facilitate the organization of education responses in time-pressured emergency situations. As part of a joint Learning Passport (LP) partnership project with UNICEF, researchers along with curriculum and subject specialists at the University of Cambridge, UK, developed a curriculum framework that could be used as a resource for coordinating the actions of education specialists and practitioners in Education in Emergencies (EiE) situations. This article outlines the curriculum framework design approach they developed for the Maths and Science components of the LP framework. The article outlines a three-stage curriculum framework development model, which involves consideration of "context," leading to "descriptor generation," and attending to "cohesion building elements."

Inspired by the work of David Raffe and his co-authors who set out the positive benefits gained from comparing the policies of "the UK home nations" in an article published in 1999, researchers in the Education and Curriculum Team launched a project in early 2020 that we called Curriculum Watch. The aim of this project was to collate a literature and documents database of education and curriculum policies, research and analyses from across the four countries of the United Kingdom (UK). In this article, we draw on our literature database to make sense of the rapid changes in education policy that occurred in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in the four UK nations of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. We analyse some of the key areas of UK policy formation and content (in relation to curriculum, pedagogy and assessment) that we observed during the first six months of the unfolding pandemic. In addition, we reiterate the clear benefits of using comparative research methods in the UK context: our research findings support the idea that closeness of national contexts offers the opportunity for evidence exchange and policy learning in education.