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Injustice: why social inequality persists, by Daniel Dorling, Bristol, The Policy Press, 2010, 387 pp., hardcover, ISBN 978 1 84742 426 6 In this book, Daniel Dorling provides a detailed account of...

Education policy shouldn’t focus solely on academic attainment Education policy in England increasingly encourages schools to maximise students’ academic attainment and ignore their broader wellbeing, personal development, and health.1 Schools are now monitored on attainment in a narrow range of academic subjects. Participation in the National Healthy Schools Programme no longer benefits from governmental targets or funding. Ofsted reports no longer focus specifically on how well schools promote students’ health or personal development.2 Personal, social, and health education (PSHE) remains a non-statutory subject, and schools spend less and less time teaching it because of pressure to focus on academic subjects.3 The government recently proposed making the early years foundation stage profile—which offers a holistic view of the child including his or her personal, social, and emotional development—non-statutory. At the same time, it wants to introduce mandatory academic tests in the first year of primary school.4 Two ideas apparently underpin these developments. Firstly, that promoting attainment, on the one hand, and health and …

Systematic and quantitative management of work-related fatigue within workplaces has been a challenging task due to a lack of useful tools. A previous paper provided background and development of a work-related fatigue modelling approach. The current paper outlines model evaluations using sleep deprivation experiments and recommendations of work scheduling. Previous studies have reported cumulative effects of sleep restriction (4-5 h per night) on a number of measures. Model predictions were correlated against psychomotor vigilance task lapses (r = 0.92) and reaction time responses (slowest 10%, r = 0.91) as well as sleep latency (r = -0.97). Further correlations were performed on four measures from a 64 h continuous sleep deprivation study; that is objective vigilance (r = -0.75) as well as subjective performance (r = -0.75), sleepiness (r = 0.82) and tiredness (r = 0.79). Evaluation against current scheduling recommendations illustrated consistency with the literature with the exception that forward rotation did not provide benefits over backward rotation. The results indicate that model predictions correlate well across a range of objective and subjective measures. This relationship also appears to hold for cumulative and continuous sleep deprivation protocols. Future studies will also focus on field-based evaluation.

Shiftwork, and in particular night work, is associated with decreased quantity and quality of sleep. Such changes to sleep manifest themselves in measures such as increased sleepiness, fatigue and accident risk. To manage these risks, particularly in operational environments, a work-related fatigue model has been developed. To date, strong correlations have been observed with a range of measures in empirical and laboratory experiments. This study aimed to determine if these observed relationships between predicted fatigue, alertness and performance also exist in the workplace. Data was analysed from 193 train drivers who filled in sleep and work diaries, wore actigraphs, performed subjective alertness and objective performance tests before and after each shift for a period of two weeks during a normal schedule. Work-related fatigue scores were calculated and compared to alertness and performance measures. The findings of the present study show that there was a stronger relationship between predicted fatigue and self-rated alertness than between predicted fatigue and performance. Furthermore, the fatigue model predicted self-rated alertness better in the afternoon and evening hours, when employees worked up to four consecutive shifts. With further field validation of the current model, there is potential for work-related fatigue to be predicted from actual or potential hours of work. In the future, such models may help to clarify the direct and indirect costs of poor fatigue management on safety, productivity and efficiency.

Parallel programs are typically written in an explicitly parallel fashion using either message passing or shared memory primitives. Message passing is attractive for performance and portability since shared memory machines can efficiently execute message passing programs, however message passing machines cannot in general effectively execute shared memory programs. In order to write a parallel program using message passing, the programmer is often obliged to develop a significant amount of code which manages distributed data and events and parallel input/output, and such code may have little or nothing to do with the application. However many parallel applications have common structural elements and much of this additional code can be encapsulated within a parallel library and reused in several programs. We discuss the requirements the library writer and user makes of the basic message passing interface and describe how we have addressed these requirements in our Common High-Level Interface for Message Passing (CHIMP) project. We also describe how these requirements are supported in the new standard Message Passing Interface (MPI). We then describe a selection of the parallel libraries which we have written in our Parallel Utility Library (PUL) project. These libraries encapsulate common approaches to parallel data and event management and parallel input/output.

Background Secondary schools are increasingly subject to quasi-markets in the UK, Europe and North America, typified by: diversity of school types; parents choosing where to apply; and government publishing school performance data. There is a paucity of research examining these policies potential for harming young people9s health. Aim To develop a logic-model of mechanisms by which market-oriented education policies might influence students9 health. Methods Qualitative case-study research conducted in seven secondary-schools in London and south-east England between 2006 and 2010. Data collected via semi-structured interviews with students aged 11–16 (N=103), school leadership team members (N=12), classroom teachers (N=23) and non-teaching staff (N=4), and observations. Techniques associated with thematic content analysis and grounded theory were used to analyse the data. Results Parental ‘choice’ of secondary-school, and complex admission policies, were associated with the dispersal of students9 friendship groups when transitioning from primary to secondary school, with consequent loss of social support and emotional harms. Greater ‘choice’ was also implicated in some schools being regarded as ‘dumping-grounds’ for socially-disadvantaged students and potentially violent, intimidating environments in which students engaged in risk-behaviours such as drug use and violence to develop protective bonds with peers. All case-study schools were strongly focused on academic attainment due to the emphasis on this from the national school inspectorate and in performance ‘league-tables’. Some schools sought to improve their league-table position by targeting resources on ‘key-marginal’ students on the threshold of achieving five exam passes, the key performance metric. Less academic students could become disaffected, engaging in smoking, drinking and other risk-behaviours as alternative markers of status and bonding, and with fewer reasons to avoid early parenting. The exam-focused environment also aroused anxiety among both high- and low-attainers, some of whom used drugs and solvents as self-medication. Schools also give low priority to any non-academic activities such as health education and sport in this performance-driven context. Conclusion Secondary schools may now be key sites for the production of health-risk and emotional harms, and by which health inequalities are reproduced. We propose a logic-model to guide further research illustrating how, via the above pathways, market reforms might encourage increased violence, substance use, teenage pregnancy, physical inactivity, poorer mental health and health inequalities.

A flawed response to riots and youth offending The British government has recently established the Troubled Families Programme in response to the riots in England in 2011, scaling up a non-negotiable version of the previous government’s Family Intervention Projects. Their aim is to prevent further riots. Key workers will assess the needs of families identified as being troubled and coordinate a year long programme of intensive family support to tackle antisocial behaviour, misuse of drugs and alcohol, and youth crime. However, evidence for the effectiveness of family intervention projects is weak, being made up of small scale evaluations without external comparison groups.1 A systematic review commissioned by the previous government found no studies to support the claim that such interventions improve outcomes for families.2 Even if the programme were effective for those receiving it, targeting 120 000 families, which represent less than 2% of all families in England, would miss most future rioters and young offenders. Public health scientists know that disease prevention approaches aimed only at people identified as at high risk …

Background:\ud There is increasing interest in promoting young people’s health by modifying the school environment. However, existing research offers little guidance on how the school context enables or constrains students’ health behaviours, or how students’ backgrounds relate to these processes. For these reasons, this paper reports on a meta-ethnography of qualitative studies examining: through what processes does the school environment (social and physical) influence young people’s health?\ud \ud Methods:\ud Systematic review of qualitative studies. Sixteen databases were searched, eliciting 62, 329 references which were screened, with included studies quality assessed, data extracted and synthesized using an adaptation of Noblit and Hare’s meta-ethnographic approach.\ud \ud Results:\ud Nineteen qualitative studies were synthesised to explore processes through which school-level influences on young people’s health might occur. Four over-arching meta-themes emerged across studies focused on a range of different health issues. First, aggressive behaviour and substance use are often a strong source of status and bonding at schools where students feel educationally marginalised or unsafe. Second, health-risk behaviours are concentrated in unsupervised ‘hotspots’ at the school. Third, positive relationships with teachers appear to be critical in promoting student wellbeing and limiting risk behaviour; however, certain aspects of schools’ organisation and education policies constrain this, increasing the likelihood that students look for a sense of identity and social support via health-risk behaviours. Fourth, unhappiness at school can cause students to seek sources of ‘escape’, either by leaving school at lunchtime or for longer unauthorized spells or through substance use. These meta-themes resonate with Markham and Aveyard’s theory of human functioning and school organisation, and we draw on these qualitative data to refine and extend this theory, in particular conceptualising more fully the role of young people’s agency and student-led ‘systems’ in constituting school environments and generating health risks.\ud \ud Conclusion:\ud Institutional features which may shape student health behaviours such as lack of safety, poor student-staff relationships and lack of student voice are amenable to interventions and should be the subject of future investigation. Future qualitative research should focus on health behaviours which are under-theorised in this context such as physical activity, sexual and mental health.

Background: Van Belle et al. argue that our attempt to pursue realist evaluation via a randomised trial will be\ud fruitless because we misunderstand realist ontology (confusing intervention mechanisms with intervention activities\ud and with statistical mediation analyses) and because RCTs cannot comprehensively examine how and why\ud outcome patterns are caused by mechanisms triggered in specific contexts.\ud Methods: Through further consideration of our trial methods, we explain more fully how we believe complex\ud social interventions work and what realist evaluation should aim to do within a trial.\ud Results: Like other realists, those undertaking realist trials assume that: social interventions provide resources which\ud local actors may draw on in actions that can trigger mechanisms; these mechanisms may interact with contextual\ud factors to generate outcomes; and data in the ‘empirical’ realm can be used to test hypotheses about mechanisms\ud in the ‘real’ realm. Whether or not there is sufficient contextual diversity to test such hypotheses is a contingent not\ud a necessary feature of trials. Previous exemplars of realist evaluation have compared empirical data from\ud intervention and control groups to test hypotheses about real mechanisms. There is no inevitable reason why\ud randomised trials should not also be able to do so. Random allocation merely ensures the comparability of such\ud groups without necessarily causing evaluation to lapse from a realist into a ‘positivist’ or ‘post-positivist’ paradigm.\ud Conclusions: Realist trials are ontologically and epistemologically plausible. Further work is required to assess\ud whether they are feasible and useful but such work should not be halted on spurious philosophical grounds.\ud Keywords: Randomized controlled trials, Realist evaluation, Scientific realism, Causation