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BackgroundIn patients with COVID-19, granulocyte-macrophage colony stimulating factor (GM-CSF) might be a mediator of the hyperactive inflammatory response associated with respiratory failure and death. We aimed to evaluate whether mavrilimumab, a monoclonal antibody to the GM-CSF receptor, would improve outcomes in patients with COVID-19 pneumonia and systemic hyperinflammation.MethodsThis investigator-initiated, multicentre, double-blind, randomised trial was done at seven hospitals in the USA. Inclusion required hospitalisation, COVID-19 pneumonia, hypoxaemia, and a C-reactive protein concentration of more than 5 mg/dL. Patients were excluded if they required mechanical ventilation. Patients were randomly assigned (1:1) centrally, with stratification by hospital site, to receive mavrilimumab 6 mg/kg as a single intravenous infusion, or placebo. Participants and all clinical and research personnel were masked to treatment assignment. The primary endpoint was the proportion of patients alive and off supplemental oxygen therapy at day 14. The primary outcome and safety were analysed in the intention-to-treat population. This trial is registered at ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT04399980, NCT04463004, and NCT04492514.FindingsBetween May 28 and Sept 15, 2020, 40 patients were enrolled and randomly assigned to mavrilimumab (n=21) or placebo (n=19). A trial of 60 patients was planned, but given slow enrolment, the study was stopped early to inform the natural history and potential treatment effect. At day 14, 12 (57%) patients in the mavrilimumab group were alive and off supplemental oxygen therapy compared with nine (47%) patients in the placebo group (odds ratio 1·48 [95% CI 0·43-5·16]; p=0·76). There were no treatment-related deaths, and adverse events were similar between groups.InterpretationThere was no significant difference in the proportion of patients alive and off oxygen therapy at day 14, although benefit or harm of mavrilimumab therapy in this patient population remains possible given the wide confidence intervals, and larger trials should be completed.FundingKiniksa Pharmaceuticals.

Historians of education are well placed to engage in applied historical approaches providing authoritative evidence of the past to inform policy and practice. This article is based on the presidential keynote delivered at the History of Education Society (UK) annual conference in 2019. As such it reflects on possible future directions for the history of education and considers the role of informal educational activity that takes place outside the classroom, including that of children's reading for pleasure. Stories in the interwar British, Canadian and Australian "Girl's" and "Boy's" annuals provide an example of how appropriate gender roles were presented to their young readers at a time of intense social and political change for Britain. With Brexit heralding a similar significant moment of change and the pandemic lockdowns resulting in children spending more time at home, it is concluded that the significance of 'informal' education, both historically and today, requires our attention.

The remit for this short piece was to identify themes emerging from the articles in this edition by Julie McLeod, Duncan Waite and Eugenie Samier, to consider how these themes reflect on the current field, and to identify their ongoing relevance. Additionally, I was asked to consider the current challenges that the field is facing and what this means for research and journals such as this one. My short response is that our research has to matter. It has to matter to us as individuals so that what we do is worthwhile; it has to matter that we can provide rigorous research that is reliable so that it can inform policy makers and administrators; and it has to provide teachers and students with a greater understanding of why they are doing what they are being asked to do.

This article focuses on the series of 11 books about a young female pilot, "Worrals of the WAAF," by W.E. Johns, creator of Biggles. The Worrals books were published from 1941 when recruitment for the Women's Auxiliary Air Force was falling. Johns chose to ignore that the WAAF supported pilots through their work on the ground and did not themselves fly. The article discusses how historians of education can draw on fiction in order to identify aspects of informal education, especially during wartime, when so many children's formal schooling was disrupted or non-existent. Drawing on Erica Jong's 1970s metaphor of "flying" as representative of female freedom, it is possible to read Worrals' character as a role model for teenage girls. The conundrum of why Johns chose to put Worrals in the WAAF, rather than in Air Transport with the likes of Amy Johnson, is further explored in the light of evidence that a number of WAAF were seconded to the SOE. It concludes that fiction read alongside a range of other evidence offers a rich source for the historian engaged in a search for the gendered nature of education beyond the classroom.

In 1927 the British Federation of University Women (BFUW) established Crosby Hall in London as a hall of residence for women graduates from overseas. The Federation aimed to foster international understanding and peace at a time of social and political turmoil. Accessions to the library at the Hall were on a somewhat ad hoc basis and provide an intriguing historical source. Crosby Hall was sold, but the much loved library travelled first to Bloomsbury and ultimately to the Special Collections of a university. This article discusses the sensory power of a book collection for the historian drawing on recent reflections on the affective turn in history of education. Is it more than the sum of its parts? Does the collection hold more meaning if held separately rather than integrated onto the general shelves? What are the possibilities inherent in research on rather than in a collection such as this? (Contains 5 figures and 72 footnotes.)

Changes in governmental financial support are causing many would-be students to question the value of higher education or to consider attending a local university. Oral history testimonies provide a source for understanding the role that living, as well as working, within an academic community plays in the learning lives of its alumni. An understanding of the cultural and social space provided by an institution offers an insight into how time spent in higher education remains integral to long-term learning lives, often articulated as marking a "watershed" or inspiration. Interviews for the University of Winchester Alumni Voices project invited alumni and retired staff to reflect on the process of learning generated by their time at Winchester (previously King Alfred's College). At the article's core is the significance of oral history narratives to the social history of learners and learning. We discuss how we have developed voice relational analysis in order to interrogate the transformative impact of learning on individuals' sense of self. The richness of the data from a small scale research project and the increasing sophistication of oral history methodology demonstrate the relatively untapped potential that histories of higher education hold for understanding individual learning lives. (Contains 1 note.)

Britain in the 1950s offered increased opportunities for secondary education leading to better career prospects at a time of full employment. A government report into early leaving in 1954 noted that it was girls of all social classes who were most "at risk" of not staying the course. The following article discusses first the nature of risk and suggests that for girls perhaps, staying at school and delaying marriage, at a time when unequal pay and opportunities were the norm, was perceived as more of a risk than the safety of marriage and dependent domesticity. It then considers the concerns of the "Early Leaving" Report in more detail. Despite the attempts by policy makers to encourage girls into education, there were rival discourses which persuaded girls into domesticity and the article concludes by indicating the varied and pervasive nature of some of this rhetoric. (Contains 68 footnotes.)

This article discusses the possibility for expanding our understanding of the visual to include the "spoken visual" within oral history analysis. It suggests that adding a further reading, that of the visualized body, to the voice-centred relational method we can consider the meaning of the uniformed body for the individual. It uses as a case-study reflections on a photograph taken of a group of girls on a school outing and their adult interpretation of the meaning of the modifications to their school uniform. Extracts from oral history interviews with girls who left school in South London in the late 1950s are also used to demonstrate the frequency with which respondents refer to how they looked in order to express in more detail how they felt. (Contains 1 figure and 85 footnotes.)

Brian Simon used the phrase 'site of struggle' to describe the class-based inequalities that were played out in the provisions for English compulsory education. In the nineteenth century, the growth of the state system for the working class alongside the predominantly middle-class independent sector simply confirmed existing class hierarchies with social mobility through secondary education only available to a select few. The 1944 Education Act abolished fees in all state-aided secondary schools in twentieth-century England and Wales but this did not mean that all pupils now received what had previously been described as secondary education. Indeed, for working-class girls and boys growing up in the 1950s, the experience of secondary education seems to have been aeons away from the ideals generated by the rhetoric of building a better future after the problems of wartime. Writing of education in Britain in the postwar period, Ken Jones has identified a longstanding conflict between the elitism endemic in British political and social life and any attempt to provide undifferentiated education spaces. 'For most students, and most teachers, schooling was about the basics of literacy, numeracy and socialisation. It was endured without enthusiasm; it was a place riddled with teacher-student antagonisms; it was something if not ... to be run away from, then at least to be left quickly behind'. More than 40 years on, the 1988 Education Act heralded league tables, Standard Assessment Tests and a National Curriculum designed to offer equality of opportunity to all children yet Simon also noted that the changes were as much about political differences as increasing the quality of educational provision. Conservative plans within the 1988 Act, he argued, were intended to 'develop a competitive hierarchic structure of schooling through establishment of a market system in education, and to strengthen the privatisation of the system'.