Teaching GBAs with pre-service teachers: Learning lessons when developing a degree programme [Blog Post]

This blog provides a reflection on Ellen’s experiences of the new Models-Based Pedagogy Module on the revalidated BSc Physical Education with QTS course at the University of Sunderland. The personal observations and reflections highlight the students’ understanding of Game-Based Approaches (GBAs) (Bunker and Thorpe, 1982; Gambles and Gutierrez, 2023; TGfU SIG, 2021) and their application in assignments and teaching sessions. Provided are some key learning points and strategies that we could implement to strengthen our degree programme

Neuroscience in Criminal Justice Systems The Positive Impact of Neurojustice

This edited collection shows the tangible and positive impacts neuroscience is having in specific jurisdictions for individuals involved in the criminal justice system as witnesses, victims, defendants and legal practitioners. Over the last 30 years, neuroscience has significantly informed legal, philosophical, and doctrinal discussions by deepening our understanding of the relationships between the brain, mind, and criminality. By embracing a practical and realist approach, this book explores the fundamental question of what and how neuroscience has been concretely contributing to criminal justice, with a specific focus on international systems. Notably, the volume brings together perspectives to discuss neuroscience's positive impact on the global criminal justice process. It provides an overview of different legal dimensions that have been thus far positively impacted by neuroscience, as well as some discussion on its future applications to improve the treatment of system-impacted people. To this aim, the book covers two key areas: criminal trials; and punishment, treatment, and reform. This work will appeal to academics, criminal lawyers, judges, policy-makers and reformers interested in how neuroscience contributes to meaningful changes in the criminal justice system. The reader will gain significant insights into neuroscience's present and immediate future contributions to different dimensions of the criminal justice process through original exploration by legal academics and practitioners

How Has Neuroscience Positively Contributed to English Youth Justice?

This chapter explores the contributions of neuroscientific evidence of adolescent brain development to youth justice law and policy in England and Wales. It will show that the youth justice system in England and Wales continues not to support children and young people's developmental immaturity and lack of capacity. In English law, children are held criminally responsible and punished for their actions from 10 years of age because it is assumed that they possess the legally relevant capacities necessary for blame. However, the latest neuroscientific evidence suggests that maturation is a long and complex process that stretches into adulthood. The developmental differences in the brain’s biochemistry and anatomy limit children’s ability to perceive risks, control impulses, understand consequences, and control emotions. The prefrontal lobe is involved in the control of aggression and other behavioural impulses related to criminal responsibility. Yet, this lobe is the last area to mature, developing in the twenties rather than the teen years. This evidence highlights that the child’s inexperience and under-developed powers of self-control and reasoning make them prone to acting in ways they cannot help, understand, or intend. These insights show that some children deserve to be excused from criminal responsibility, and abolishing the defence of doli incapax was short-sighted. This chapter will develop the argument that the youth justice system should support the child’s development by more explicitly considering the Child First imperative of promoting their status as capacity-evolving persons. The chapter will conclude by proposing the introduction of a developmental immaturity defence

Structured Coaching Frameworks for Inclusive and Personalized Education: Empowering Neurodivergent Learners

This chapter explores the importance of empowering neurodivergent learners through coaching psychology, focusing on structured frameworks that promote inclusive and personalised education. Acknowledging the unique cognitive, emotional, and social profiles of autistic individuals, ADHDers, dyslexics, and others, the chapter emphasises the necessity for tailored approaches that recognise each learner's strengths and challenges. Educators and coaches can cultivate an environment that encourages self- efficacy, goal- setting, and resilience by integrating coaching frameworks such as the GROW model, CLEAR model, Solution- Focused Coaching, and Motivational Interviewing. This inclusive approach shifts the focus from deficits to strengths, allowing neurodivergent individuals to thrive academically and personally. Through evidence- based practices and a commitment to celebrating neurodiversity, the chapter advocates for a learning landscape where every learner can achieve their full potential, fostering a culture of appreciation and acceptance within educational settings

The secondary school curriculum

This unit examines the central role of the secondary school curriculum in shaping educational experiences and outcomes. It explores how 'the curriculum' encompasses far more than traditional subject disciplines, extending to all activities promoting intellectual, personal, social and physical development of pupils. The unit traces the evolution from teacher-controlled curriculum decisions to government-prescribed frameworks, examining how political, social and economic factors influence curriculum content and structure. Through comparative analysis of different national approaches across the UK, beginning teachers are encouraged to understand curriculum as both a contested space and a tool for social transformation. The unit emphasises teacher agency, demonstrating how beginning teachers can move beyond simply delivering prescribed content to become active curriculum makers who adapt and transform curriculum documents into meaningful learning experiences

Disentangled Image-Text Classification: Enhancing Visual Representations with MLLM-driven Knowledge Transfer

Multimodal image-text classification plays a critical role in applications such as content moderation, news recommendation, and multimedia understanding. Despite recent advances, visual modality faces higher representation learning complexity than textual modality in semantic extraction, which often leads to a semantic gap between visual and textual representations. In addition, conventional fusion strategies introduce cross-modal redundancy, further limiting classification performance. To address these issues,we proposeMD-MLLM, a novel image-text classification framework that leverages large multimodal language models (MLLMs) to generate semantically enhanced visual representations. To mitigate redundancy introduced by direct MLLM feature integration, we introduce a hierarchical disentanglement mechanism based on the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC) and orthogonality constraints, which explicitly separates modality-specific and shared representations. Furthermore, a hierarchical fusion strategy combines original unimodal features with disentangled shared semantics, promoting discriminative feature learning and cross-modal complementarity. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, N24News and Food101, show that MD-MLLM achieves consistently stable improvements in classification accuracy and exhibits competitive performance compared with various representative multimodal baselines. The framework also demonstrates good generalization ability and robustness across different multimodal scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/xiaohaochen0308/MD-MLLM

The transition of clinical Nurses to academic Roles: An interpretative phenomenological inquiry into identity development

Background: The transition from clinical practice to academia represents a profound career shift for nurses, involving significant changes in professional identity, skill application, and work environment. Aim: To explore the experiences of nurses who had recently made the transition from a clinical nursing role to an academic teaching role. Methods: An interpretive phenomenological approach was adopted. This was enhanced through using communities of practice as a theoretical lens. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven (7) nurses from across the UK. Interviews were participant led, allowing them to discuss elements of their professional identity, both old and new. Reflexive Thematic Analysis was used to analyse the collected data. Results: The following themes were identified within the analysis: finding my passion; institutional and colligate support; and acceptance of new(er) identity. Conclusions: There is a need for structured onboarding programs and robust peer support networks to effectively integrate and sustain communities of practice; ongoing professional development opportunities, particularly in areas such as Information Technology, were identified as pivotal to aiding adaptation to academic roles

Cleaner air, healthier hospitals: Implementing the UK's Clean Air Hospital Framework

National healthcare services significantly contribute to ambient air pollution and greenhouse gases, particularly through transport and energy generation. Hospitals bring together vulnerable patients in high-traffic settings often in urban areas where there are significant baseline concentrations of ambient pollutants. Therefore, there is a requirement for hospitals to look at ways of reducing their emissions of airborne pollutants, ideally within the framework of achieving net zero goals. This study details the initial implementation of the UK's Clean Air Hospital Framework (CAHF) at two major UK hospitals. CAHF is a proactive self-assessment tool designed to reduce the generation of air pollution from hospital activities. It comprises 215 compliance actions across seven key categories: travel, procurement, design & construction, energy generation, communication & training, outreach & leadership and local air quality. CAHF implementation has focused on sustainable travel options, parking policy, energy efficiency improvements, staff training, education, the adoption of green procurement policies and the incorporation of sustainable travel considerations into new infrastructure designs. Currently, the hospitals are more than half-way towards achieving their implementation goal. To monitor the future overall effectiveness of CAHF, a network of 32 NO2 diffusion tubes was set up across the hospital sites, together with continuous monitors for NO2, PM10 and PM2.5 measurement, and four indoor particulate matter monitors at each hospital. The monitoring programme was supplemented with the development of an ADMS-Urban dispersion model for the site, focussing on emissions from significant adjacent road networks. This study provides an evidence-based exemplar for the CAHF approach and provides a blueprint to support other hospitals to engage in this process

Providing an e-cigarette starter kit for smoking cessation and reduction as adjunct to usual care to smokers with a mental health condition: findings from the ESCAPE feasibility study

Background: Smoking rates in the UK have declined steadily over the past decades, masking considerable inequalities, as little change has been observed among people with a mental health condition. This trial sought to assess the feasibility and acceptability of supplying an electronic cigarette (e-cigarette) starter kit for smoking cessation as an adjunct to usual care for smoking cessation, to smokers with a mental health condition treated in the community, to inform a future effectiveness trial. Methods: This randomised controlled feasibility trial, conducted March-December 2022, compared the intervention (e-cigarette starter kit with a corresponding information leaflet and demonstration with Very Brief Advice) with a ‘usual care’ control at 1-month follow-up. Participants were ≥ 18 years, receiving treatment for any mental health condition in primary or secondary care in three Mental Health Trusts in Yorkshire and one in London, UK. They were also willing to address their smoking through either cessation or reduction of cigarette consumption. The agreed primary outcome measure was feasibility (consent ~ 15% of eligible participants; attrition rate < 30%). Acceptability, validated sustained abstinence and ≥ 50% cigarette consumption reduction at 1-month, were also evaluated and qualitative interviews conducted to further explore acceptability in this population. Results: Feasibility targets were partially met; of 201 eligible participants, 43 (mean age = 45.2, SD = 12.7; 39.5% female) were recruited (21.4%) and randomised (intervention:48.8%, n = 21; control:51.2%, n = 22). Attrition rate was 37.2% at 1-month follow-up and was higher (45.5%) in the control group. At follow-up (n = 27), 93.3% (n = 14) in the intervention group and 25.0% (n = 3) in the control group reported e-cigarette use. The intervention was well received with minimal negative effects. In intention-to-treat analysis, validated sustained abstinence at 1-month was 2/21 (9.5%) and 0/22 (0%) and at least 50% reduction in cigarette consumption 13/21 (61.9%) and 3/22 (13.6%), for the intervention and control group, respectively. Qualitative analysis of participant interviews (N = 5) showed the intervention was broadly acceptable, but they also highlighted areas of improvements for the intervention and trial delivery. Conclusions: Offering an e-cigarette starter kit to smokers with a mental health condition treated in the community was acceptable and largely feasible, with harm reduction outcomes (i.e. switching from cigarette smoking to e-cigarette use and substantial reduction in cigarette consumption) favouring the intervention. The findings of the study will be used to help inform the design of a main trial. Trial Registration: Registry: ISRCTN. Registration number: ISRCTN17691451. Date of registration: 30/09/202

Leveraging blockchain technology to enhance healthcare supply chain performance: a resilience capability perspective

Purpose Healthcare organizations increasingly focus on improving supply chain performance (SCP) through technological advancement. While blockchain technology (BCT) has emerged as a transformative tool, the mechanisms through which healthcare organizations can leverage BCT to enhance healthcare supply chain performance (HSCP) remain unclear. This paper bridges this gap by examining how BCT drives HSCP through three (3) dimensions of supply chain resilience (SCR) absorptive capability, response capability and recovery capability (REC) via the dynamic capability perspective. Design/methodology/approach The model was validated using empirical data collected from 374 senior officers of healthcare facilities in Ghana. The covariance-based (AMOS) structural equation modeling was used. Findings The results showed that BCT significantly enhances SCR and performance within the healthcare setting. The findings further revealed that all three (3) dimensions of SCR partially mediate the BCT and HSCP link. Originality/value Despite the growing interest of scholars and industry players in the relevance of blockchain utilization, it is still unclear how it could be leveraged to enhance supply chain outcomes in life-saving supply chains like healthcare. This paper, therefore, constitutes the pioneering attempt to offer empirical evidence on the relevance of BCT in enhancing HSCP directly and indirectly through resilience strategies. The paper offers fresh managerial insight to justify how BCT can be used to build resilience and efficient supply chains in the healthcare setting in developing regions like Africa