The Legacy of ERA, Privatization and the Policy Ratchet

This article explores the ways in which the neo-liberal impetus toward the privatization of state schooling signalled in the Education Reform Act 1988 (ERA) has become embedded in the English school system. Four main points are made. First, that ERA itself was of huge strategic rather than substantive importance as far as privatization is concerned. Second, by tracing the lineage of privatization from ERA onwards a 'ratchet' effect of small and incremental policy moves can be identified, which have disseminated, embedded and naturalized privatization within public sector provision. Third, that while privatization has been taken up and taken much further by New Labour than it had been by the Conservatives there are differences between the two sets of governments in the role of privatization in education policy and the role of the state. Fourth, the participation of private providers in the planning and delivery of state services has put the private sector at the very heart of policy. At points the article draws upon interviews conducted with private sector providers. © 2008 Sage Publications

NewsPad: Designing for Collaborative Storytelling in Neighborhoods

This paper introduces design explorations in neighborhood collaborative storytelling. We focus on blogs and citizen journalism, which have been celebrated as a means to meet the reporting needs of small local communities. These bloggers have limited capacity and social media feeds seldom have the context or readability of news stories. We present NewsPad, a content editor that helps communities create structured stories, collaborate in real time, recruit contributors, and syndicate the editing process. We evaluate NewsPad in four pilot deployments and find that the design elicits collaborative story creation.Comment: NewsPad: designing for collaborative storytelling in neighborhoods. In Proceedings of the extended abstracts of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI EA 2014

Models for Light-Cone Meson Distribution Amplitudes

Leading-twist distribution amplitudes (DAs) of light mesons like pi,rho etc. describe the leading nonperturbative hadronic contributions to exclusive QCD reactions at large energy transfer, for instance electromagnetic form factors. They also enter B decay amplitudes described in QCD factorisation, in particular nonleptonic two-body decays. Being nonperturbative quantities, DAs cannot be calculated from first principles, but have to be described by models. Most models for DAs rely on a fixed order conformal expansion, which is strictly valid for large factorisation scales, but not always sufficient in phenomenological applications. We derive models for DAs that are valid to all orders in the conformal expansion and characterised by a small number of parameters which are related to experimental observables.Comment: 19 pages, 10 figure

The incidence and make up of ability grouped sets in the UK primary school

The adoption of setting in the primary school (pupils ability grouped across classes for particular subjects) emerged during the 1990s as a means to raise standards. Recent research based on 8875 children in the Millennium Cohort Study showed that 25.8% of children in Year 2 were set for literacy and mathematics and a further 11.2% of children were set for mathematics or literacy alone. Logistic regression analysis showed that the best predictors of being in the top set for literacy or mathematics were whether the child was born in the Autumn or Winter and cognitive ability scores. Boys were significantly more likely than girls to be in the bottom literacy set. Family circumstances held less importance for setting placement compared with the child’s own characteristics, although they were more important in relation to bottom set placement. Children in bottom sets were significantly more likely to be part of a long-term single parent household, have experienced poverty, and not to have a mother with qualifications at NVQ3 or higher levels. The findings are discussed in relation to earlier research and the implications for schools are set out

Evolution of Gluon Spin in the Nucleon

We examine the $Q^2$ evolution of gluon polarization in polarized nucleons. As is well known, the evolution of $\alpha_s \Delta G(Q^2)$ is negligible for typical momentum transfer variations found in experimental deep inelastic scattering. As $\alpha_s$ increases, however, the leading nonzero term in the evolution equation for the singlet first moment reduces the magnitude of the gluon spin. At low $Q^2$ the term $\alpha_s \Delta G$ can vanish, and ultimately become negative. Thus, low energy model calculations yielding negative $\Delta G$ are not necessarily in conflict with experimental evidence for positive gluon polarization at high $Q^2$.Comment: ReVTeX + psfig, 7 pages, 3 figures (postscript), accepted in Physics Letters B, ([email protected]

Twist-3 Distribute Amplitude of the Pion in QCD Sum Rules

We apply the background field method to calculate the moments of the pion two-particles twist-3 distribution amplitude (DA) $\phi_p(\xi)$ in QCD sum rules. In this paper,we do not use the equation of motion for the quarks inside the pion since they are not on shell and introduce a new parameter $m_0^p$ to be determined. We get the parameter $m_0^p\approx1.30GeV$ in this approach. If assuming the expansion of $\phi_p(\xi)$ in the series in Gegenbauer polynomials $C_n^{1/2}(\xi)$, one can obtain its approximate expression which can be determined by its first few moments.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figure

On Two-Body Decays of A Scalar Glueball

We study two body decays of a scalar glueball. We show that in QCD a spin-0 pure glueball (a state only with gluons) cannot decay into a pair of light quarks if chiral symmetry holds exactly, i.e., the decay amplitude is chirally suppressed. However, this chiral suppression does not materialize itself at the hadron level such as in decays into $\pi^+\pi^-$ and $K^+K^-$, because in perturbative QCD the glueball couples to two (but not one) light quark pairs that hadronize to two mesons. Using QCD factorization based on an effective Lagrangian, we show that the difference of hadronization into $\pi\pi$ and $KK$ already leads to a large difference between ${\rm Br} (\pi^+\pi^-)$ and ${\rm Br}(K^+K^-)$, even the decay amplitude is not chirally suppressed. Moreover, the small ratio of $R={\rm Br}(\pi\pi)/{\rm Br}(K\bar K)$ of $f_0(1710)$ measured in experiment does not imply $f_0(1710)$ to be a pure glueball. With our results it is helpful to understand the partonic contents if ${\rm Br}(\pi\pi)$ or ${\rm Br}(K\bar K)$ is measured reliably.Comment: revised versio

Symmetries and Asymmetries of B -> K* mu+ mu- Decays in the Standard Model and Beyond

The rare decay B -> K* (-> K pi) mu+ mu- is regarded as one of the crucial channels for B physics as the polarization of the K* allows a precise angular reconstruction resulting in many observables that offer new important tests of the Standard Model and its extensions. These angular observables can be expressed in terms of CP-conserving and CP-violating quantities which we study in terms of the full form factors calculated from QCD sum rules on the light-cone, including QCD factorization corrections. We investigate all observables in the context of the Standard Model and various New Physics models, in particular the Littlest Higgs model with T-parity and various MSSM scenarios, identifying those observables with small to moderate dependence on hadronic quantities and large impact of New Physics. One important result of our studies is that new CP-violating phases will produce clean signals in CP-violating asymmetries. We also identify a number of correlations between various observables which will allow a clear distinction between different New Physics scenarios.Comment: 56 pages, 18 figures, 14 tables. v5: Missing factor in eqs. (3.31-32) and fig. 6 corrected. Minor misprints in eq. (2.10) and table A corrected. Conclusions unchange