China country strategy

This strategy outlines a vision of where Australia\u27s relationship with China should be in 2025 and how Australia should get there. China’s rise to the top of the global economic and political order is defining the 21st century. By 2025, China is set to be the world’s largest economy. The Chinese economy’s size and scale, combined with robust growth, will consistently make China the largest contributor to global and Asian economic growth leading up to 2025. How China manages its transformation from exportand investment-led development to a consumption and innovation-driven economy will determine the shape of the global economic system in the coming decades

OECD reviews of higher education in regional and city development, State of Victoria, Australia

With more than 5.3 million inhabitants Victoria is the second most populous state in Australia. Once a manufacturing economy, Victoria is now transforming itself into a service and innovation-based economy. Currently, the largest sectors are education services and tourism. In terms of social structure, Victoria is characterised by a large migrant population, 24% of population were born overseas and 44% were either born overseas or have a parent who was born overseas. About 70% of the population resides in Melbourne. Victoria faces a number of challenges, ranging from an ageing population and skills shortages to drought and climate change and increased risk of natural disasters. Rapid population growth, 2% annually, has implications for service delivery and uneven development as well as regional disparities. There are barriers to connectivity in terms of transport and infrastructure, and a high degree of inter-institutional competition in tertiary education sector. The business structure in Victoria includes some highly innovative activities such as in biotechnology, but other sectors, especially those with high number of small and medium-sized enterprises, are lagging behind. Most of the larger manufacturing enterprises are externally controlled and there is uncertainty over the long term investments they will make in the state, as well as the place of Victoria in the global production networks

An overview of the nature of the preparation of practice educators in five health care disciplines

Practice education is a core element of all educational programmes that prepare health care professionals for academic award and registration to practice. Ensuring quality and effectiveness involves partnership working between Higher Education Institutions (HEI’s) and health care providers, social care communities, voluntary and independent sectors offering client care throughout the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland. Clearly practitioners who support, supervise and assess learners for entry to their respective professions need to be well prepared and supported in their roles as practice educators. However it would appear that the nature of this support and preparation varies across disciplines and that good practice is not easily shared. With this in mind, the Making Practice Based Learning Work (MPBLW) project aims to make practitioners more effective at supporting and supervising students in the workplace across a range of health care disciplines namely Dietetics, Nursing, Occupational Therapy, Physiotherapy and Radiology. The Department of Employment and Learning (Northern Ireland) and the Higher Education Funding Council for England has funded this collaborative project involving staff from Ulster, Northumbria and Bournemouth Universities. The outcomes for each phase of the project are: Phase One: • Identify and document good practice on how practitioners are prepared for their educational role. Phase Two: • Develop and evaluate learning materials for use by practitioners across five health care disciplines. • Make learning materials available in a number of efficient media, e.g. paper, electronic, CD-ROM and web-based. • Develop a programme applicable to interprofessional and uniprofessional contexts. • Widen access for a multicultural workforce. Phase Three: • Embed best educational practice through the establishment of an academicpractitioner network. • Disseminate a range of materials and processes across the wider academic and health and social care communities

Applied Research Through Partnership: the Experience of the Yorkshire and Humberside Regional Research Observatory

Paper presented at a seminar on ‘Los Observatorios Regionales de Políticas Públicas como Herramientas de Gestión de Información: Una Aproximación al Estudio del Rendimiento Autonómico, at the Centro de Estudios de Gestión, Análisis y Información, Campus de Somosaguas, La Universidad Complutense, Madrid, 23-24 November, 2000 Ten years ago, a Regional Research Observatory (ReRO) was established to provide ‘clients’ in Yorkshire and Humberside with a single point access to a region-wide data and analysis service. The Observatory’s portfolio covered activities relating to applied research and consultancy, intelligence, education and training, publications and networking. The first part of the paper explains the concept of the Observatory as it was initially conceived as a form of partnership across all the universities in the region, outlines the structure of the organization that was created, explains the arrangements for operating the Observatory as a partnership initiative, and exemplifies the outputs and achievements during the first half of the decade. In order to facilitate its regional monitoring activities, ReRO constructed a Regional Intelligence Centre (RIC), a customised geographical information system in which to store key data sets and generate a range of statistical indicators for the region as a whole or its constituent parts. The second part of the paper explains the structure of the RIC and its contents. It argues that the main advantage that derives from the construction of such a centre is the value that is added to raw information through data handling and integration, through skilled interpretation and through the provision of new information, maybe in the form of forecasts of what is likely to happen in the future, as well as analyses of what has happened in the past. The third and final part of the paper explores some of the key issues and difficulties relating to the operation of the Observatory and considers some of the reasons that have accounted for its loss of momentum in the last few years. This has occurred over a period of increased political attention to regional administration and planning in the UK, exemplified by the creation of Scottish and Welsh Assemblies and the emergence of Regional Development Agencies and Regional Assemblies across England. A retrospective evaluation demonstrates a number of lessons that have been learnt and provides a number of useful guidelines to those attempting to establish similar structures elsewhere in the developed world