School-based teacher training - a partnership in balance

Greenhead Grammar School, a multi-cultural, mixed ability, comprehensive school in Keighley has gained an international reputation for its excellence in the teaching of Design & Technology. In particular the `TRIPS' (Technology, Resources, Information and Problem-solving) scheme pre-dated the National Curriculum to provide a balanced experience for KS3 pupils in the areas of Design, IT, Business Awareness, Food and Fabrics, Systems and Structures. Leeds Polytechnic Design & Technology Centre was the first institution in the country to modularise its degree programmes in line with National Curriculum requirements to provide a Design & Technology degree with two routes Design & Technology and Design & Technology/Home Economics. Greenhead Grammar School has for some years facilitated traditional teaching practice placements for Leeds' students on a variety of courses. Links have grown naturally from the interaction of school and polytechnic staff. The paper will outline the KS3 TRIPS scheme and give an insight into a developing pilot project which has run this year as a possible model for a more school-based teacher education course

The Fate of Firms: Explaining Mergers and Bankruptcies

Using a uniquely complete data set of more than 50,000 observations of approximately 16,000 corporations, we test theories that seek to explain which firms become merger targets and which firms go bankrupt. We find that merger activity is much greater during prosperous periods than during recessions. In bad economic times, firms in industries with high bankruptcy rates are less likely to file for bankruptcy than they are in better years, supporting the market illiquidity arguments made by Shleifer and Vishny (1992). At the firm level, we find that, among poorly performing firms, the likelihood of merger increases with poorer performance, but among better performing firms, the relation is reversed and chances of merger increase with better performance. Such a changing relation has not been detected in prior merger studies. We also find that low-growth, resource-rich firms are prime acquisition targets and that firms’ debt capacity relates negatively to the likelihood of a merger. Debt-related variables, leverage and secured debt, play an especially prominent role in distinguishing between which firms merge and which firms go bankrupt

Towards a bridging concept for undesirable resilience in social-ecological systems

Resilience is a cross-disciplinary concept that is relevant for understanding the sustainability of the social and environmental conditions in which we live. Most research normatively focuses on building or strengthening resilience, despite growing recognition of the importance of breaking the resilience of, and thus transforming, unsustainable social-ecological systems. Undesirable resilience (cf. lock-ins, social-ecological traps), however, is not only less explored in the academic literature, but its understanding is also more fragmented across different disciplines. This disparity can inhibit collaboration among researchers exploring interdependent challenges in sustainability sciences. In this article, we propose that the term lock-in may contribute to a common understanding of undesirable resilience across scientific fields