A ‘quiet revolution’? The impact of Training Schools on initial teacher training partnerships

This paper discusses the impact on initial teacher training of a new policy initiative in England: the introduction of Training Schools. First, the Training School project is set in context by exploring the evolution of a partnership approach to initial teacher training in England. Ways in which Training Schools represent a break with established practice are considered together with their implications for the dominant mode of partnership led by higher education institutions (HEIs). The capacity of Training Schools to achieve their own policy objectives is examined, especially their efficacy as a strategy for managing innovation and the dissemination of innovation. The paper ends by focusing on a particular Training School project which has adopted an unusual approach to its work and enquires whether this alternative approach could offer a more profitable way forward. During the course of the paper, five different models of partnership are considered: collaborative, complementary, HEI-led, school-led and partnership within a partnership

Measuring inequality: tools and an illustration

BACKGROUND: This paper examines an aspect of the problem of measuring inequality in health services. The measures that are commonly applied can be misleading because such measures obscure the difficulty in obtaining a complete ranking of distributions. The nature of the social welfare function underlying these measures is important. The overall object is to demonstrate that varying implications for the welfare of society result from inequality measures. METHOD: Various tools for measuring a distribution are applied to some illustrative data on four distributions about mental health services. Although these data refer to this one aspect of health, the exercise is of broader relevance than mental health. The summary measures of dispersion conventionally used in empirical work are applied to the data here, such as the standard deviation, the coefficient of variation, the relative mean deviation and the Gini coefficient. Other, less commonly used measures also are applied, such as Theil's Index of Entropy, Atkinson's Measure (using two differing assumptions about the inequality aversion parameter). Lorenz curves are also drawn for these distributions. RESULTS: Distributions are shown to have differing rankings (in terms of which is more equal than another), depending on which measure is applied. CONCLUSION: The scope and content of the literature from the past decade about health inequalities and inequities suggest that the economic literature from the past 100 years about inequality and inequity may have been overlooked, generally speaking, in the health inequalities and inequity literature. An understanding of economic theory and economic method, partly introduced in this article, is helpful in analysing health inequality and inequity

Towards commercialising underground coal gasification in the EU

Modern ‘enabling technologies’ and over a century of research and development have pushed underground coal gasification (UCG) beyond the proof-of-concept phase. Lessons learned from previous trials have demonstrated that UCG can exploit the energy stored in coal efficiently and with limited environmental impact compared with conventional coal-based energy technologies. Many countries in the EU (and worldwide) struggle to meet their energy needs despite containing very large reserves of coal, which cannot be exploited conventionally because of its depth. Application of modern UCG techniques, state-of-the-art drilling and monitoring technologies offer the opportunity to extract the energy from deep coal resources economically and with limited environmental impacts; however, several hurdles, such as public opinion and carbon dioxide (CO2) emission limits, must be overcome before UCG can be commercialised in the EU. Continued support by member states will attract more private investments, enable more field trials and allow Europe’s world-class UCG experts to demonstrate that the technology is ready to provide cleaner energy from coal for the EU in the twenty-first century. This is a review paper that aims to summarise the lessons learned from UCG trials and EU-sponsored work and to discuss what still needs to be done to commercialise UCG