THE IMPACT OF PLACEMENT IN SPECIAL CARE UNIT SETTINGS ON THE WELLBEING OF YOUNG PEOPLE AND THEIR FAMILIES

The Special Residential Services Board, established under Part 11 of the Children Act 2001, commissioned the Centre for Social and Educational Research to carry out this study into the Impact of Placement in Special Care Unit Settings on the Wellbeing of Young People and Their Families. Special Care Units are a relatively new part of the child care system in Ireland. They are facilities that provide a secure environment for young people who require protection because of a real and substantial risk to their health, safety, development or welfare. At the time the work for this report was carried out, all children placed in Special Care Units, had to be placed there on a High Court Order. When Part 3 of the Children Act 2001, is fully implemented, the process for obtaining a Special Care Order will be through the District Court. The Special Residential Services Board will be required to give a view to the Court on the appropriateness of any such Order. As Special Care Units have been in existence for a relatively short period of time, research in this area has been limited. This report therefore represents an important contribution to our knowledge of special care and the impact of these placements on young people. One of the functions of the Special Residential Services Board is to carry out a programme of research into specialist residential services, and we intend to develop a body of knowledge in this field. We would like to thank the researchers Dr Lorna Ryan, Mr Niall Hanlon and Ms Louise Riley and Ms Audrey Warren for her contributions to the final report. We would also like to thank the staff of the units and our colleagues across the Health Services Executive. Most importantly we would like to thank the children and families who took part in the research

Third mission and regional context: assessing universities’ entrepreneurial architecture in rural regions

Universities are expected to contribute to regional development through the ‘third mission’ going beyond traditional academic core functions. Hitherto, the literature has focused on a rather idealistic ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to university engagement, though in reality universities have different ways to carry out third-stream activities. This has been partly explained by geographical factors. Therefore, this paper focuses on how a particular context – in this case a rural region – can shape universities’ institutional responses towards the third mission. A single case study of the University of Lincoln (UK) demonstrates that a rural context has an impact on the way universities develop their entrepreneurial architectures. A contextual element, namely a rural region, was added to the entrepreneurial architecture framework, originally conceptualized by Vorley and Nelles in 2009 to study how the rural context affects the other dimensions of the entrepreneurial architectures framework. Tentative findings from the case study suggest that in rural regions universities face increased expectations to take leadership outside academia in the lack of other local knowledge institutions. The engagement is largely based on personal linkages with external stakeholders instead of a formal collaboration mechanism, while the structures and strategic choices are oriented towards serving the local job market and regional priority sectors. These results imply that a particular context shapes the university’s orientation and institutional responses to third-stream activities, and thus further context-sensitive studies on universities’ entrepreneurial architectures would be beneficial for exploring how universities can efficiently contribute to regional development in different environments. can efficiently contribute to regional development in different environments

The pedagogic beliefs of Indonesian teachers in inclusive schools

This research explores, for the first time, the pedagogical orientations of Indonesian teachers in the context of inclusive education. A mixed-method approach was used for an analysis of questionnaire data from 140 teachers and qualitative interviews from 20 teachers in four inclusive schools. The findings suggest that, in general, the implicit orientation of teachers is social constructivist. This orientation is also reflected in their reported classroom practices. Although less common, more directive pedagogical approaches appear to have an impact upon the flexibility of roles within two teacher inclusive classrooms. Whilst the number of disabled pupils within each class was a significant issue for interviewees, no pupils were deemed unteachable in their classrooms. Furthermore, what is described by the teachers as a “special pedagogy” typically entailed additional teaching time and modified assessments, and consequently could be framed as “good teaching for all”. The questionnaires also contained responses from student and special school teachers and support the view that teachers’ beliefs about inclusive pedagogy are mediated by experience and occupation

Rationale, design and conduct of a comprehensive evaluation of a school-based peer-led anti-smoking intervention in the UK: the ASSIST cluster randomised trial [ISRCTN55572965]

BACKGROUND: To date, no school-based intervention has been proven to be effective in preventing adolescent smoking, despite continuing concern about smoking levels amongst young people in the United Kingdom. Although formal teacher-led smoking prevention interventions are considered unlikely to be effective, peer-led approaches to reducing smoking have been proposed as potentially valuable. METHODS/DESIGN: ASSIST (A Stop Smoking in Schools Trial) is a comprehensive, large-scale evaluation to rigorously test whether peer supporters in Year 8 (age 11–12) can be recruited and trained to effect a reduction in smoking uptake among their fellow students. The evaluation is employing a cluster randomised controlled trial (RCT) design with secondary school as the unit of randomisation, and is being undertaken in 59 schools in South East Wales and the West of England. Embedded within the trial are an economic evaluation of the intervention costs, a process evaluation to provide detailed information on how the intervention was delivered and received, and an analysis of social networks to consider whether such a peer group intervention could work amongst schoolchildren in this age group. Schools were randomised to either continue with normal smoking education (n = 29 schools, 5562 students), or to do so and additionally receive the ASSIST intervention (n = 30 schools, 5481 students). No schools withdrew once the trial had started, and the intervention was successfully implemented in all 30 schools, with excellent participation rates from the peer supporters. The primary outcome is regular (weekly) smoking, validated by salivary cotinine, and this outcome has been obtained for 94.4%, 91.0% and 95.6% of eligible students at baseline, immediate post-intervention, and one-year follow-up respectively. DISCUSSION: Comprehensive evaluations of complex public health interventions of this scale and nature are rare in the United Kingdom. This paper demonstrates the feasibility of conducting cluster RCTs of complex public health interventions in schools, and how the rigour of such designs can be maximised both by thorough implementation of the protocol and by broadening the scope of questions addressed in the trial by including additional evaluative components

iTEC: conceptualising, realising and recognising pedagogical and technological innovation in European classrooms

Innovation, a complex concept, underpinned a four-year pan-European research project designed to increase the effective use of technology in school classrooms. This article revisits evaluation data collected during the project and explores the challenges of conceptualising, realising and researching ‘innovation’. The authors describe how innovation was conceptualised, highlighting key issues, not all of which could be resolved in the project. The development of an approach to support teachers to change their practices facilitated the realisation of innovation in the classroom. This approach, through which researchers and national pedagogical coordinators worked with teachers to develop their teaching and learning practices with technology in potentially innovative ways, is outlined. Case study data are then used to exemplify how teachers and other stakeholders applied this approach and how they perceived innovation in practice within their own countries. Through a discussion of these cases, the article highlights the challenge of defining innovation in different country settings and, in turn, the complexity of identifying its occurrence. It concludes by proposing the next steps for similar research endeavours

Democratic experimentation in early childhood education

Qualifications of the early years workforce are a salient predictors of quality and therefore of children’s outcomes. International reports advise that a majority of staff is trained at Bachelor’s levels and rank countries according to this criterion. There is fewer consensus on what this professionalism should be. In a majority of countries, large numbers of professionals are untrained, unqualified and sometimes invisible in the official reports. Many of these unqualified “assistants” take up crucial “care” tasks, while the teacher’s tasks are defined as “education”. The separation between care and education occurs in split systems as well as in systems where education and care are supposed to be integrated. In addition, the growing diversity of families challenges our preconceived ideas about “the good life” for children. These observations urge us to rethink professionalism in terms of reflexivity and the capacity of co-constructing pedagogy with parents and children. A case study in Ghent shows how low qualified professionals develop research capacities. The analysis of their experience suggests that “learning” may be less a quality of the individual than a quality of the systemic relationships that are build in the teams as well as in the interaction between teams and their social contexts

The Development of Inclusive Learning Relationships in Mainstream Settings: A Multimodal Perspective

The debate regarding the inclusion of children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) in mainstream education in the UK partly revolves around what makes the classroom environment inclusive. Through the potential offered by the specific qualitative methodologies employed, this study aimed to explore the development of teachers’ pedagogical practices and learning relationships upon the inclusive education of children with special educational needs and disabilities in two primary school classes. The study considered the views and behaviours of primary school pupils with and without special educational needs, primary school teachers and teaching assistants (TAs) in one mainstream school. Drawing on a multimodal approach to discourse analysis to account for the complex relationships between symbolic and non-verbal modes of classroom signification, the study explored how meaning is produced in classrooms and children’s modes of communication, as well as in teachers’ practices. The two classes are compared on the basis of teaching observations, interviews, transcripts of dialogues, and analyses of classroom organisation and decoration. This paper suggests that the greatest influence on the educational and social outcomes of students with special educational needs is the behaviour and practices of the classroom teacher