‘Inside out: what are the challenges to the effective assessment of learning and skills provision in HM Prisons and Youth Offending Institutions’?

Report and Summary of the outputs from a one-day national prison conference hosted by the School of Education and Social Science at the University of Central Lancashire - Friday 2nd December 2011

Transforming Rehabilitation and its impact on a locally-based rehabilitation programme for Black and Minority Ethnic and Muslim offenders

This article discusses the outcomes of a proposed evaluation of an offender rehabilitation programme called ReachingOut, which operates in north-west England and is tailored to the needs of Black and Minority Ethnic and Muslim offenders. The start of the evaluation coincided with the major restructuring of the probation services in England and Wales, as part of the Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) agenda. Six months into the evaluation, no primary research data had been made available for the evaluation. This article discusses the events that conspired to thwart the evaluation and analyses critically the policies underpinning TR, with reference to the literature and continuing neo-liberal governmental approaches to cost cutting across public services

Every Child/Youth Matters, a government programme for welfare reform; the research findings of a pilot study conducted for a PhD research project that is focused on: exploring the impact of the Every Child/Youth Matters programmes on professional practice across the agencies of education, social services, health and youth justice

Much has already been written and will continue to be written about the rationale for the Every Child Matters/Youth Matters (ECM/YM) programme (hereafter referred to as ECM). I chose it as the focus of my research proposal because I have a deep interest in the underlying principles that have led to the introduction of the ECM programmes as a result of my professional background. I have been a teacher and manager in schools for over thirty years and I worked as an Ofsted inspector from 2001 – 2005. As well as my research work, I also work in schools as an educational consultant for the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL). My research for this PhD thesis focuses on just how the sweeping changes proposed through ECM are being implemented and the impact they may or not be having on the working practice of professionals across the welfare agencies. The main purpose of this paper is to: • outline the processes of analysis and interpretation of these findings, for which I used selected tools from the Grounded Theory process; • explain how I was able to induct three hypotheses from the research findings and how these helped me to shape the focus and direction of my final study; • summarise the findings from my Pilot Study, which comprised a series of loosely structured interviews with professionals and young people from across the agencies concerned. One of my intentions is to ground my writing and research firmly in the field of the workers, managers, children, parents and young people who are the direct recipients of the ECM agendas. These findings are drawn from original data and are in no way shaped around or attributable to what the legislation and government documentation tells us should be happening

Helping, I Mean Assessing Psychiatric Communication: An Applicaton of Incremental Self-Repair Detection

18th SemDial Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (DialWatt), 1-3 September 2014, Edinburgh, ScotlandSelf-repair is pervasive in dialogue, and models thereof have long been a focus of research, particularly for disfluency detection in speech recognition and spoken dialogue systems. However, the generality of such models across domains has received little attention. In this paper we investigate the application of an automatic incremental self-repair detection system, STIR, developed on the Switchboard corpus of telephone speech, to a new domain – psychiatric consultations. We find that word-level accuracy is reduced markedly by the differences in annotation schemes and transcription conventions between corpora, which has implications for the generalisability of all repair detection systems. However, overall rates of repair are detected accurately, promising a useful resource for clinical dialogue studies

Every child matters: a small scale enquiry into policy and practice

This research study examines aspects of the effectiveness of the Every Child/Youth Matters (ECM/YM) programme with regard to its implementation in 2006. Part 1 of the study explores the practical implications of ECM/YM for professional practice across the different welfare agencies, through a series of loosely structured interviews with managers, case workers and young offenders (aged up to 16 years). From an analysis of the data, using grounded theory approaches, three key findings were inducted. These findings suggested the following: I. A lack of consistency in the quality of targeted support provided by integrated services for the most vulnerable children and young people and their families; II. A lack of fine tuning in: a) the identification of vulnerability across different cohorts of children and young people, according to their changing circumstances; b) the ways in which information (about vulnerable children and young people) is shared and used across the different welfare agencies. Reflection on these findings led to a further review of the literature that focuses on critiques of social policy. The analyses of research data within this domain suggest the limitations of social policy making that conforms to a linear, mechanistic approach, because it does not respond to individualised, local need. This suggests further that it is the policies themselves that account for the perceived lack of fine tuning identified in the above findings in part one of this research thesis. Therefore it was important, next, to capture data which drew on respondents' personal perceptions of welfare provision, which might endorse, or otherwise, those aspects in which part 1 of the study suggested that the ECM/YM agenda is failing, in some localities, to meet the needs of the most vulnerable children, young people and their families. In part two of this study, further research was conducted through a series , of extended conversations with: male offenders (aged between 16 and 24 years); parents/partners of prisoners; managers from voluntary/not for profit organisations and senior multi-agency professionals. The data were analysed using a phenomenological approach. Overall, the findings suggest that a purely mechanistic, evidenced-based approach to providing welfare support for vulnerable children, young people and their families can result in negative outcomes when compared with a more contextualised, holistic approach