Concurrent planning - report of a scoping exercise carried out for Faith in Families, Nottingham

Context: During 2008 -2009 Faith in Families investigated the possibility of introducing a concurrent planning scheme with 6 local authorities in the East Midlands. Planning for this became quite advanced, and a member of staff was appointed by Faith in Families to carry forward the project. Nottingham Trent University was asked to evaluate the implementation, and funding was secured through a Knowledge Transfer Partnership grant. Following the demise of the Goodman project in Manchester (see below), and internal changes at Faith in Families, the implementation was put on hold and the university was asked to undertake a scoping exercise. This report relates to that exercise

I once knew a team where all the workers called the manager ‘mother’. Some reflections on supervision within an integrated leadership and management programme

In 2010, an integrated Leadership, Management and Safeguarding training programme for adult and children's services managers was created by a group of local authorities and a local university. Following Lord Laming (Department of Health, 2003 and Laming, 2009), the emerging reports of Munro (2010) and the Social Work Task Force (Department for Children, Schools and Families, 2009) called for increased emphasis on supervision as a key mechanism for safeguarding children, and by implication, adults. Therefore on this course two different means for candidates to address issues of supervision and explore their practice were included: a discussion board, and a critical friend exercise using video. A feature of the programme was the learning and understanding which developed from adults and children's sectors learning together. The work on supervision provided a shared space in which all could participate. Feedback indicates that the two methods were both valued in different ways for the opportunity they provided for exploring supervision and enhancing reflective practice. This article is a reflection by one of the course tutors on the methods used and the value of both adult and children's managers participating together

“It’s a big deal, being given a person” – a study of the links between infertility and adoption

This study was commissioned and funded by Family Care and undertaken by Jo Ward and Joe Smeeton, both Principal Lecturers at Nottingham Trent University. It comprises a review of the literature relating to the links between adoption and infertility, a survey of the views of adoption from people who have experienced infertility, and 3 qualitative interviews with people who have experienced infertility but not adopted

Precision Measurements of Particle Masses using Jets at LEP2

How massive elementary particles get their mass is one of the greatest open questions in physics. Two of the major goals of the current LEP2 physics program that help to address this question are (a) to measure as precisely as possible the W Boson mass mW and (b) to exclude or discover the Higgs Boson within the available kinematic region. The reconstruction of invariant masses with jets from 4-jet channels (e.g. WW -> q qbar q qbar and HZ -> b bbar q qbar) and missing energy channels (e.g WW -> e nu q qbar and e+e- -> H nu nubar) is discussed. The emphasis is on the determination of mW, from which the role of calorimetry in such a precision measurement is emphasised

The Theory of SNOM: A Novel Approach

In this paper we consider the application of electromagnetic theory to the analysis of the Scanning Near-field Optical Microscope (SNOM) in order to predict experimentally observable quantities such as the transmission or reflection coefficients for a particular tip-surface configuration. In particular we present the first application of a transfer matrix based calculation to this challenging problem by using an adaptive co-ordinate transformation to accurately model the shape of the SNOM tip. We also investigate the possibility of increasing the transmitted light through the SNOM tip by introducing a metal wire into the centre of the tip. This converts the tip into a co-axial cable. We show that, in principle, this can dramatically improve the transmission characteristics without having a detrimental effect on the resolution.Comment: 19 pages, 11 figures. To be published in the Journal of Modern Optic