Resilience - Policy buzzword or key concept? - How relevant is resilience as a tool for promoting positive outcomes for ‘at-risk’ young people

Successive governments have placed increasing emphasis on ‘resilience’ for the positive development of children and young people as they negotiate their academic careers. It is a ubiquitous buzzword that pervades current policy directives and interventions, aimed at all levels of the educational system. Used in this context, resilience is seen as a key skill or attribute that young people need to acquire in order to thrive in today’s world. It is defined as an individual’s ability to ‘bounce back’ from adversity or to overcome adverse circumstances to nevertheless achieve positive outcomes. Overcoming these various risks or adverse circumstances, however, involves more than being taught ‘how to be resilient’ as part of the regular curriculum. Employing a mixed-methods approach, I draw on quantitative data from a large-scale survey of students, matched administrative data acquired from the Department for Education (DfE) and qualitative focus groups with teachers to highlight the importance of access to support and resources for young people to be able to cope with and surmount the challenges they face. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of social reproduction, I engage with the literature on risk and resilience (Rutter, 1985; Masten et al., 1990; Werner, 2000) to frame the processes involved in promoting support for students who might otherwise be expected to struggle academically in terms of ‘buffering’ them against adverse circumstances to promote resilience. In particular, I show that teachers operate within a key proximal relationship of a young person’s microsystem (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) and are uniquely well-placed to impart support and guidance to students facing a range of adverse circumstances. My thesis contributes to the weight of existing evidence on the significant link between socio-economic disadvantage and educational attainment. Going beyond this, my thesis also makes a significant new contribution to understanding the mechanisms which underpin the role of positive social support networks in supporting young people at school. My thesis challenges, therefore, the salience of the concept of ‘resilience’ as a personality trait that can be taught through ‘character education’ initiatives. Indeed, I argue that such initiatives are inevitably destined to be fruitless without government, teachers and curricula taking a much more holistic ‘whole-child’ approach in schools, with complementary social policies that seek to mitigate the structural inequalities that continue to disadvantage students in twenty first century Britain

The role of diffusion on the interface thickness in a ventilated filling box

We examine the role of diffusivity, whether molecular or turbulent, on the steady-state stratification in a ventilated filling box. The buoyancy-driven displacement ventilation model of Linden et al. (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 212, 1990, p. 309) predicts the formation of a two-layer stratification when a single plume is introduced into an enclosure with vents at the top and bottom. The model assumes that diffusion plays no role in the development of the ambient buoyancy stratification: diffusion is a slow process and the entrainment of ambient fluid into the plume from the diffuse interface will act to thin the interface resulting in a near discontinuity of density between the upper and lower layers. This prediction has been corroborated by small-scale salt bath experiments; however, full-scale measurements in ventilated rooms and complementary numerical simulations suggest an interface that is not sharp but rather smeared out over a finite thickness. For a given plume buoyancy flux, as the cross-sectional area of the enclosure increases the volume of fluid that must be entrained by the plume to maintain a sharp interface also increases. Therefore the balance between the diffusive thickening of the interface and plume-driven thinning favours a thicker interface. Conversely, the interface thickness decreases with increasing source buoyancy flux, although the dependence is relatively weak. Our analysis presents two models for predicting the interface thickness as a function of the enclosure height, base area, composite vent area, plume buoyancy flux and buoyancy diffusivity. Model results are compared with interface thickness measurements based on previously reported data. Positive qualitative and quantitative agreement is observed

Enfield Citizens’ Advice Bureau - clients profile & needs gap analysis

This research report maps the characteristics of Enfield Citizens Advice Bureau’s clients and explores their needs and the impact of CAB services on their lives. The report also identifies challenges and opportunities faced by the organisation and, more generally, by local third sector service providers in the changing funding and policy environment

Optimal Cloning and Singlet Monogamy

The inability to produce two perfect copies of an unknown state is inherently linked with the inability to produce maximal entanglement between multiple spins. Despite this, there is no quantitative link between how much entanglement can be generated between spins (known as monogamy), and how well an unknown state can be cloned. This situation is remedied by giving a set of sufficient conditions such that the optimal Completely Positive map can be implemented as a teleportation operation into a standard, reference, state. The case of arbitrary 1 to N asymmetric cloning of d-dimensional spins can then be solved exactly, yielding the concept of `singlet monogamy'. The utility of this relation is demonstrated by calculating properties of Heisenberg systems, and contrasting them with the results from standard monogamy arguments.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure. v2: conjecture upgraded to proof and generalized to arbitrary local hilbert space dimensions. v3: published versio

The Effects of System Type and System Characteristics on Skills Acquisition in Upper Secondary Education and Training

This report examines the effects of upper secondary system types and characteristics on literacy and numeracy skills acquisition during the upper secondary phase of education and training. Whereas there is a substantial literature on system effects on skills during the primary and lower secondary phases of education, much less has been written about these effects in relation to the upper secondary phase. However, with the arrival of the OECD’s Survey of Adult Skills (SAS), which has now tested adults in over 40 countries and regions, it is now possible to explore how far education system characteristics explain the substantial variation across countries in changes in skills levels and inequalities during upper secondary phase. In this report we seek to build on earlier work and provide more robust evidence on system effects during the upper secondary phase in three ways. Firstly, we use data from the larger sample of countries in both waves 1 and 2 of SAS. Secondly, we test the effects of a considerably wider range of system indicators. Thirdly, we use a variety of statistical methods to analyse the relationships across countries between upper secondary system types and characteristics and changes in levels and distributions of skills between age 15 (in PISA) and the end of the upper secondary phase. Whereas our previous work analysed changes using quasi-cohort analysis of published data on skills from PISA (at age 15) and SAS (at age 25-29), thus allowing compounding effects from tertiary education and employment, here we use customised data from OECD on skills scores at age 18-20 to capture more precisely the skills at the beginning and end of upper secondary education and training. Following a review of the literature on system effects, we identify a range of factors deemed to influence skills acquisition in the upper secondary phase and six upper secondary system types based on common and distinctive characteristics. The subsequent sections provide descriptive statistics on system characteristics by country/region and by system type and a statistical analysis, using both OLS regressions and Difference-in-Difference methods to estimate the effects of different types and characteristics on relative changes in skills levels and inequalities during the upper secondary phase

Design of Transportation Process for Band Equipment

The following report documents the attempt to design a safe and reliable process for transporting Louder Space’s musical gear that requires minimal physical demand. Design specifications were derived from customer requirements as well as human factors principles. The transportation process was broken down into systematic process steps and standardized, making use of lean methodologies in order to reduce the number of non-value steps involved. Furthermore, a model portable storage unit for miscellaneous gear was developed to the specifications determined by the band using 3D modeling, as well as certain limiting constraints. Once the customer approved the prototype, the product was broken down into a bill of materials and manufactured. Once the product and improved process were implemented, extensive analysis revealed a profit of about $2,485 each year

The Formal Dynamism of Categories: Stops vs. Fricatives, Primitivity vs. Simplicity

Minimalist Phonology (MP; Pöchtrager 2006) constructs its theory based on the phonological epistemological principle (Kaye 2001) and exposes the arbitrary nature of standard Government Phonology (sGP) and strict-CV (sCV), particularly with reference to their confusion of melody and structure. For Pöchtrager, these are crucially different, concluding that place of articulation is melodic (expressed with elements), while manner of articulation is structural. In this model, the heads (xN and xO) can license and incorporate the length of the other into their own interpretation, that is xN influences xO projections as well as its own and vice versa. This dynamism is an aspect of the whole framework and this paper in particular will show that stops and fricatives evidence a plasticity of category and that, although fricatives are simpler in structure, stops are the more primitive of the two. This will be achieved phonologically through simply unifying the environment of application of the licensing forces within Pöchtrager's otherwise sound onset structure. In doing so, we automatically make several predictions about language acquisition and typology and show how lenition in Qiang (Sino-Tibetan) can be more elegantly explained