Self-efficacy in teaching primary physical education: reflections on research

This article comprises a think piece based upon a piece of undergraduate research that aimed to understand primary school teachers’ reflections on the physical education (PE) aspects of their Initial Teacher Education (ITE) in England and their perceived self-efficacy in the teaching of PE in primary schools.Research consistently suggests that primary teachers do not have sufficient subject and pedagogical knowledge to teach primary PE and that often their experience is an ‘introduction’ to the subject rather than a deeper understanding of, and pedagogical content knowledge of PE. Contextually, following ten years of PE and sport premium funding, and the first of the five key indicators being ‘increased confidence, knowledge and skills of all staff in teaching PE and sport’ (Ofsted, 2024), this study was well placed to evaluate the potential impact on self-efficacy in primary school PE teaching. A lack of subject and pedagogical knowledge has been highlighted as impactful upon perceived self-efficacy as a determiner of teacher behaviour (Schnitzius et al., 2021). Self-efficacy is defined by Bandura (1986) as beliefs about one’s capability to succeed within a particular performance domain; it underpins an individual's self belief and can influence motivation and actions. Self-efficacy is impacted by personal experiences in physical exercise and sport (Simpson et al., 2011, p.3), lack of time for preparation of lessons and equipment (Duggan, 2022, pp.130-131), and lack of pedagogical and subject knowledge and competence in teaching primary PE (Harris et al., 2019, p.1). Lack of self-efficacy has been identified as a factor in burnout among PE teachers (Sas-Nowosielski and Kowalczyk, 2019, pp.186-7). Low self-efficacy can lead to avoidance behaviours and giving up quickly, whereas high self-efficacy is characterised by optimism, self belief and determination.Self-efficacy is a dynamic construct and is shaped by one's context and experiences (Naidoo and Naidoo, 2023) according to Bandura's social learning theory (1986) these are: social persuasion, mastery experiences, vicarious experience, and emotional arousal. <br/

Financial resilience in English local authorities: delivering cultural and related services (CRS) during the era of austerity

Local Authorities (LAs) have been exposed to increasing financial and service demand pressures from the occurrence of disruptive events, particularly austerity. These pressures make it challenging for LAs to continue delivering services that are essential to their residents (users). In England, cultural services are essential services to residents, although English LAs struggle to consistently provide cultural and related services to their residents. This paper adopted a mixed method comprising secondary data (through data visualisation) and evidence from primary research to explore the impacts of austerity and how English LAs withstood these pressures by continuing to provide cultural and related services. The findings of this paper contribute to knowledge in the public service management literature and also provides some recommendations towards policy formulation, which is expected to enhance the financial resilience of English LAs to enable them to withstand pressures from future disruptive events

Local authority financial sustainability and the Section 114 regime

This submission provides evidence on all of the key issues outlined in the terms of reference. There are increasing numbers of long-term and complex financial challenges besetting local government, that if not addressed, will continue to make an increasing number of authorities financially unsustainable. Under current financial reporting arrangements this will lead to the issuing of more Section 114 Notices. The scale of the problem is significant, and the long-term unsustainability of local authority finances is fundamentally due to underlying structural issues in the collection, allocation and distribution of revenue raised to support local public service provision. Continuing to provide short term and piecemeal financial support on the basis of the system last revised in 2013 is increasingly inefficient and sub-optimal in terms of distribution, with all parts of the current model becoming demonstrably more regressive in terms of their impact. COVID-19 impacts and authorities’ involvement in risky commercial investments exacerbate and intensify this long-term problem and have accelerated the process, but neither are they the fundamental causes of these problems. There is a long-term need to re-establish a new regime for local authority financing that is fair and sustainable; that reflects the levels of need for local services and the ability of individual local areas to generate revenue. The implementation of the Redmond proposals for local audit, the adoption of CIPFA’s financial resilience index and the provisions of the Fair Funding Review will not resolve these fundamental issues on their own. A new local audit regime and a fairer distribution mechanism are both necessary, but not sufficient to generate long-term stability and a robust new regime. A new regime will require significantly improved data and information, not least for the assessment of need, as the basis of calculating the future property tax component, and for the economic and efficient operation of the re-distributional mechanism. An improved and updated Resilience Index; changes to the oversight of the Prudential Framework, capitalisation and reform of the Public Works Loan Board are necessary in themselves and as part of a new local government financial regime. The submission provides detailed analysis and recommendations on each of these issues

Social Media Networks and Community Development in Work-based Undergraduate Students

Abstract The purpose of the study was to explore how students on two related work-based degree courses with limited opportunities for face to face interaction used social media platforms to support their experiences and learning. The students involved work as teaching assistants in a range of mainstream and special schools in the East Midlands and attend classes one day a week. It was noted by tutors that students made frequent references to using various social media platforms for sharing student-to-student information relating to the taught sessions or assignments in preference to the university’s virtual learning environment. To investigate this phenomenon, a case study approach, using focus groups and a paired interview, was adopted. The entire student population on the courses was invited to participate, so the sample was self-selecting and a total of 11% of the students volunteered, participating in either a focus group discussion or paired interview. The study found that students made extensive use of social media platforms, mainly Facebook and Whatsapp, for academic and affective support. Students found this to be an effective way to keep in touch with one another away from university, to share resources and experiences and felt that it helped with their identity as a higher education student

Developing a local government dataset: a tool for enhanced resilience

Governments and Local Authorities (LAs) have been continuously challenged by the increasing financial and service pressures posed by over a decade of austerity in England as they try to maintain their delivery of public services. This prompted the researcher to create a 15-year longitudinal dataset on the revenue income, revenue expenditure, reserves, and capital items for all principal LAs in England from 2005/06-2020/21 (Dom, 2022). As the shocks from austerity and other disruptive events have continued after 2021/2022, an extension to this longitudinal dataset is being constructed to identify key income and expenditure trends and patterns to help devise better strategies and build capacity and capabilities in local authorities. The researcher extracted further secondary data from publicly available datasets, namely (i) the Local Authority Revenue Outturn (RO) suite of forms and (ii) the Local Authority Capital Outturn Receipts (COR) group of tables, which are used by His Majesty’s Treasury and government agencies. These groups of financial data were used to extend the current data sets as they are the most informative and authoritative collection of local authority funding and spending data. Once updated, the quantitative panel dataset allowed for comparison and analysis of English LAs’ income and expenditure over a longer-term period that includes the period up to 2023/24. This dataset provided opportunities and a comparative context for further, more detailed research into particular services and case studies on individuals or groups of LAs. The longitudinal nature of this encouraged further studies exploring LA financial arrangements for long-term comparisons of the periods before and during the austerity era and those associated with other disruptive events such as Brexit, Covid-19, the Liz Truss financial crises and the conflicts in Syria, Gaza and the Ukraine. This development paper demonstrates how the dataset has been developed and how it has been used to date. For example, the data set has been used to identify and analyse and trends/patterns in expenditure that led to financial distress among LAs in England. (Dom et al. 2024a); how Welsh LAs prioritised limited resources to maintain public service delivery between 2010/11 to 2019/20 (Dom et al. 2022) and more specifically how cultural services in England were affected by austerity – localism (Dom et al. 2024b). Future versions of the dataset will be updated with post-2020 financial data of English and Welsh LAs will be hosted on an interactive online dashboard and made readily available to interested researchers, think tanks, and other interested stakeholders from public, private and third-sector organisations

Local authority financial reporting and external audit in England: the Redmond Review and the future of local audit

Academics and auditors have expressed growing concerns about the financial resilience and vulnerability of English local authorities after a decade of funding cuts and growing demand for public services (Barbera et al 2017; CIPFA 2017; Sandford 2020). The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated these problems, as local authority income has fallen, demand for services has risen and investments in assets and companies have proven less rewarding in uncertain times. (Murphy et al. 2021). There is a widespread consensus that arrangements for public audit and formal assurance to the public and key stakeholders are no longer fit for purpose thereby increasing uncertainty amongst all key stakeholders and increasing the risk of severe financial problems within local authorities (Murphy and Lakoma 2020). In response to these growing concerns, the UK Government established an independent review of local authority audit (Redmond 2020). This has been complemented by the release of an updated Code of Audit Practice from the National Audit Office (2020), which sought to guide auditors in how to address financial sustainability. The subsequent Redmond report articulated the widespread concerns about the adequacy and transparency of local authority audit and accounts arrangements. It found new local authority activities such as new commercial and hybrid organisations fell outside of the scope of the statutory audit and it acknowledged the widening ‘expectations gap’ in what the public expect from the audit and what it is actually obliged to deliver (ICAEW 2018). In terms of the overall audit regime Redmond (2020) also found an inadequate regulatory framework, delivered by an overly complex and disparate organisational landscape having no single regulatory authority responsible for systemic leadership, oversight and co-ordination. In December the UK Government published its response to the report’s recommendations. This paper reviews the Redmond report, the government’s formal response to its recommendations and subsequent progress with implementation in the period prior to the conference. In so doing it will be cognisant of and review its potential compliance with the INTOSAI Financial Audit Guidelines based on the International Standards on Auditing (ISA) issued by the IAASB

A Methodological Framework for the Reconstruction of Contiguous Regions of Ancestral Genomes and Its Application to Mammalian Genomes

The reconstruction of ancestral genome architectures and gene orders from homologies between extant species is a long-standing problem, considered by both cytogeneticists and bioinformaticians. A comparison of the two approaches was recently investigated and discussed in a series of papers, sometimes with diverging points of view regarding the performance of these two approaches. We describe a general methodological framework for reconstructing ancestral genome segments from conserved syntenies in extant genomes. We show that this problem, from a computational point of view, is naturally related to physical mapping of chromosomes and benefits from using combinatorial tools developed in this scope. We develop this framework into a new reconstruction method considering conserved gene clusters with similar gene content, mimicking principles used in most cytogenetic studies, although on a different kind of data. We implement and apply it to datasets of mammalian genomes. We perform intensive theoretical and experimental comparisons with other bioinformatics methods for ancestral genome segments reconstruction. We show that the method that we propose is stable and reliable: it gives convergent results using several kinds of data at different levels of resolution, and all predicted ancestral regions are well supported. The results come eventually very close to cytogenetics studies. It suggests that the comparison of methods for ancestral genome reconstruction should include the algorithmic aspects of the methods as well as the disciplinary differences in data aquisition