Social Work, Child Protection and Politics: Some Critical and Constructive Reflections

This Critical Commentary reflects on how the author's personal and professional experiences have both mirrored and fed into the changing policy and practice contexts in England over the last forty years. A central part of the argument is that the way public and political debates have been constructed has meant there is a very intimate relationship between social work and child protection such that the former almost fails to have an existence outside of the parameters of the latter; social work has been reduced to a very narrow concern with child protection. The Commentary considers how this has come about and concludes by arguing that the two need to be clearly disaggregated such that each has a clear existence separate from the other so that more progressive policies and practices can be developed

Book Review: Paul Michael Garrett, Social work and social theory: Making connections. The Policy Press: Bristol, 2013, ISBN 9781847429605

It is important to state at the outset that I enjoyed this book, or at least large sections of it, but I also found it rather frustrating. The book is made up of 11 chapters and following an introductory chapter, is split into two parts. The first is concerned with ‘debating modernity’ made up of four chapters which critically analyse some of the most high-profile social theorists of recent times and their approaches to understanding contemporary society and recent social change – Giddens, Beck and Bauman in particular – together with some of the social work writers who have drawn on this body of work. The remaining two chapters in part one are then concerned with drawing on Marx, particularly Das Capital, for making sense of modernity and convincingly argues for replacing the concept of modernity with an explicit use of

Spin(9) and almost complex structures on 16-dimensional manifolds

For a Spin(9)-structure on a Riemannian manifold M^16 we write explicitly the matrix psi of its K\"ahler 2-forms and the canonical 8-form Phi. We then prove that Phi coincides up to a constant with the fourth coefficient of the characteristic polynomial of psi. This is inspired by lower dimensional situations, related to Hopf fibrations and to Spin(7). As applications, formulas are deduced for Pontrjagin classes and integrals of Phi and Phi^2 in the special case of holonomy Spin(9).Comment: 18 page

PAL leader training at Bournemouth University: 12 years on and still evolving

Peer Assisted Learning (PAL) at Bournemouth University (BU) is a peer mentoring scheme that fosters cross-year support between students on the same course. Coordination of PAL, including leader training, is run centrally within Student and Academic Services by the PAL Coordination Team. Successful applicants attend two days of compulsory training in June or September with optional follow up training sessions offered throughout the autumn term. As with other training programmes for peer learning schemes, including Supplemental Instruction (SI), upon which PAL is based (Arendale 1994; Jacobs et al. 2008), the concept of modelling is integral to the training. Trainers employ small group learning techniques and frequently re-direct questions. Leaders can then use these approaches in their own sessions. Crucially, all attendees lead a simulated PAL session. Weekly follow up training is delivered in collaboration with other support staff, providing information on various academic skills, support services and ideas for related PAL sessions. Like PAL itself, leader training has evolved gradually since it began in 2001. Changes include: training on new online community areas on the University's Virtual Learning Environment; streamlining of initial training in response to trainee feedback. However, the overarching principles of the training, established by the founders of the scheme, remain (Capstick et al. 2004). Qualitative feedback from 2011-2012 trainees after completing training, and from a later survey delivered to them towards the end of their role, has further confirmed the continued power of this training while revealing potential ways to strengthen it

The even Clifford structure of the fourth Severi variety

The Hermitian symmetric space $M=\mathrm{EIII}$ appears in the classification of complete simply connected Riemannian manifolds carrying a parallel even Clifford structure. This means the existence of a real oriented Euclidean vector bundle $E$ over it together with an algebra bundle morphism $\varphi:\mathrm{Cl}^0(E) \rightarrow \mathrm{End}(TM)$ mapping $\Lambda^2 E$ into skew-symmetric endomorphisms, and the existence of a metric connection on $E$ compatible with $\varphi$. We give an explicit description of such a vector bundle $E$ as a sub-bundle of $\mathrm{End}(TM)$. From this we construct a canonical differential 8-form on $\mathrm{EIII}$, associated with its holonomy $\mathrm{Spin}(10) \cdot \mathrm{U}(1) \subset \mathrm{U}(16)$, that represents a generator of its cohomology ring. We relate it with a Schubert cycle structure by looking at $\mathrm{EIII}$ as the smooth projective variety $V_{(4)} \subset \mathbb{C}P^{26}$ known as the fourth Severi variety