Promoting widening participation and higher education: Lessons from a four year intervention programme

Since the labour government came to power in 1997, a major policy has been to increase the participation rates of those entering higher education, particularly those from lower-socio economic backgrounds. Just over 10 years later, little has changed. The Brunel Urban Scholars programme is a 4 year long intervention programme for students from lower socio-economic backgrounds aged 12-16. It aims, through university style teaching, emersion in a university environment, and regular interaction with undergraduates, to enhance these students’ aspirations and higher education orientation. Findings from the first 2 years suggest that higher education orientation has increased. Aspirations are showing some signs of increasing, but are more gradual. This evidence supports previous findings from pilot programmes that change is slow, and justifies and suggests the need for a longer intervention programmes

‘Are we being de-gifted, Miss?’ Primary school gifted and talented co-ordinators’ responses to the Gifted and Talented Education Policy in England

This is the accepted version of the following article: Koshy, V. and Pinheiro-Torres, C. (2013), ‘Are we being de-gifted, Miss?’ Primary school gifted and talented co-ordinators’ responses to the Gifted and Talented Education Policy in England. British Educational Research Journal, 39: 953–978. doi: 10.1002/berj.3021, which has been published in final form at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/berj.3021/abstract.Over a decade ago the UK government launched its gifted and talented education policy in England, yet there has been very little published research which considers how schools and teachers are interpreting and implementing the policy. By seeking the views of the gifted and talented co-ordinators (For ease of reference, the term gifted and talented (G&T) co-ordinator is used throughout the paper as a generic shorthand for the research participants who were either designated school gifted and talented co-ordinators or teachers or head teachers with responsibility for policy implementation) with responsibility for addressing the requirements of the policy, the study reported in this paper explored how primary schools in England responded to the policy. Drawing on data gathered using questionnaires with a national sample of primary schools as well as follow-up in-depth interviews with a sample of G&T co-ordinators, the authors report their findings. The study found that there was considerable unease about the concept of identifying and ‘labelling’ a group of pupils as ‘gifted and talented’. G&T co-ordinators found it difficult to interpret the policy requirements and were responding pragmatically to what they considered to be required by the government. Curriculum provision for the selected group of gifted and talented pupils was patchy. The paper concludes by identifying a need for further professional development for teachers and by challenging the policy's over-emphasis on identifying and labelling gifted and talented pupils. We posit whether the gifted and talented education policy would have been better introduced and enjoyed greater success by leaving the identification of pupils to one side and by placing greater emphasis on developing effective learning and teaching strategies instead

On a Three-Dimensional Gravity Model with Higher Derivatives

The purpose of this work is to present a model for 3D massive gravity with topological and higher-derivative terms. Causality and unitarity are discussed at tree-level. Power-counting renormalizability is also contemplated.Comment: 9 pages, Latex, no figures; to be published in Gen. Rel. Gra

Massive, Topologically Massive, Models

In three dimensions, there are two distinct mass-generating mechanisms for gauge fields: adding the usual Proca/Pauli-Fierz, or the more esoteric Chern-Simons (CS), terms. Here we analyze the three-term models where both types are present, and their various limits. Surprisingly, in the tensor case, these seemingly innocuous systems are physically unacceptable. If the sign of the Einstein term is ``wrong'' as is in fact required in the CS case, then the excitation masses are always complex; with the usual sign, there is a (known) region of the two mass parameters where reality is restored, but instead we show that a ghost problem arises, while, for the ``pure mass'' two-term system without an Einstein action, complex masses are unavoidable. This contrasts with the smooth behavior of the corresponding vector models. Separately, we show that the ``partial masslessness'' exhibited by (plain) massive spin-2 models in de Sitter backgrounds is formally shared by the three-term system: it also enjoys a reduced local gauge invariance when this mass parameter is tuned to the cosmological constant.Comment: 7 pages, typos corrected, reference adde