The Experiences of Autistic Young People and Managed Moves

Managed moves were introduced to the UK policy landscape in 1999 as a way of avoiding permanent exclusions for young people, giving them an opportunity to have a ‘fresh start’ at a different school. Guidance defining managed moves and the processes involved is limited. Research suggests that managed move practice is varied and inconsistent across the country. There is currently no research exploring managed moves involving Autistic Young People, this is despite evidence pointing to Autistic children being at a greater risk of placement breakdowns due to exclusions, including managed moves. The aim of this research is to address this gap in the literature by focusing on Autistic young peoples’ experience of managed moves. Autism theory from the Autistic community is drawn upon, and in particular Milton’s Double Empathy Theory. This theory reframes discourses of social communication and interaction deficits (e.g. theory of mind) as a ‘a two-way’ predicament; with non-Autistic individuals also experiencing difficulties in understanding and effectively responding to Autistic individuals. Bronfenbrenner’s Bioecological Systems Theory provides a framework for considering YP’s situated experience of managed moves. Therefore, the study looks into the YP’s accounts as well as the accounts of staff embedded within school and LA systems. Four Autistic young people and six members of staff were interviewed and data was analysed thematically using Reflexive Thematic Analysis. Key themes from the perspective of autistic YP and staff are identified and implications for educational psychology practice are discussed

Preparing to Be an Ethically Minded Educational Psychologist: Examining Conceptualisations of Social Justice and a Reflexive Exploration of Values

This paper originated as an essay written to partially fulfil the requirements of a Professional Doctorate in Educational and Child Psychology. Trainee Educational Psychologists were invited to consider the ethical questions that arise from following the moral principles that underpin the practice of educational psychologists, namely social justice, beneficence and autonomy. The TEP chose to focus on social justice. This was explored by drawing on three theories or principles: Utilitarianism, Rawlsian Redistribution and Communitarianism. These were considered within the context of the diverse communities educational psychologists work with. Vignettes from personal and professional experiences were offered and used by the TEP to explore the sources of her values and to consider how her identity and values influence her work. This reflexive exercise is undertaken in the first term and in the first year of the TEP’s training, in preparation for her becoming the ethically minded psychologist she intends to be

Convolutional Deblurring for Natural Imaging

In this paper, we propose a novel design of image deblurring in the form of one-shot convolution filtering that can directly convolve with naturally blurred images for restoration. The problem of optical blurring is a common disadvantage to many imaging applications that suffer from optical imperfections. Despite numerous deconvolution methods that blindly estimate blurring in either inclusive or exclusive forms, they are practically challenging due to high computational cost and low image reconstruction quality. Both conditions of high accuracy and high speed are prerequisites for high-throughput imaging platforms in digital archiving. In such platforms, deblurring is required after image acquisition before being stored, previewed, or processed for high-level interpretation. Therefore, on-the-fly correction of such images is important to avoid possible time delays, mitigate computational expenses, and increase image perception quality. We bridge this gap by synthesizing a deconvolution kernel as a linear combination of Finite Impulse Response (FIR) even-derivative filters that can be directly convolved with blurry input images to boost the frequency fall-off of the Point Spread Function (PSF) associated with the optical blur. We employ a Gaussian low-pass filter to decouple the image denoising problem for image edge deblurring. Furthermore, we propose a blind approach to estimate the PSF statistics for two Gaussian and Laplacian models that are common in many imaging pipelines. Thorough experiments are designed to test and validate the efficiency of the proposed method using 2054 naturally blurred images across six imaging applications and seven state-of-the-art deconvolution methods.Comment: 15 pages, for publication in IEEE Transaction Image Processin