Improving services for pupils with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties : responding to the challenges

This paper considers some of the major challenges facing key stakeholders, including teachers, professionals working in support services, parents and pupils, as they strive to improve services for children with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties (SEBD). For each of these challenges (working with families, low educational attainments, including pupils with SEBD in mainstream schools, transition from school to college or employment, early intervention and prevention) we review research evidence, mainly from the UK and USA, and discuss possible solutions. A key theme in the paper, discussed in the concluding section, is that governments, local authorities and schools, should use the research evidence to develop carefully planned and evidence based interventions that will lead to sustained improvements being made in the education of vulnerable young people.peer-reviewe

Campus Art Museums in the 21st Century: A Conversation

In the summer of 2012, the authors of this study brought together a group of campus art museum directors and outside experts to 'think out loud' about the changes already occurring at campus museums and where new opportunities and roles may be emerging. We hope the resulting paper will further the field's larger, continuing exploration of its roles and potentials through dialogue, research, and experimentation -- an exploration that contributes to the continued healthy evolution of campus art museum practice

Social Digital Series: Reflecting on the State of Social Digital Behaviour in the UK

Social digital behaviour, in the form of building digital skills and improving digital literacy, has been part of the political, social and academic landscape in the UK for at least a decade. Initiatives have been set up by the government, the third sector, and commercial and other partners, with the aim of improving socio-economic well-being and creating greater equality through improving access to computers and the internet, and giving people the skills they need to use them

Transferring a Question-Based Dialog Framework to a Distributed Architecture

Inquiry skills are an essential tool for assessing and integrating knowledge. In facilitated face-to-face settings, inquiry skills were improved successfully by using a “question-based dialog” and its resulting visual representation. However, groups that work without a facilitator, or in which members collaborate asynchronously or in different geographical regions, such as Communities of Practice (CoP), cannot schedule face-to-face inquiry meetings. This paper summarises the unmet requirements of CoPs for a collaborative inquiry tool found by previous research on the Noracle model and proposes a distributed Web architecture as a solution. It mitigates the need for a common infrastructure, central coordination or facilitation, addresses the evolutionary nature of communities of practice and reduces the cognitive load for the individual by filtering and organising the representational artefacts with respect to the social network of the community. The implementation we envision in this paper aims at applying the concept to a much broader audience, ultimately replacing the need for local meetings

Evaluation of Getting Ahead: the Symud Ymlaen/Moving Forward project Interim Report

The SY/MF project has been developed to target young care leavers and young people who have offended in Wales to enhance their chances of finding employment and accessing further learning or training. The project has been designed to reflect learning from other similar projects and take account of the complex range of needs often presented by young people who have offended and/or are in care – and who are rarely 'job ready'. It is to offer intensive, tailored support in the form of: pre-employability and basic skills training; a six month paid work placement for a minimum of 25 hours per week; and, mentor support. SY/MF is delivered through a consortium partnership led by homeless charity Llamau.This report presents the findings of an interim assessment of SY/MF during its first full year of operation, October 2013 to the end of September 2014. The interim evaluation largely focuses on understanding the processes put in place to deliver the project and whether services have been implemented as expected; it also begins to capture outcome information. A full evaluation will build on these findings and include an assessment of impact over the full project (please see Section 1 for full details of the evaluation approach and method)