Inspection and Emotion

In this paper I explore the emotional impact of inspection on the staff of a school in the two years between Ofsted1 inspections. Using data from one school undergoing inspection, I argue that the negative emotional impact of inspection of teachers goes beyond the oft-reported issues of stress and overwork. Teachers experience a loss of power and control, and the sense of being permanently under a disciplinary regime can lead to fear, anger and disaffection. This perhaps calls into question the whole issue of seeking school improvement by way of a system which creates such a negative emotional impact

Panoptic performativity and school inspection regimes: disciplinary mechanisms and life under special measures

This paper looks at Ofsted and particularly special measures regimes as part of a disciplinary mechanism. It examines issues such as school effectiveness theories, the increasing powers of Ofsted, and life under special measures and links it to performativity, discipline and surveillance using the metaphor of the panopticon. The change in teachers' accountability is traced, along with the rise in the audit culture in teaching, and the increase in the power of Ofsted. The research context is a case study of a school over the period 1999-2003. During this time the school was placed into special measures and provided an opportunity to examine the effects of a key Government policy. The issues researched were Ofsted, special measures and the effects that these had on schools and teachers. The paper argues that a special measures regime is an example of panoptic discipline which I call panoptic performativity. The primary research is echoed by much of the existing research and first hand accounts of Ofsted inspections. I also locate special measures regimes in the context of Lyotard's 'performativity', Foucault's 'normalization', and the school effectiveness literature

Improvement after inspection

This article is based on a case study of one English secondary school in the three years following its release from Special Measures. Having followed the school's successful improvement (in inspection terms) while under Special Measures, I was interested to know if the school would be able to sustain its improvement once the inspectors had departed. Data used are from interviews with middle and senior management detailing responses to the essential question 'is the school improving?'. I found that, although in many respects the school was maintaining its improvement, some middle and senior managers were suspicious about the long-term effects of becoming an institution so seemingly built around passing inspection. © Author

The History of Astrometry

The history of astrometry, the branch of astronomy dealing with the positions of celestial objects, is a lengthy and complex chronicle, having its origins in the earliest records of astronomical observations more than two thousand years ago, and extending to the high accuracy observations being made from space today. Improved star positions progressively opened up and advanced fundamental fields of scientific enquiry, including our understanding of the scale of the solar system, the details of the Earth's motion through space, and the comprehension and acceptance of Newtonianism. They also proved crucial to the practical task of maritime navigation. Over the past 400 years, during which positional accuracy has improved roughly logarithmically with time, the distances to the nearest stars were triangulated, making use of the extended measurement baseline given by the Earth's orbit around the Sun. This led to quantifying the extravagantly vast scale of the Universe, to a determination of the physical properties of stars, and to the resulting characterisation of the structure, dynamics and origin of our Galaxy. After a period in the middle years of the twentieth century in which accuracy improvements were greatly hampered by the perturbing effects of the Earth's atmosphere, ultra-high accuracies of star positions from space platforms have led to a renewed advance in this fundamental science over the past few years.Comment: 52 pages, 14 figures. To appear in The European Physical Journal: Historical Perspectives on Contemporary Physic

The Gaia Astrometric Survey

In its all-sky survey, the ESA global astrometry mission Gaia will perform high-precision astrometry and photometry for 1 billion stars down to $V = 20$ mag. The data collected in the Gaia catalogue, to be published by the end of the next decade, will likely revolutionize our understanding of many aspects of stellar and Galactic astrophysics. One of the relevant areas in which the Gaia observations will have great impact is the astrophysics of planetary systems. This summary focuses on a) the complex technical problems related to and challenges inherent in correctly modelling the signals of planetary systems present in measurements collected with a space-borne observatory poised to carry out precision astrometry at the micro-arcsecond ($\mu$as) level, and b) on the potential of Gaia $\mu$as astrometry for important contributions to the astrophysics of planetary systems.Comment: 2 pages. Summary of an invited talk given at Special Session 6 (Planetary Systems as Potential Sites for Life) of the XXVIIth IAU General Assembly held in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). To appear in IAU Highlights of Astronomy 15 (2010

Hipparcos: a Retrospective

The Hipparcos satellite was launched in 1989. It was the first, and remains to date the only, attempt at performing large-scale astrometric measurements from space. Hipparcos marked a fundamentally new approach to the field of astrometry, revolutionising our knowledge of the positions, distances, and space motions of the stars in the solar neighbourhood. In this retrospective, I look back at the processes which led to the mission's acceptance, provide a short summary of the underlying measurement principles and the experiment's scientific achievements, and a conclude with a brief summary of its principal legacy - the Gaia mission.Comment: European Astronomical Society Tycho Brahe Prize Lecture 2011 (18 pages, 4 figures

Something for everyone? The different approaches of academic disciplines to Open Educational Resources and the effect on widening participation

This article explores the relationship between academic disciplines‘ representation in the United Kingdom Open University‘s (OU) OpenLearn open educational resources (OER) repository and in the OU‘s fee-paying curriculum. Becher‘s (1989) typology was used to subdivide the OpenLearn and OU fee-paying curriculum content into four disciplinary categories: Hard Pure (e.g., Science), Hard Applied (e.g., Technology), Soft Pure (e.g., Arts) and Soft Applied (e.g., Education). It was found that while Hard Pure and Hard Applied disciplines enjoy an increased share of the OER curriculum, Soft Applied disciplines are under-represented as OER. Possible reasons for this disparity are proposed and Becher‘s typology is adapted to be more appropriate to 21st-century higher education

The realities of ‘reaching out’: enacting the public-facing open scholar role with existing online communities

A core tenet of the open educational resources (OER) movement has long been that 'the world's knowledge is a public good' (Smith & Casserly, 2006, p.2) and should be available for everyone to use, reuse and share. However, this vision of openness and of the connection between OER and social justice, which McAndrew and Farrow (2013) observe is currently re-emerging, is limited by the fact that OER-provision is typically top-down, driven by higher education suppliers with the needs of higher education (HE) in mind. As a consequence, the OER that are released can be hard to find for potential users outside HE and often fail to meet those potential users' needs in respect of the content, size, format and level of the OER. Seeking to increase the impact of OER and open educational practices (OEP) beyond higher education we conceptualised a new role for academics - the public-facing open scholar. The role involves academics working with online communities outside HE to source OER to meet the specific needs of those communities. Having developed detailed guidelines for performing the role we piloted it within a voluntary sector child welfare community in order to explore its viability. To date, our pilot findings indicate that the role of public-facing open scholar is both viable and well-received by the case study community. However, the pilot process, conducted in a community which requires all participants to be anonymous, has also highlighted the need to be aware of the impact of privacy constraints when choosing a community with which to work. In addition, the pilot indicated that listening to a community's needs involves more than noting requests for advice and includes attentiveness to a community's culture and typical modes of participation. This, in turn, can help the public-facing open scholar to fit in with the community and gain members' trust. The implications of these findings are wide-ranging. Voluntary sector online communities offer one platform for the public-facing open scholar to realise the transformative potential of open education, raising awareness and increasing the use and reuse of OER by people outside HE. However, the scope for the role is not limited to the voluntary sector and academics could find opportunities to perform the role in many different types of community. Furthermore, whilst we have concentrated on the role of the individual academic, institutional dimensions are also relevant. For example, higher education institutions which formally recognise the public-facing open scholar role as an important component of academic output, rather than an activity which is in tension with the demands of paid employment, may themselves be seen as taking on the role of a benevolent academy that is contributing to a global movement for free and open access to knowledge

Beyond the ivory tower: a model for nurturing informal learning and development communities through open educational practices

Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Educational Practices (OEP) are making an evergrowing impact on the field of adult learning, offering free high-quality education to increasing numbers of people. However, the top-down distribution of weighty university courses that typifies current provision is not necessarily suitable for contexts such as Continued Professional Development (CPD). This article proposes that a change of focus from a supplier-driven to a needs-led approach, grounded in theories of informal learning, could increase the positive impact of OER and OEP beyond the ivory towers of higher education. To explore this approach, we focused on the requirements of a specific community outside higher education – trainers in the UK’s voluntary sector – in order to design a more broadly applicable model for a sustainable online learning community focused around OER and OEP. The model was informed by a recent survey of voluntary sector trainers establishing their need for high-quality free resources and their desire to develop more productive relationships with their peers, and by evaluation of successful online communities within and outside the voluntary sector. Our proposed model gives equal attention to learning resources and group sociality. In it, academics and practitioners work together to adapt and create learning materials and to share each other’s knowledge and experiences through discussion forums and other collaborative activities. The model features an explicit up-skilling dimension based on Communities of Practice (CoP) theory and a system of reputation management to incentivise participation. The model is unique in building a pan-organisation community that is entirely open in terms of membership and resources. While the model offered in this article is focused on the voluntary sector, it could also be applied more widely, allowing practitioner communities the benefits of tailored resources and academic input, and collaborating universities the benefit of having their OER used and reused more widely for CPD through informal learning