The Thatcher governments and the British Sports Council, 1979–1990

The month of February 2015 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the Sports Council. Despite its central role in sports governance in Britain, the advisory Council of 1965 and its successor bodies have received little attention from historians. This article assesses the early history of the Sports Council, using primary material such as National Archive papers and memoirs by practitioners to focus attention particularly on the period of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership in the 1980s. The pre-1979 Council commanded widespread respect, and the article explores how and why it became beleaguered thereafter, attributing this to a combination of ideological distrust as ‘Thatcherism’ gained in strength, shortcomings on the part of the Council itself and parochial in-fighting among leading sports bodies. By the mid-1980s the Council was under scrutiny as never before, some in the political and sporting world questioning whether it had a viable future. Although it survived to fight another day, the confidence and momentum of earlier years became a thing of the past and the way was opened up for a major overhaul of sports administration to be carried out in the 1990s.     

Estranged students in higher education: navigating social and economic capitals

ABSTRACT

Family is widely regarded as a cornerstone of student support. When family support exist as an essential form of social capital making, rupture of family ties places students in a disadvantageous position. This paper focuses on estranged students’ accounts of their experiences of higher education, highlighting how capital dynamics shape their academic trajectories. Based on interviews with 21 estranged students, our research uncovers different dimensions of estranged students’ struggles and successes as they move through academia. This paper explores the social imagination that surrounds the university student, or ‘student experience’, as resting upon family support. The authors propose that widening participation policies and practices need to be more attuned to the realities that mark estranged students’ experiences, as they are not only impacted by the scarcity of either economic or social capital, but also by the instability of interrelated capitals that contribute to precarious and volatile experiences.     

The student experience of piloting multi-modal performance feedback tools in health and social care practice (work)-based settings

The aim of this study was to evaluate newly developed performance feedback tools from the student perspective. The tools were innovative in both their mode of delivery and the range of stakeholders they involved in the feedback process. By using the tools in health and social care settings, students were able to engage in interprofessional assessment of common competences and obtain performance feedback from a range of stakeholders not commonly involved in work-based learning; these included peers and service users. This paper discusses the ways in which the performance feedback tools were developed by a collaborative programme and compares their delivery, across a wide range of professions and work-based settings, in paper-based, web-based and mobile formats. The tools were evaluated through a series of profession-specific focus groups involving 85 students and 7 professions. The data were analysed thematically and reduced to three key categories: mode of delivery, assessment tool dynamics and work-based issues. These will be discussed in detail. The students agreed that the structured way of capturing and documenting feedback from several sources would support their practice placement learning. The reflective nature of the tools and the capacity for guiding reflection was also welcomed. The concepts of gaining service user, peer and/or interprofessional feedback on performance were new to some professions and evoked questions of reliability and validity, alongside appreciation of the value they added to the assessment process.     

Presidential reflections

Family stories participate in the formation of culture as they imagine and reproduce ethnic identity. This essay examines grandmother (mémère,) stories in Franco American families as the cultural location of a global moment where family, white ethnic identity, and gender intersect. Within a transnational feminism and performative theory of family storytelling which historidze and situate cultural texts, grandmothers become linked with the motherland and mother tongue in the imagination of Franco American identity. The analysis of a corpus of mémère stories identifies both the performative agency and constraints on traditional ethnic women within structures of gender, culture, ana power. The performance of mémère stories enchants the grandmother as a cultural icon and reproduces the Franco American family. However, the formation of cultural identity through family storytelling in mémère stories is a problematic achievement because it is built upon myths of cultural purity and “goodness,“ although narrative strategies complicate these images.