The use and usefulness of a parent questionnaire to help schools identify disability

The Equality Act 2010 will be implemented in full in 2011, and schools in the UK will have to provide special aids or services for children with disabilities where this provision is considered reasonable. This paper reports on staff perspectives on the use and usefulness of a parental questionnaire on disability from a sample of 49 schools (mainstream and special) located in 12 local authorities. Most schools found the process of administering the parent questionnaire undemanding; just under half of the sample indicated that they would take some action as a result of the data collected from the parental questionnaire (e.g., to inform plans for targeting or monitoring support for children, and to contact parents and follow‐up issues they had mentioned); and about one‐third of schools recorded unanticipated findings from the parental questionnaire, that is, the identification of children whose disabilities were not previously known to the school. Implications for schools are discussed.     

Demonstrating the positive impact of information support on patient care in primary care: a rapid literature review

AIM: To review the literature on the positive impact of information services, or information resources, on patient care in primary care. OBJECTIVES: To identify and summarize key papers on which librarians might draw in making the case for investment, and to highlight gaps in the research evidence Methodology: A rapid literature review was conducted in the summer of 2005. RESULTS: There is a small body of evidence to demonstrate the positive impact of library and information services on the direct care of patients as well as a beneficial impact on the care of future patients through the application of evidence to multiple patients. CONCLUSIONS: There is relatively limited research evidence of the impact of information, and library services, in primary care, in comparison with hospital settings and the research available is generally reliant on small samples. There is a lack of impact studies conducted with non-clinical staff. The review highlights the value of critical incident technique (CIT). It is possible to gather evidence of the potential for information services to deliver cost savings.     

Habitus, social fields, and circuits in rural science education

Schooling and science education are embedded within larger socio-cultural, political and economic contexts, influenced by global flows of capital, labor, ideas, and images. In this article we consider the ways in which ethnography traces the web of interactions (circuits), in a rural community and the ways that science inquiry was associated with character education. Our discussion examines the relationship between social fields, habitus, and meritocracy under new and ever-changing neoliberal conditions. These macro-level forces play out in everyday practices in the community and reveal schools, as well as science education, as sites for struggle.     

A rural math, science, and technology elementary school tangled up in global networks of practice

This is an ethnographic study of a newly created math, science, and technology elementary magnet school in a rural community fiercely committed to cultural preservation while facing unprecedented economic instability brought on by massive loss of manufacturing jobs. Our goal was to understand global- and community-level contexts that influenced the school’s science curriculum, the ways the school promoted itself to the community, and the implicit meanings of science held by school staff, parents and community members. Main sources of data were the county’s newspaper articles from 2003 to 2006, the school’s, town’s, and business leaders’ promotional materials, and interviews with school staff, parents, and community members. A key finding was the school’s dual promotion of science education and character education. We make sense of this “science with character” curriculum by unpacking the school and community’s entanglements with historical (cultural preservation), political (conservative politics, concerns for youth depravity), and economic (globalization) networks. We describe the ways those entanglements enabled certain reproductive meanings of school science (as add-on, suspect, and elitist) and other novel meanings of science (empathetic, nurturing, place-based). This study highlights the school as a site of struggle, entangled in multiple networks of practice that influence in positive, negative, and unpredictable ways, the enacted science curriculum.     

Using solution focused brief therapy in individual referrals for bullying

The authors work in a city local education authority Special Educational Needs Support Service with an Anti-Bullying Project that continues to develop effective approaches to dealing with bullying in schools. This paper describes the project's use of Solution Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) and reports on the outcomes of a large number of interventions, particularly with pupils of secondary school age. The support group approach, developed within this project and published in Educational Psychology in Practice, is referred to in the government's anti-bullying pack as a key strategy. The authors show that SFBT provides another effective strategy to support pupils vulnerable to bullying in both primary and secondary schools.