Challenging from the margins into the mainstream—improving renal services in a collaborative and entrepreneurial spirit

Can the development, both clinical and managerial, of practitioners involved in healthcare be enriched by connecting action learning principles and practice with research on ‘tempered radicals’? Might such connection also assist the efforts of patients and their advocates to create more holistic approaches to patient care? This paper explores these questions with reference to a UK Department of Health project to improve renal services. The prime focus is the experience of a set of set advisers who ‘held the ring’ on the project, supporting the work of the sets and attempting to make sense of the emerging learning.     

The accuracy of students’ predictions of their GCSE grades

The paper reports a study that investigated the relationship between students’ self-predicted and actual General Certificate of Secondary Education results in order to establish the extent of over- and under-prediction and whether this varies by subject and across genders and socio-economic groupings. It also considered the relationship between actual and predicted attainment and attitudes towards going to university. The sample consisted of 109 young people in two schools being followed up from an earlier study. Just over 50% of predictions were accurate and students were much more likely to over-predict than to under-predict. Most errors of prediction were only one grade out and may reflect examination unreliability as well as student misperceptions. Girls were slightly less likely than boys to over-predict but there were no differences associated with social background. Higher levels of attainment, both actual and predicted, were strongly associated with positive attitudes to university. Differences between predictions and results are likely to reflect examination errors as well as pupil errors. There is no evidence that students from more advantaged social backgrounds over-estimate themselves compared with other students, although boys over-estimate themselves compared with girls.     

Association of the Functional Movement Screen™ with match-injury burden in men’s community rugby union

Evidence supporting use of the Functional Movement Screen (FMS^TM) to identify athletes’ risk of injury is equivocal. Furthermore, few studies account for exposure to risk during analysis. This study investigated the association of FMS^TM performance with incidence and burden of match-injuries in adult community rugby players. 277 players performed the FMS^TM during pre-season and in-season time-loss injuries and match exposure were recorded. The associations between FMS^TM score, pain, and movement-pattern asymmetries with match-injury incidence (≥8-days time-loss/1000hours), severe match-injury incidence (>28-days time-loss/1000hours), and match-injury burden (total time-loss days/1000hours for ≥8-days match-injuries) were analysed using Poisson regression. Multivariate analysis indicated players with pain and movement-pattern asymmetry during pre-season had 2.9 times higher severe match-injury incidence (RR, 90%CI = 2.9, 0.9–9.7) and match-injury burden (RR, 90%CI = 2.9, 1.3–6.6). Players with a typically low FMS^TM score (mean – 1SD threshold) were estimated to have a 50% greater match-injury burden compared to players with a typically high FMS^TM score (mean + 1SD threshold) as match-injury burden was 10% lower per 1-unit increase in FMS^TM score. As the strongest association with injury outcome was found for players with pain and asymmetry, when implementing the FMS^TM it is advisable to prioritise these players for further assessment and subsequent treatment.     

Recovering potential: factors associated with success in engaging challenging students with alternative pre-16 provision

This short report describes the extent to which sociometric test results are validated by observations of children's social behaviour during playtimes. The sociometric terms ‘star’ and ‘isolate’, in particular, are examined in the light of measurements of the social interactions of children thus labelled.     

The Power of Collaboration: Learning to Teach Antiracist Content

In this article the author examines the experiences of eight teacher educators within a collaborative teaching community as they learned to meet the unique challenges of teaching antiracist content. Such spaces can be powerful places of mentoring and retreat that sustain the legacy of critical multicultural education, yet they remain institutionally precarious.     

Sense about sex: media,sex advice,education and learning

The media are widely acknowledged as important in sex and relationship education, but they are usually associated with ‘bad’ effects on young people in contrast to the ‘good’ knowledge represented by more informational and educational formats. In this paper we look at sex advice giving in newspapers, magazines and television in the UK, in sex advice books and in online spaces for sexual learning. We examine some of the limitations of the information provided, consider the challenges for sex advice in the contemporary context, and outline some of the opportunities for academics, researchers, therapists, sex educators and activists to contribute productively to sex advice giving and sexual learning more generally.     

Truancy and well-being among secondary school pupils in England

The paper considers two problematic aspects of the lives of young people: the long-standing issues of truancy from school and more recent concerns about the extent of mental well-being. It uses data from a large-scale survey, the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (LSYPE). LSYPE provides a very large sample which allows for robust analysis of sub-groups within the population, data from families as well as the young people themselves and a panel design, so that characteristics of the young people at one point in time can be related to later outcomes. The results show the extent of truancy among year-10 pupils with well over one in five reporting truanting but high levels of truancy much less common. The reasons given for truancy mostly revolved around dislike of aspects of school. Truancy, even at low levels, was associated with more negative outcomes such as poor examination results and later unemployment. Data on mental well-being, based on the General Health Questionnaire, showed the extent of feelings of distress and inability to cope with everyday life with more serious levels affecting perhaps one in five of the young people. Young women were more likely to report problems of mental well-being than young men and truancy was strongly associated with poorer levels of well-being. The contrast between the way that most truants said that it was important to them to do well at school but also that disliking school was given as a reason for truancy suggests the possibility of school interventions.     

THE STRUCTURE AND IMPLICATIONS OF CHILDREN'S ATTITUDES TO SCHOOL

ABSTRACT:  The paper reports a study of children's attitudes to school based on a questionnaire survey of 845 pupils in their first year of secondary school in England, together with interviews with a sample of the children. A clearly structured set of attitudes emerged from a factor analysis which showed a distinction between instrumental and affective aspects of attitudes but also dimensions within these, including a sense of teacher commitment and school as a difficult environment. Virtually all children had a strong sense of the importance of doing well at school. However, a substantial minority were not sure that they would stay on after 16. There were few differences between boys and girls or between children from different socio-economic backgrounds but children planning to leave at 16 enjoyed school less and were less sure that it had anything to offer them. There was an almost universal commitment to the value of education but, for a minority, an ambivalence about the experience and relevance of schooling for them.