Disabled Children and Residential Schools: The Implications for Local Education Professionals

Jenny Morris, freelance researcher, David Abbott, research associate at the Norah Fry Research Centre at the University of Bristol, and Linda Ward, Director of the Norah Fry Research Centre at the University of Bristol, carried out research to look at whether the current system of legislation and regulation is adequately protecting and promoting the interests of disabled children placed at residential schools. This article summarises some findings from the research which investigated the decision-making processes leading to residential special school placements and explored the involvement of education and social services authorities after placements have been made. The research found that the needs of individual children are not central to these decision-making processes; and that the local authorities who make such placements do not pay sufficient attention to protecting and promoting children's educational or care needs once they have gone away to school. Jenny Morris, David Abbott and Linda Ward indicate some of the ways in which current practice could be improved; make recommendations for future developments; and call for further research into the role of special residential schools in the context of policy on educational and social inclusion.     

Multiple components of fitness improved among overweight and obese adolescents following a community-based lifestyle intervention

Fitness is an important component of health, and obese adolescents regularly have poor fitness. Unfortunately, few have assessed the impact of community-based lifestyle interventions on multiple components of fitness. The purpose of this study was to assess the impact of participation in a community-based intervention involving adolescents and parents on multiple components of fitness of obese adolescents. In a within-subject, waitlist controlled clinical trial with 12 months follow-up in Western Australia, participants (n = 56) completed multiple fitness measures at baseline, immediately prior to beginning an 8-week intervention and at 3, 6 and 12 months during a maintenance period. Performance on the shuttle walk was improved immediately post-intervention (increase of 42.8 m, 95% CI: 7.5, 78.2) and at 12 months post-intervention (increase of 44.6 m, 95% CI: 1.3, 87.8) compared with pre-intervention. Muscle performance of quadriceps and deltoids were improved post-intervention (increase of 1.1 (95% CI: 0.1, 2.1) kg · F and 1.0 (0.02, 2.1) kg · F, respectively) and all muscle performance measures were improved at 12 months following the intervention. There were no changes in waist circumference. A community-based lifestyle programme such as Curtin University’s Activity, Food and Attitudes Program (CAFAP) may be a viable strategy for improving fitness in overweight adolescents.     

Evaluating efforts to enhance health and wellbeing in Scottish secondary schools

Curriculum for Excellence in Scotland outlines a policy vision of a more progressive, integrated and holistic form of education; a commitment which contains an obligation for health and well-being (HWB) to be a responsibility of all teachers. A critical policy analysis approach was utilized in order to review school-level progress in different stages of policy development, i.e. policy formulation, legitimation, implementation and evaluation. Evidence was collected through 15 semi-structured interviews with head teachers, teacher education academics and staff with national and local authority quality improvement remits. Questions focused on: aims and curriculum goals; school culture; learning and teaching; partnership relationships and evaluations of practice. Findings suggest a high degree of support for curriculum aims, however, there were often problems communicating policy expectations (policy formulation). Thus, despite impressive examples of innovative practice in relation to school ethos, wider achievement and pupils’ broader general education (policy legitimation), there were also examples of HWB being constrained by senior school examinations and the backwash effect this had on curriculum planning and engagement with interdisciplinary learning approaches (policy implementation/evaluation). These findings have implications in terms of policy to practice coherence as well as highlighting the need for further more specific research evaluations.     

Course teams: myth and actuality

This article argues for the development of group intervention techniques to improve the efficacy of course teams in the preparation of distance education materials. A review of recent commentaries on course teams is presented along with an initial selection and discussion of course team issues. These are presented in the refreshingly frank domestic context of actual interactions. The irritations generated by these will be familiar to practitioners. The author concludes with a series of recommendations to enrich the quality of course team life and output. It is hoped that this provocative analysis of the course team method of producing distance education materials will generate a lively response.     

Angle and rotation: Effects of different types of feedback on the quality of response

The study compares the levels of response to angle/rotation problems presented on screen with a Logo microworld with the levels of response to similar problems presented on paper. Pairs of children aged from 9 to 11 who had little or no experience of Logo completed the problems in about 40 minutes. Pairs of children completed the problems over a period of eight weeks. The responses, classified using the SOLO taxonomy (Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes), suggested that the effect of the immediate feedback of the screen turtle heading was to inhibit moves to a higher level of response compared to those levels of response reached when responding to paper tests.