Sex Education Materials in The Netherlands and in England and Wales: A comparison of content,use and teaching practice

Sex education in The Netherlands and in the UK [1] has attracted attention because of the huge differences between the teenage pregnancy rates. There are substantial similarities in the way in which sex education is structured in the two countries, and yet the approach to the subject is very different. We used documentary sources and interviews to explore the political debates; compared both science and PSE texts aimed at 14-15- year-olds; and carried out exploratory field work in three secondary schools in each country. While sex education is controversial in both countries, the British debate is adversarial and the Dutch strive to seek consensus, making use of professional sex educators in the process. The difference in approach is reflected in both the sex education materials and the approach taken in the classroom. We conclude that the Dutch are significantly more successful in addressing the problem of ignorance and of promoting a coherent sex education message.     

The trouble with resits …

In the criterion‐based clinical assessment context, and more broadly, examination resits continue to present an ongoing dilemma to educators. The number of students involved is generally a small percentage of the cohort, but it is precisely with these students that institutions bear a heavy responsibility in ensuring they reach a sufficiently high standard of performance, and are accurately assessed. The students must be given a “fair” opportunity to reach the appropriate standard(s), but at the same time, especially when clinical skills are being assessed, the public must be protected from incompetent practitioners. However, this creates a delicate tension for institutions since resits present an additional financial burden, and student failures adversely effect external funding.

This paper investigates and compares the main clinical assessment and resit profiles of students in two medical schools, each of which employs a different standard setting methodology. The analysis demonstrates that resit students improve their performance by a substantial amount; this finding applies across all undergraduate clinical levels. The key issue under investigation is whether resits, as currently constituted, offer an unfair advantage to the resit student. In essence, are resits are too easy?     

Managing the Process of International Collaboration in Online Course Development: A Case-Example Involving Higher Education Institutions in Ireland,Switzerland, Austria,and the United Kingdom

There has been significant growth recently in online learning and joint programmes of education involving collaborative partnerships between and among higher education institutions in different jurisdictions. Utilising an interdisciplinary team model (Care and Scanlan 2001), we describe in this article the process of collaboration among four European institutions in Austria, Ireland, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom in order to develop and deliver an accredited online course on the management of work-related stress for health and social care workers. This course was also one of the first to pilot a system of equivalency between two European vocational and higher education credit schemes to promote learner mobility and recognition of a new international qualification. Although this process of collaboration occurred within a pan-European context, important lessons may be drawn from this explanation that are of potential interest to the wider international audience.