Search results

Health and Society Knowledge Exchange (HASKE) was commissioned by Hello Future to explore the role of parental influence in young people's decision-making about their future. The aim of this project was to explore the context of Cumbrian 'hard to reach' parents and carers, and the routes to engagement with them. This work built upon HASKE's previous work on an asset-based approach to widening participation, which mapped the variations of assets available to and engaged by young people in Cumbria. Outreach programmes have often found it difficult to engage parents as part of their activities, despite research showing that parental influence can be a key factor in young people's decision-making over whether to apply to University and apprenticeships. Understanding parent's aspirations for their children in the context of their own social and cultural capital is key to improving the number of applicants to University, but this is all the more significant in deprived areas and traditionally 'hard-to-reach' groups. The project consists of the following: 1) an initial deep dive of literature concerning 'hard to reach' parents, focussing on the barriers and enablers to engagement. This literature came predominantly come from the education arena, but also included psychology, sociology and other appropriate subject areas. The literature review also included apposite grey literature, for example, policy work from The Children's Society, Family Action, Action for Children as well as both the Scottish and English governments. 2) The findings of the literature review were compared with those from Hello Future's parent and carer surveys in order to consider what the unique challenges Cumbrian parents may face. 3) The findings were used to inform a number of email interviews to explore in more detail the context of Cumbrian 'hard to reach' parents and carers, and the routes to engagement with them.

Context: Following the publication of Better Births (National Maternity Review, 2016), and to support the Government's target of halving stillbirths, neonatal and maternal deaths by 2025, Health Education England introduced the Maternity Safety Training Fund to distribute over £8.1 million to NHS trusts with maternity services in England. The purpose of this initiative was to fund multidisciplinary training to improve maternity safety and care for mothers and babies. Health and Social Care Evaluations was commissioned to conduct an evaluation of the impacts and outcomes of the Maternity Safety Training Fund. Methodology: The evaluation was based on a realist methodology and used a mixed methods approach: quantitative analysis of the survey data collected by Health Education England from 128 trusts in 2017/2018 and qualitative data collection through semi-structured interviews with 10 trusts. Key findings: Contexts: - In total, 30,945 training places were delivered through the Maternity Safety Training Fund. - A wide range of maternity professional groups engaged with the training courses. - The trusts selected 41 courses from the Maternity Safety Training Catalogue and the ten most popular courses were: PROMPT, Child Birth Emergencies in the Community, Human Factors in Healthcare Trainers Course, CTG Masterclass, Labour Ward Leaders Workshop, Resilience Training for Maternity Healthcare Professionals, Newborn Life Support (NLS), Management of Labour Ward, Advanced CTG Masterclass and Maternal Critical Care. Mechanisms: - The funding of maternity safety training, both prior to the initiative and in the future, can be an issue for some trusts. - Courses delivered in face-to-face formats with multi-professional groups were particularly valued by the trusts. Outcomes: - The trusts have successfully incorporated their learning and training skills into their mandatory programmes. - The maternity safety training has impacted on everyday practice through: increasing confidence and empowering the maternity staff; enhancing skills, knowledge and awareness; improving multi-professional working and communication; improving patient safety; and encouraging cultural change. Conclusions and recommendations: - The Maternity Safety Training Fund has enabled a significant number of maternity staff to be trained, across many professional groups, and on a broad range of courses. - The funding initiative presented a unique opportunity for the trusts to upskill their workforce and develop pathways for sustaining the learning through extending their mandatory training programmes, creating champions and training staff in key positions to disseminate the knowledge through everyday practice. - Positive outcomes and sustainable learning can be achieved through identifying relevant maternity staff to train, selecting courses to meet the contextual needs of the service, training staff through face-to-face mechanisms with multi-professional groups, and disseminating the learning through mandatory training programmes. - Ongoing financial support is needed to ensure that the benefits of the funding initiative and the impacts of the maternity safety training are sustained in the future.

This paper examines the current interest in 'art activism' (Grindon 2010), and the relationship between artistic expression and civil disobedience. Boris Groys has argued that the lack of political dissidence within contemporary art is not down to the ineffectiveness of the aesthetic, but the far more effective intrusion of the aesthetic by the political (Groys 2008). As such, the political question of civil disobedience is necessarily an aesthetic one. At the same time, this raises problems for how politically effective artistic dissidence can be. As Grindon argues, if art activism often only mimics 'real' social activism, it remains within the boundaries of the gallery system with no real consequences (2010: 11). Most art activism fails to be effective civil disobedience, in this sense, as it already operates within the confines of pre-established curatorial spaces. As such, the use of art for the purposes of civil disobedience cannot be, then, mere aestheticism, but rather must act as 'an insight into the transformed mechanisms of conquest' (Groys, in Abdullah & Benzer 2011: 86): a conflict over the topology of disobedience which exposes the interrelation of aesthetics and politics through medium, space and archive. This paper critically assesses attempts in contemporary art to re-appropriate the symbolic dimension of dissidence as an aesthetic; in particular the use of militancy, asceticism and dissidence as an attempt to move beyond mere counter-political protest and towards a reclaiming of aesthetics from the intrusions of politics. It uses as a specific case example Militant Training Camp, a social experimental performance camp held at Arcadia Missa Gallery in London, March 2012. This weeklong performance piece was designed to explore the activity and mind-set of militant groups and the idea of non-pacifist activity within wider social movements. Engaging with not only the tradition of anarchist activism, but also more recent artistic engagements with civil disobedience (such as the Yes Men; Avaaz.org; Bike Bloc), the camp involved a residential ascetic 'training programme' followed by a series of violent performances open to the public, often disturbing other sites of protest such as Anarchist theatres and Occupy sites in the process. The paper uses first-hand documentary evidence and critical reflection on the event in order to argue that, as both an act of civil disobedience, and an exploration of the limits of its aesthetic treatment, the event raises two specific issues surrounding the notion of disobedience and its conceptual possibilities. The first issue is the representation of rage within the context of art activism. Here, the performance is discussed with particular reference to Sloterdijk's arguments that argues that militancy and revolt operate under a 'thymotic economy' (2010: 58). However, Sloterdijk's re-appropriation of the thymotic – a conceptualising of 'rage' which is not absorbed within the sublimination of psychology or Habermasian symbolism – is not as simple as offering an alternative, 'non-symbolic' rage. Given that modern militancy is always subject to containment (the 'civility' of civil disobedience), the second issue raised is the formative role of 'curating' acts of disobedience. Using the work of Groys on aesthetics and power, the paper assesses how 'events' of civil disobedience such as Militant Training Camp are located, represented, circulated and even stored, and the ways in which they might resist their reduction to or supplementing of a further economy (be it symbolic, banal or simply pious) which conceals the formative 'rage' of disobedience.

The order of influence from thesis to hypothesis, and from philosophy to the social sciences, has historically governed the way in which the abstraction and significance of language as an empirical object is determined. In this article, an argument is made for the development of a more reflexive intellectual relationship between ordinary language philosophy (OLP) and the social sciences that it helped inspire. It is demonstrated that, and how, the social scientific traditions of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (CA) press OLP to re-consider the variety of problematic abstractions it has previously made for the sake of philosophical clarity, thereby self-reinvigorating.

Hello Future forms part of the Uni Connect programme (previously known as the National Collaborative Outreach Programme until January 2020), funded by the Office for Students. The programme aims to drive rapid progress towards achieving the Government's goals to double the proportion of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds in Higher Education (HE) by 2020, increase by 20 per cent the number of students in HE from ethnic minority groups and address the under-representation of young men from disadvantaged backgrounds. Hello Future is a partnership of local universities, colleges and employers who are committed to improving access to HE for young people in Cumbria. Previous reports commissioned by Hello Future (see HASKE 2020) have argued that an asset-based approach to widening participation is a key strategy for improving access and participation in higher education in Cumbria. In previous work this has been explored from the perspective of schools and outreach officers. This report seeks to develop the asset-based approach to widening participation and outreach by examining the roles of voluntary organisations – sports, arts, scouting and so on – which often form key assets for young people's decision-making regarding future careers. Currently, very little resource or training exists for such organisations in this specific context. The aims of this research are, then, to: • Map the organisations available to young people in different areas of Cumbria (building from the work HASKE have already done on what constitutes "the rural" within the Cumbrian context). • Identify how organisations view their own roles in young people's potential journey to Higher Education; how their roles constitutes assets for outreach programmes to engage with; and in what ways they "gate" these assets to particular groups of young people (building on the work HASKE have done on widening participation, cultural capital and asset-based approaches). The aim of this report is: • To articulate the ways in which VCOs can be seen as assets for FE and HE outreach, by - Demonstrating the variation in VCO types and activities across Cumbria; - Articulating the different ways in which they engage with young people in general, and in discussions about their potential future decisions in particular; • To identify the ways in which these assets are gated, in order to inform any potential interventions from outreach teams.

Hello Future forms part of Uni Connect (previously known as National Collaborative Outreach Programme (NCOP) until January 2020) funded by the Office for Students. The programme aims to drive rapid progress towards achieving the Government's goals to double the proportion of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds in Higher Education (HE) by 2020, increase by 20 per cent the number of students in HE from ethnic minority groups and address the under-representation of young men from disadvantaged backgrounds. Hello Future is a partnership of local universities, colleges and employers who are committed to improving access to higher education for young people in Cumbria. The work of Uni Connect programmes and others has shown a growing awareness of a number of hidden perspectives and assumptions about cultural capital in much 'mainstream' Widening Participation (WP)1 outreach work. For example, there has often been an assumption that whilst WP students may have plenty of social capital, what they are missing is the cultural capital that more 'traditional' HE students may have access to, and as such conventional WP seeks to remedy this. However this reflects a 'deficit' model of outreach, whereby capital is identified in terms of what the student lacks, almost exclusively from the perspective of the HE institution. Such a model risks overlooking a number of already-existing skills, traits and characteristics which may benefit a student at University. The cultural capital of HE entrants is, on this view, socially formed predispositions, predilections and forms of knowledge that equip individuals, in turn, with competence in deciphering new cultural practices. Yet students may also hold a range of different social and cultural capital, which provides the capability for success at HE and beyond. Rather than assuming a deficit model amongst WP students and potential students, work should be done to identify existing tools and predilections for engaging in cultural practice. These are the 'assets' available to the young people targeted by outreach programmes. As such, an asset-based approach aims at mapping and engaging with the resources – institutions, persons, activities and so on – that provide such capital; as well as understanding how young people interface with such assets, and possible enablers and obstacles for this. This report documents the research commissioned by Hello Future to investigate the role of assets in the provision of social and cultural capital for young people in Cumbria. The aims of the project were to: - Identify the critical facets of an asset-based approach to Widening Participation for young people from Cumbria. - Using these facets, and other information, to create an asset-based approach (to WP) for young people from Cumbria. The research consisted of three stages: 1. a literature review of a range of academic and policy literature together with evidence gathered in HASKE's previous work in this area; 2. primary data collection from interviews with key stakeholders: namely, individuals who bridged both the current landscapes in target learner communities (i.e. HELLO FUTURE wards) and level 4-6 settings ie FE/HE and degree apprenticeships; and 3. collection of feedback and analysis on the draft map of assets by strategic-level stakeholders in Hello Future, in order to link the data from practice to policy and management-level contexts and mechanisms.