Measured parental weight status and familial socio-economic status correlates with childhood overweight and obesity at age 9

Background: Parental obesity is a predominant risk factor for childhood obesity. Family factors including socio-economic status (SES) play a role in determining parent weight. It is essential to unpick how shared family factors impact on child weight. This study aims to investigate the association between measured parent weight status, familial socio-economic factors and the risk of childhood obesity at age 9. Methodology/Principal Findings: Cross sectional analysis of the first wave (2008) of the Growing Up in Ireland (GUI) study. GUI is a nationally representative study of 9-year-old children (N = 8,568). Schools were selected from the national total (response rate 82%) and age eligible children (response rate 57%) were invited to participate. Children and their parents had height and weight measurements taken using standard methods. Data were reweighted to account for the sampling design. Childhood overweight and obesity prevalence were calculated using International Obesity Taskforce definitions. Multinomial logistic regression examined the association between parent weight status, indicators of SES and child weight. Overall, 25% of children were either overweight (19.3%) or obese (6.6%). Parental obesity was a significant predictor of child obesity. Of children with normal weight parents, 14.4% were overweight or obese whereas 46.2% of children with obese parents were overweight or obese. Maternal education and household class were more consistently associated with a child being in a higher body mass index category than household income. Adjusted regression indicated that female gender, one parent family type, lower maternal education, lower household class and a heavier parent weight status significantly increased the odds of childhood obesity. Conclusions/Significance: Parental weight appears to be the most influential factor driving the childhood obesity epidemic in Ireland and is an independent predictor of child obesity across SES groups. Due to the high prevalence of obesity in parents and children, population based interventions are required.

An assessment of health in post-medieval Ireland: ‘One vast Lazar house filled with famine, disease and death’

Three indicators of health and diet were selected to examine the health status in three socioeconomic groups in post-medieval Ireland. The aim was to examine the reliability of traditional skeletal markers of health in highly contextualised populations. The link between socio-economic status and health was examined to determine if traditional linking of poor health with poverty was evident in skeletal samples. The analysis indicated that this was indeed the case and that health was significantly compromised in populations of low socio-economic status. Thus it indicated that status intimately influences the physical body form. Sex was also found to be a major defining factor in the response of an individual to physiological stress. It was also evident that contemporary populations may suffer from different physiological stresses, and their responses to those stresses may differ. Adaptation was a key factor here. This has implications for studies of earlier populations that may lack detailed contextual data in terms of blanket applications of interpretations. The results also show a decline in health from the medieval through to the post-medieval period, which is intimately linked with the immense social changes and all the related effects of these. The socio-economic structure of post-medieval Ireland was a direct result of the British policies in Ireland. The physical form of the Irish may be seen to have occurred as a result of those policies, with the Irish poor in particular suffering substantial health problems, even in contrast to the poor of Britain. This study has enriched the recorded historical narrative of this period of the recent past, and highlights more nuanced narratives may emerge from the osteoarchaeological analysis when sound contextual information is available. It also examines a period in Irish history that, until very recently, had been virtually untouched in terms of archaeological study.

Citizenship education in Irish secondary schools: the influence of curriculum content, school culture and stakeholder perspectives

This research interrogates the status of citizenship education in Irish secondary schools. The following questions are examined: How does school culture impact on citizenship education? What value is accorded to the subjects, Civic, Social and Political Education (CSPE) and Social, Personal and Health Education (SPHE)? To what extent are the subjects of both the cognitive and non-cognitive curricula affirmed? The importance of these factors in supporting the social, ethical, personal, political and emotional development of students is explored. The concept of citizenship is dynamic and constantly evolving in response to societal change. Society is increasingly concerned with issues such as: globalisation; cosmopolitanism; the threat of global risk; environment sustainability; socio-economic inequality; and recognition/misrecognition of new identities and group rights. The pedagogical philosophy of Paulo Freire which seeks to educate for the conscientisation and humanisation of the student is central to this research. Using a mixed methods approach, data on the insights of students, parents, teachers and school Principals was collected. In relation to Irish secondary school education, the study reached three main conclusions. (1) The educational stakeholders rate the subjects of the non-cognitive curriculum poorly. (2) The subjects Civic, Social and Political education (CSPE), and Social, Personal and Health Education (SPHE) command a low status in the secondary school setting. (3) The day-to-day school climate is influenced by an educational philosophy that is instrumentalist in character. Elements of school culture such as: the ethic of care; the informal curriculum; education for life after school; and affirmation of teachers, are not sufficiently prioritised in supporting education for citizenship. The research concludes that the approach to education for citizenship needs to be more robust within the overall curriculum, and culture and ethos of the Irish education system.

Inclusive education policy, the general allocation model and dilemmas of practice in primary schools

Background: Inclusive education is central to contemporary discourse internationally reflecting societies’ wider commitment to social inclusion. Education has witnessed transforming approaches that have created differing distributions of power, resource allocation and accountability. Multiple actors are being forced to consider changes to how key services and supports are organised. This research constitutes a case study situated within this broader social service dilemma of how to distribute finite resources equitably to meet individual need, while advancing inclusion. It focuses on the national directive with regard to inclusive educational practice for primary schools, Department of Education and Science Special Education Circular 02/05, which introduced the General Allocation Model (GAM) within the legislative context of the Education of Persons with Special Educational Needs (EPSEN) Act (Government of Ireland, 2004). This research could help to inform policy with ‘facts about what is happening on the ground’ (Quinn, 2013). Research Aims: The research set out to unearth the assumptions and definitions embedded within the policy document, to analyse how those who are at the coalface of policy, and who interface with multiple interests in primary schools, understand the GAM and respond to it, and to investigate its effects on students and their education. It examines student outcomes in the primary schools where the GAM was investigated. Methods and Sample The post-structural study acknowledges the importance of policy analysis which explicitly links the ‘bigger worlds’ of global and national policy contexts to the ‘smaller worlds’ of policies and practices within schools and classrooms. This study insists upon taking the detail seriously (Ozga, 1990). A mixed methods approach to data collection and analysis is applied. In order to secure the perspectives of key stakeholders, semi-structured interviews were conducted with primary school principals, class teachers and learning support/resource teachers (n=14) in three distinct mainstream, non-DEIS schools. Data from the schools and their environs provided a profile of students. The researcher then used the Pobal Maps Facility (available at www.pobal.ie) to identify the Small Area (SA) in which each student resides, and to assign values to each address based on the Pobal HP Deprivation Index (Haase and Pratschke, 2012). Analysis of the datasets, guided by the conceptual framework of the policy cycle (Ball, 1994), revealed a number of significant themes. Results: Data illustrate that the main model to support student need is withdrawal from the classroom under policy that espouses inclusion. Quantitative data, in particular, highlighted an association between segregated practice and lower socioeconomic status (LSES) backgrounds of students. Up to 83% of the students in special education programmes are from lower socio-economic status (LSES) backgrounds. In some schools 94% of students from LSES backgrounds are withdrawn from classrooms daily for special education. While the internal processes of schooling are not solely to blame for class inequalities, this study reveals the power of professionals to order children in school, which has implications for segregated special education practice. Such agency on the part of key actors in the context of practice relates to ‘local constructions of dis/ability’, which is influenced by teacher habitus (Bourdieu, 1984). The researcher contends that inclusive education has not resulted in positive outcomes for students from LSES backgrounds because it is built on faulty assumptions that focus on a psycho-medical perspective of dis/ability, that is, placement decisions do not consider the intersectionality of dis/ability with class or culture. This study argues that the student need for support is better understood as ‘home/school discontinuity’ not ‘disability’. Moreover, the study unearths the power of some parents to use social and cultural capital to ensure eligibility to enhanced resources. Therefore, a hierarchical system has developed in mainstream schools as a result of funding models to support need in inclusive settings. Furthermore, all schools in the study are ‘ordinary’ schools yet participants acknowledged that some schools are more ‘advantaged’, which may suggest that ‘ordinary’ schools serve to ‘bury class’ (Reay, 2010) as a key marker in allocating resources. The research suggests that general allocation models of funding to meet the needs of students demands a systematic approach grounded in reallocating funds from where they have less benefit to where they have more. The calculation of the composite Haase Value in respect of the student cohort in receipt of special education support adopted for this study could be usefully applied at a national level to ensure that the greatest level of support is targeted at greatest need. Conclusion: In summary, the study reveals that existing structures constrain and enable agents, whose interactions produce intended and unintended consequences. The study suggests that policy should be viewed as a continuous and evolving cycle (Ball, 1994) where actors in each of the social contexts have a shared responsibility in the evolution of education that is equitable, excellent and inclusive.