Preconception counselling resource for women with diabetes

Women with diabetes need to plan for pregnancy if they are to reduce their risk of poor pregnancy outcome. While care providers have focused on setting up specialist pre-pregnancy planning clinics to help women prepare for pregnancy, the majority of women do not attend, entering pregnancy unprepared. A major barrier to accessing this care, and a consequence of poor preconception counselling, is a lack of knowledge as to the need to plan and the reasons why. This project addressed an urgent need to raise awareness of the importance of planning for pregnancy among women with diabetes and among the healthcare professionals (HCPs) caring for them. Focus groups with the target groups informed the development of a preconception counselling resource for women with diabetes. Originally produced as a DVD (Diabetes UK funding), this resource has been embedded in routine care in Northern Ireland (NI) since 2010. A subsequent service evaluation of pregnancy planning indicators undertaken across all five antenatal-metabolic clinics in NI indicated that women who viewed the resource were better prepared for pregnancy. In order to increase the positive impact of the resource and to ensure longer term sustainability the DVD was converted to a website, http://www.womenwithdiabetes.net (Public Health Agency NI funding). The evaluation also highlighted that women with type 2 diabetes were a hard to reach group. As these women are often cared for outside of specialist clinics, it is pertinent that all HCPs caring for women with diabetes are aware of the importance of preconception counselling. Funding also supported the development of an e-learning continuing professional development (CPD) resource within the website. The e-learning resource has since been embedded into existing CPD programmes and is an important tool to ensure that all HCPs caring for women with diabetes are empowered to provide preconception counselling at every opportunity.

School's out forever: Postsecondary educational trajectories of students with autism

Objective:Postsecondary educational attainment is the key for successful transition to adulthood, economic self-sufficiency, and good mental and physical health.Method:Secondary analyses of school leavers’ data were carried out to establish postsecondary educational trajectories of students on the autism spectrum in the United Kingdom.Results:Findings show that students with autism who had attended mainstream secondary schools enter Further Education (post-16 vocational training) and Higher Education (University) institutions at a similar rate to other students to study the full range ofsubjects on offer. However, they are more likely to be younger, study at a lower academic level, and remain living at home.Conclusion:While course completion data were not yet available, attainment data showed that prospects were improving, although more needs to be done to enable these young adults to a achieving their post secondary educational potential.

Stresses reported by UK trainee counselling psychologists

This study examined stressors and psychological distress in 109 UK counselling psychology trainees. The research focus was two-fold. What is the profile of stressors that counselling psychology trainees report about the components of training? What relationship is there between this profile, and other characteristics of trainees, including their level of current psychological distress? Data from a stress survey and from the General Health Questionnaire were examined. High stress scores were found on three aspects of the stress survey ('academic', 'placements', 'personal and professional development'), but not-surprisingly-on the aspect, 'lack of support systems'. Significant stress differences were reported for gender and age of participants, and highly significant positive relationships were found between General Health Questionnaire and stress scores. Overall, the results suggest actions to be taken. Further research is needed to clarify unavoidable and avoidable stressors in training, and the reduction of trainees' experience of training stress to the necessary minimum needs to be adopted as an active target by programmes.

The Educational and Employment Aspirations of Adolescents from Areas of High Deprivation in London

Adolescents from areas of high deprivation are often assumed to have low aspirations for the future. However, recent research has suggested otherwise and there have been calls for more substantial investigation into the relationship between poverty and aspiration. This article reports levels and variation in aspiration from 1,214 adolescents (49.5% male; 50.5% female) living in areas of high deprivation across 20 London boroughs. A strength of this study is our large and diverse population of low socio-economic status (SES) adolescents, comprising of white British (22%), black African (21%), black Caribbean (9%), Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi/Other Asian (24%), mixed ethnicity (9%), and 15% defining themselves as Other. Our measures indicated a high group level of reported aspiration with notable variations. Females reported higher educational (but not occupational) aspirations than males; white British students reported lower educational and occupational aspirations than other ethnic groups; and black African children reported the highest educational aspirations. Perceived parental support for education had the largest positive association with aspirations. In contrast to previous findings from studies carried out in the United States, aspirations were found to be negatively associated with perceptions of school and school peer environment. These measures explored feelings of safety, happiness and belonging within the school environment and school peer group. We discuss possible explanations for this unexpected finding within our population of adolescents from UK state schools and how it might affect future policy interventions. This study makes an important contribution to the literature on adolescent aspirations because of the unique nature of the data sample and the multiple domains of functioning and aspiration measured.

Suggestions by the South Carolina Citizens’ Educational Association for the observance of American Education Week, December 3-9, 1922

The bulletin presents an outline for an educational talk for speakers promoting education in South Carolina.

Counselling Psychology in the United Kingdom

Counselling psychology within the UK has grown over the last three decades, adapting to many changes in the field of applied psychology, whilst remaining true to its core values and humanistic origins. The identity of counselling psychology is strongly rooted in a relational stance and applied psychology, where attention to psychological formulation is given to improve psychological functioning and well-being. This article outlines a brief history of counselling psychology in the UK, the training process, credentialing and looks at some important challenges and future directions for counselling psychology in the UK. A proportion of the members from the British Psychological Society’s division of counselling psychology (DCoP, N = 148) took part in the study. Participants provided demographic, training, employment, workplace and career pathway information obtained through an online questionnaire distributed to all DCoP members. On the whole, DCoP members are working in a variety of areas within the UK and the findings of this article contribute to the international study comparing counselling psychology across the globe.

A Global Portrait of Counselling Psychologists’ Characteristics, Perspectives, and Professional Behaviors

Counselling psychologists in eight countries (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States) responded to survey questions that focused on their demographics as well as their professional identities, roles, settings and activities. As well, they were asked about satisfaction with the specialty and the extent to which they endorsed 10 core counselling psychology values. This article reports those results, focusing both on areas in which there were between-country similarities as well as on those for which there were differences. These data provide is a snapshot of counselling psychology globally and establish a foundation for the other articles in this special issue of the journal.

Increasing inter-generational social mobility: is educational expansion the answer?

Reforms which increase the stock of education in a society have long been held by policy-makers as key to improving rates of intergenerational social mobility. Yet, despite the intuitive plausibility of this idea, the empirical evidence in support of an effect of educational expansion on social fluidity is both indirect and weak. In this paper we use the raising of the minimum school leaving age from 15 to 16 years in England and Wales in 1972 to estimate the effect of educational participation and qualification attainment on rates of intergenerational social class mobility. Because, in expectation, children born immediately before and after the policy was implemented are statistically exchangeable, the difference in the amount of education they received may be treated as exogenously determined. The exogenous nature of the additional education gain means that differences in rates of social mobility between cohorts affected by the reform can be treated as having been caused by the additional education. The data for the analysis come from the ONS Longitudinal Study, which links individual records from successive decennial censuses between 1971 and 2001. Our findings show that, although the reform resulted in an increase in educational attainment in the population as a whole and a weakening of the association between attainment and class origin, there was no reliably discernible increase in the rate of intergenerational social mobility.

Leading as designing: how educational developers in leadership and management studies can use architectural design to facilitate student learning about delivering innovation

This paper describes a qualitative observational study of how a work based learning masters leadership development programme for middle managers in health and social care in the UK introduced students to key aspects of delivering innovation, through a formative assignment on contemporary architectural design. Action learning and activity theoretical approaches were used to enable students to explore common principles of leading the delivery of innovation. Between 2001 and 2013 a total of 89 students in 7 cohorts completed the assignment. Evaluation lent support for the view that the assignment provided a powerful learning experience for many. Several students found the creativity, determination and dedication of architects, designers and structural engineers inspirational in their ability to translate a creative idea into a completed artefact, deploy resources and negotiate complex demands of stakeholders. Others expressed varying levels of self-empowerment as regards their capacity for fostering an equivalent creativity in self and others. Theoretical approaches in addition to activity theory, including Engeström’s concepts of stabilisation knowledge and possibility knowledge, are discussed to explain these differing outcomes and to clarify the challenges and opportunities for educational developers seeking to utilise cross-disciplinary, creative approaches in curriculum design.

Women in the driving seat Eastern European immigrant women s citizenship participation and educational inclusion in Portugal

This paper is a case study of Eastern European immigrant women’s social inclusion in Portugal through civic participation. An analysis of interviews conducted with women leaders and members of two ethnic associations provides a unique insight into their migrant pathways as highly educated women and the ways in which these women are constructing their citizenship in new contexts in Northern Portugal. These women’s accounts of their immigrant experience embrace both the public realm, in using their own education and their children’s as a means of integration but also spill over into ‘non-public’ familial relationships at home in contradictory ways. These include the sometimes traditional, gender-defined division of labour within the associations and at home and the new ways that they negotiate their relative autonomies to escape forms of violence and subordination that they face as women and immigrants.

Educational characteristics of adult students in portuguese technological schools

Despite a massive expansion of education in Portugal, since the 1970’s, educational attainment of the adult population in the country remains low. The numbers of working-age people in some form of continuing education are among the lowest, according to the OECD and EU-27 statistics. Technological Schools(TS), initially created in the 1990’s, under the umbrella of the Ministry of Economy in partnership with industry and industrial associations, aimed to prepare qualified staff for industries and services in the country, particularly in the engineering sector, through the provision of post secondary non-university programmes of studies, the CET (Technological Specialization Courses). Successful CET students are awarded a DET(Diploma of Technological Specialization), which corresponds to Vocational Qualification level IV of the EU, according to the latest alteration (2005) of the Education Systems Act (introduced in 1986). In this, CET’s are also clearly defined as one of the routes for access to Higher Education (HE), in Portugal. The PRILHE (Promoting Reflective and Independent Learning in Higher Education) multinational project, funded by the European Socrates Grundtvig Programme, aimed to identify the learning processes which enable adult students in higher education to become autonomous reflective learners and search best practices to support these learning processes. During this research, both quantitative and qualitative methods were used to determine how students organise their studies and develop their learning skills. The Portuguese partner in the project’ consortium used a two case studies approach, one with students of Higher Education Institutions and other with students of TS. This paper only applies to students of TS, as these have a predominant bias towards engineering. Results show that student motivation and professional teaching support contribute equally to the development of an autonomous and reflective approach to learning in adult students; this is essential for success in a knowledge economy, where lifelong learning is the key to continuous employment.

User modeling In adaptive hypermedia educational systems

This document is a survey in the research area of User Modeling (UM) for the specific field of Adaptive Learning. The aims of this document are: To define what it is a User Model; To present existing and well known User Models; To analyze the existent standards related with UM; To compare existing systems. In the scientific area of User Modeling (UM), numerous research and developed systems already seem to promise good results, but some experimentation and implementation are still necessary to conclude about the utility of the UM. That is, the experimentation and implementation of these systems are still very scarce to determine the utility of some of the referred applications. At present, the Student Modeling research goes in the direction to make possible reuse a student model in different systems. The standards are more and more relevant for this effect, allowing systems communicate and to share data, components and structures, at syntax and semantic level, even if most of them still only allow syntax integration.

Funding sources and fostering of educational projects

This paper is part of the results from the project "Implementation Strategies and Development of an Open and Distance Education System for the University of the Azores" funded by the European Social Fund. http://hdl.handle.net/10400.3/2327