University of Roehampton

With the increase of special schools in UK and around the world, this study seeked to explore in‐depth the reality of practitioners working with children with SEND in specialist settings throughout the COVID‐19 pandemic. Utilising semi‐structured interviews with 11 special school teachers and leaders, this study found that professionals working in specialist settings experienced parental conflict, challenges related to personal life and working arrangements during this time, and highlighted concerns and opportunities for the future and sustainability of the SEND system. The professionals highlighted some essential components needed to support the development of meaningful careers and the reduction of attrition in the sector such as an increase in pay and greater appreciation of the role. This study has implications for policy and practice in a time of uncertainty pre‐election and during national crises such as high teacher turnover coupled with low teacher recruitment.

Background The COVID-19 pandemic, caused by SARS-CoV-2, was one of the greatest modern public health crises that the world has faced. Countries undertook sweeping public health and social measures (PHSM); including environmental actions such as disinfection and ventilation; surveillance and response, such as contact tracing and quarantine; physical, such as crowd control; and restrictions on travel. This study focuses on the public perceptions of PHSM in two countries, Japan and the United Kingdom (UK) as examples of high-income countries that adopted different measures over the course of the pandemic. Methods This study was conducted between November 2021 and February 2022, a period in which the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 was predominant. Fourteen online focus group discussions were conducted in each country. Overall, 106 total participants (50 from the UK and 56 from Japan) participated in 23 focus groups (11 in the UK and 12 in Japan) with an average of three to six participants per group. Both countries were compared using a thematic analysis method. Results Both countries’ participants agreed that vaccination was an effective measure. However, they did not favor mandatory vaccination policies. Working from home was well accepted by both sides, but they reported that schools should have continued to be opened as before COVID-19. Both sides of participants expressed that temperature testing alone in indoor facilities was ineffective as a COVID-19 control measure. There were contrasting views on face covering rules in public spaces, international and domestic movement restrictions. High acceptance of mask-wearing was reflective of Japanese customs, while it was accepted as a strong recommendation for participants in the UK. Japanese participants favored quarantine for international travel, while the UK participants supported banning non-essential travel. Conclusion Similar and contrasting views on PHSM against COVID-19 between Japan and the UK demonstrated how policies in controlling an epidemic should be tailored by country with respect to its norms, cultures, economic and disease burden. Our findings may guide how policy makers can engage with the public through effective health communication and consider regulations that are aligned with the public’s views and capacities in changing their behavior for future pandemic preparedness.

The article explores the governance, leadership and management of complementary schools through the case of Greek Cypriot complementary schools in England with a view to developing a research agenda for this under-researched yet significant sector of education for children and young people. Drawing on stakeholder and bottom-up theories of governance that aim to uncover the intricate networks of groups that surround organisations and the systems in which they exist, we highlight the multiple and sometimes conflicting stakes held. This exploratory research involves interviews with five practitioners in positions of responsibility. The governance, leadership and management of these schools matters because there are concerns about their sustainability requiring a greater appreciation of their contribution, the issues they face and how they make decisions with limited resources. We call for further research to increase the understanding of the sector and to improve the support for practitioners, organisations and communities.

In smart cities, air pollution is a critical issue that affects individual health and harms the environment. The air pollution prediction can supply important information to all relevant parties to take appropriate initiatives. Air quality prediction is a hot area of research. The existing research encounters several challenges that is, poor accuracy and incorrect real‐time updates. This research presents a hybrid model based on long‐short term memory (LSTM), recurrent neural network (RNN), and Curiosity‐based Motivation method. The proposed model extracts a feature set from the training dataset using an RNN layer and achieves sequencing learning by applying an LSTM layer. Also, to deal with the overfitting issues in LSTM, the proposed model utilises a dropout strategy. In the proposed model, input and recurrent connections can be dropped from activation and weight updates using the dropout regularisation approach, and it utilises a Curiosity‐based Motivation model to construct a novel motivational model, which helps in the reconstruction of long short‐term memory recurrent neural network. To minimise the prediction error, particle swarm optimisation is implemented to optimise the LSTM neural network's weights. The authors utilise an online Air Pollution Monitoring dataset from Salt Lake City, USA with five air quality indicators for comparison, that is, SO2, CO, O3, and NO2, to predict air quality. The proposed model is compared with existing Gradient Boosted Tree Regression, Existing LSTM, and Support Vector Machine based Regression Model. Experimental analysis shows that the proposed method has 0.0184 (Root Mean Square Error (RMSE)), 0.0082 (Mean Absolute Error), 2002*109 (Mean Absolute Percentage Error), and 0.122 (R2‐Score). The experimental findings demonstrate that the proposed LSTM model had RMSE performance in the prescribed dataset and statistically significant superior outcomes compared to existing methods.

Police peer support programmes traditionally focus on mental health issues and experiences of trauma in work. Increased awareness of domestic abuse (DA), its impacts in the workplace, and calls to adopt trauma-informed approaches in the emergency and public services in the UK have culminated in a southern English police force instituting a novel peer support programme for personnel who are experiencing DA. This qualitative study interviewed 16 self-selected DA peer supporters to explore their motivations and experiences in providing support for their colleagues and the application of trauma-informed practice. Findings support previous research on the ongoing prevalence of stigma around help-seeking in the police generally, and this is perhaps even more pronounced for DA. However, the presence of this form of peer support has symbolic value to challenge prevailing culture and foster increased confidence to make disclosures. Findings also indicate value in adopting DA-specific peer support from an organizational justice perspective because this may enable a greater sense of staff well-being. The approaches employed in the DA peer support programme exhibited implicit trauma-informed practice, which could be made more explicit and aligned to wider initiatives of creating a more trauma-informed police service.

Teachers report that disruptive behaviour in their classrooms consumes a significant amount of their time and attention. Research studying disruptive behaviour often focuses on differences between those pupils who meet categorical diagnostic criteria for developmental disorders and those who do not. However, there is much to be learned about disruption from a normative personality approach to individual differences. This study investigates the relationship between personality and disruptive behaviours in 457 pupils between 11 and 16 years old in UK schools. Our analysis focuses on the relationship between self- and teacher-reported disruptive behaviour, and three measures of personality: Empathy, Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory, and Implicit Theories of Intelligence. Disruptive behaviour (measured via both self- and teacher-report) had negative relationships with empathy and incremental learning beliefs. These findings reinforce the importance of understanding disruptive behaviours from a normative individual differences perspective and have implications for research and practice.

Background A lifelong gluten‐free (GF) diet to manage coeliac disease is recognised to be challenging. This paper comprises two studies: study one aimed to report the opinions of adults with coeliac disease on review provision and explore factors influencing dietary adherence. Study two aimed to report dietetic provision for adults with coeliac disease. Methods A cross‐sectional online survey was completed by 722 adults with coeliac disease, including validated dietary adherence, health literacy and quality‐of‐life questionnaires. An online and paper survey designed to capture the provision of dietetic services to adults with coeliac disease was completed by 88 dietetic departments within the United Kingdom. Results Only 26% of adults with coeliac disease were offered annual reviews. In contrast, 85% considered reviews important, with 62% preferring dietetic provision. Those who considered reviews important had lower health literacy, greater dietary burden, poorer GF dietary adherence and lower GF food knowledge (all p < 0.05) compared with those who did not consider reviews important. GF dietary adherence was associated with health literacy, self‐regulatory behaviours, dietary burden and GF food knowledge; 53% agreed with the ‘cost of GF food restricts what I eat’; they had poorer GF dietary adherence compared with those who disagreed ( p < 0.001). More than 72% of dietetic coeliac review provision provided content on improving access to GF foods and eating out of the home. Conclusions A subpopulation of adults with coeliac disease have a greater need for support and guidance, which supports the viewpoint that limited resources should be targeted towards patients with the most need for support to enable successful disease management.

Ian Peate looks at the causes and psychological impact of alopecia, with strategies for supporting patients

This Element takes the initiative to highlight the nascent state of audiovisual translation research centring on users of video games. It proposes ways of advancing the research by integrating numerous related perspectives from relevant fields to guide studies in translated game reception into further fruition. The Element offers an accessible overview of possible relationships between translation and its experiencers, showcasing ways to design game reception studies. Examples, methods, tools, and practical concerns are discussed to ultimately develop a blueprint for game translation user research which aims to consolidate scientific user-centric inquiry into video game translation. To that end, the blueprint captures the three-pronged interplay between the parameters of localisation-reception research in facets of user experience, facets of translated games, and facets of game users.

Objectives: Common mental disorders (CMD) are associated with impaired frontal excitatory/ inhibitory (E/I) balance and reduced grey matter volume (GMV). Larger GMV (in the areas that are implicated in CMD-pathology) and improved CMD-symptomatology have been observed in individuals who adhere to high quality diets. Moreover, preclinical studies have shown altered neurometabolites (primarily gamma-aminobutyric acid: GABA and glutamate: GLU) in relation to diet quality. However, neurochemical correlates of diet quality and how these neurobiological changes are associated with CMD and with its transdiagnostic factor, rumination, is unknown in humans. Therefore, in this study, we examined the associations between diet quality and frontal cortex neuro-chemistry and structure, as well as CMD and rumination in humans. Methods: Thirty adults were classified into high and low diet quality groups and underwent 1H-MRS to measure medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) metabolite concentrations and volumetric imaging to measure GMV. Results: Low (vs High) diet quality group had reduced mPFC-GABA and elevated mPFC-GLU concentrations, as well as reduced right precentral gyrus (rPCG) GMV. However, CMD and rumination were not associated with diet quality. Notably, we observed a significant negative correlation between rumination and rPCG-GMV and a marginally significant association between rumination and mPFC-GLU concentrations. There was also a marginally significant association between mPFC-GLU concentrations and rPCG-GMV. Discussion: Adhering to unhealthy dietary patterns may be associated with compromised E/I balance, and this could affect GMV, and subsequently, rumination.

Background Through pressure from funding and governing bodies, an audit culture invades the rhetoric of the dance medicine and science research community, leading to undue focus on justifying and legitimizing the holistic benefits of dancing. This paper critiques this hierarchical value system which disproportionately favors objective, generalizable, and quantitative research approaches still dominant in dance medicine and science, existing since the founding of the International Association for Dance Medicine and Science (IADMS) in 1990. Purpose Whilst this may mean studies are generalizable when applied to broader contexts, objective outcomes lack granularity and do not automatically lead to appropriate, meaningful, inclusive, or accessible dance experiences for everyone. Subjective, idiographic, ethnographic, embodied, phenomenological, and transdisciplinary approaches to dance medicine and science research have great potential to broaden, deepen, and enrich the field. Conclusions This paper highlights the tensions between qualitative and quantitative methodologies, advocating that researchers can rigorously embrace their positionality to contribute toward ontological and epistemological clarity with any researcher bias, assumption, or expectation transparently disclosed. The writing draws on research examples from Dance for Health (DfH) as a part of dance science and medicine field of study, including but not limited to Dance for Parkinson’s. This paper provides resourceful recommendations, encouraging researchers to remain imaginative and curious through application of arts-based, person-centered, collaborative mixed methods within their own studies.