This article reports boys' experiences of life in a former residential school. The authors are all based at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. Mark Smith, who was a practitioner and manager in child and youth care settings in Scotland for many years, is currently course director of the MSc in Advanced Residential Child Care. Euan McKay is a research fellow in the Quality in Education Centre and has research interests in school self‐evaluation, parental involvement and provision for ‘looked after’ children. Mono Chakrabarti, who has published across a range of areas, including residential child care, is emeritus professor of social work. Their article reveals some fascinating and unusual perspectives.
Residential schools from the approved, or, in Scotland, List D tradition, have rarely been seen as a placement of choice by the social work profession within which they have been located over the past 30 years. Despite this, there is some evidence to suggest that the experience of such provision can be a positive one for the children and young people who attend the schools. Drawing upon a wider evaluation of a residential education and care establishment which has recently extended the range of services it offers, this article considers pupils' views of their placement experiences. Their identification of what they consider to be important to life in the centre yields some surprising insights. Mark Smith, Euan McKay and Mono Chakrabarti use the pupils' comments about structure and routine, relationships with adults, school activities and family contact to generate a provocative commentary on the provision of residential care and education services.
Many studies have examined the impression that the general public has of science and how this can prevent girls from choosing science fields. Using an online questionnaire, we investigated whether the public perception of several academic fields was gender-biased in Japan. First, we found the gender-bias gap in public perceptions was largest in nursing and mechanical engineering. Second, people who have a low level of egalitarian attitudes toward gender roles perceived that nursing was suitable for women. Third, people who have a low level of egalitarian attitudes perceived that many STEM fields are suitable for men. This suggests that gender-biased perceptions toward academic fields can still be found in Japan.
Over the past couple of decades, residential special schools in Scotland have faced fundamental changes to the way they operate. This has involved the withdrawal of state funding, a shrinkage of the sector and a situation in which schools now have to sell their services in a market economy in order to survive. This article gives a brief outline of the history and development of residential special education for children considered to be troubled or troublesome. It then draws on an evaluation of one former approved, or List D, school to describe how it managed the transition to the marketplace. Findings from the evaluation are introduced and some implications of these are discussed. It is concluded that the shift from state or local authority funding to private provision may have some advantages. However, it also raises a number of questions as to whether provision for some of society's most damaged children should be determined by market forces.
Women are a minority in science, technology, engineering and mathematics academic careers. In particular, few women in Japan choose to study physics and mathematics. In this study, we investigated the factors contributing to the masculine image of physics and mathematics based on the framework of our expanded model. We conducted online questionnaire surveys in Japan and England, and found that physics and mathematics occupations, and mathematical stereotypes were both related to a masculine image. Only in Japan were social factors, such as a person’s attitude to intellectual women, related to viewing mathematics as ‘masculine’. However, the experience of being told or having heard that the choice of a particular course of studies would make someone less attractive to the opposite sex was evident only in England. This finding suggests that social factors affect the masculine image of physics and mathematics, and that this could vary depending on the country.
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