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Building learning partnerships between schools and universitiesan example from southwest England.

as a social investment strategy has been accompanied by worldwide concerns to\ud identify appropriate pedagogical practices for working with young children.\ud Here, we trace the developing interest in child-centred approaches, before\ud considering whether there can be shared understanding of the term between\ud countries with different histories of early childhood provision. Case studies of\ud England, Hungary and Italy consider focus group and questionnaire responses\ud from staff and students on early childhood courses, together with curriculum\ud guidance, to examine ‘child-centredness’ in the context of the cultural-historical\ud background to early childhood provision in the three countries. Findings suggest\ud that the term ‘child-centred’ has rich pedagogical associations that can be easily\ud subsumed into different value systems prizing, for example, individuality, child\ud development or democracy. In the light of these findings, we consider the\ud implications of the use of the term ‘child-centred’

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Vision and football Association football (soccer) is a major global business involving huge sums of money, much of it from television. But watching football is a complex, dynamic visual task: who is moving where?öwho is offside?öwhere are the defenders? öhow many attackers in the box? Hence, if there are visual factors that enhance or hinder perception by viewers and by players, then these factors could be important to the success of the sport and the business of football. Our repeated armchair experience has been that some combinations of kit colours promote good`reading' of the game, perhaps by enabling rapid visual search and visual segregation of one team from the other. Other kit combinations seem to make matches confusing and almost unwatchable by preventing easy search and grouping of players. Figure 1a suggests that, if the two teams wear different but uniform colours (eg all-red vs all-white; Liverpool vs Real Madrid), then the segregation and`readability' of the pattern of play is very good; while figure 1b suggests that, if the two teams wear similar colours, albeit in opposite combinations (eg red^white vs white^red; Manchester United vs Southampton), then the readability may be very poor. [See supplementary figure S1 for a real example from the 2003^2004 season.] The literature on visual search (mainly for single targets) tells us that simple colour differences`pop-out' readily (Bauer et al 1996; Duncan 1989; D'Zmura 1991), while conjunctions of colour and form typically do not (Treisman and Gelade 1980). One general theory proposes that search is slow and difficult when targets are similar to distractor items, or when distractors are dissimilar from each other, or both (Duncan and Humphreys 1989). Thus, we suspect that some football matches (perhaps inadvertently) take advantage of`pop-out' and grouping by colour, while others create confusion. Surprisingly, the Laws of the Game (http://www.fifa.com/refs/laws E.html) (Law 4) make no prescription at all about kit colours, but different competitions and leagues have a variety of rules about what shall be done when kit colours clash. The English FA