Aims and methodTo describe the first 6 months of the newly introduced community treatment orders (CTOs) in Birmingham and Solihull mental health services; to establish a clearer picture of patterns of use and some early outcomes. Computerised note systems were used to collect a range of sociodemographic and clinical data using a specially designed data collection tool.ResultsWe observed higher than expected numbers of CTOs compared with previous use of Section 25 supervised discharge. Our results were consistent with international studies in showing that CTOs are typically used in males aged around 40 with a primary diagnosis of psychotic illness. Compared with the census population, Black and minority ethnic groups were overrepresented in our sample. There were high recorded rates of comorbid alcohol or substance misuse and violence. The majority of patients on CTOs were being followed up by community mental health teams or assertive outreach teams.Clinical implicationsIt is difficult to draw firm conclusions at this early stage of implementation. However, there are likely to be resource implications in view of the high numbers of CTOs applied compared with Section 25 discharge. Service providers, clinicians and commissioners need to ensure CTOs are backed up by high-quality care. Further research is required into the impact of CTOs on a range of outcomes and to understand differential rates of CTO across different ethnic groups.

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The qualitative research interview engages with experience of social reality in sites of social interaction. Research interview respondents provide insight in biographical interviews into the significance of critical change processes for their individual and collective learning. Auto/biographical narratives of learning, are emergent, evolving accounts produced in a learning space hedged in by the demands of the "reflexive project of the self" which throw the individual more than ever before in processes of lifelong or life-wide learning onto their biographical resources. These resources can be understood as representing individual learning processes which are capable of furthering the creation of new cultural and social structures of experience, new forms of biographical knowledge which emerge out of the precarious balancing-act between routines and learning transitions. Research interviews embedded in interaction and participant reflexivity, addressing the learning transitions told in talk, access the construction of knowledge as adults move on to new biographical spaces and position themselves anew

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The demands laid on the individual by increasingly fragmented life-wide learning imperatives lead to constant pressure on adults of 'migratory background' to display agency and take up a position vis-à-vis cultural-ethnic 'belonging', while around them an integration/assimilation debate continues to rage in German public discourse. The focus of this paper will therefore be the experiences of transition and transformation in learning biographies which are often experienced as self-'translation'. The paper will address agency, inclusion/exclusion in the learning biographies of young adults who straddle the precarious identity of German-Turk/Turk-German. I use here talk elicited in the learning biography of a student of Turkish origin. The assertion of agency-in-diversity is given voice in uneven ways. The extracts allow us to listen closely to the workings of agency in the subjective, shared experience related in auto/biographical narratives.

Within the framework of a European Erasmus+ project, trainee mediators were interviewed about their experience. The encounters took place in unstructured, in-depth qualitative biographical-narrative interviews, in which individuals who are engaged in dialogic interaction create shared understanding and give meaning to their stories. The interview is interactive, co-constructed. The detail of the interview language documents how meaning-making takes place, and how this is affected by group belonging, ethnic or cultural discourses, as well as gender, age, professional and educational relationships, and so on. The interview is sensitive to language resources and their use in the co-construction of meaning. This paper, using extracts from one biographical narrative, shows that the languaged form that these narratives of the biographical learning of mediators take can offer insight into the learning processes triggered by learning in communities of practice, and that the creation of a common space of experience can be heard as it emerges in biographical talk. Biographical resources, biographicity, and their relationship with language and society are considered, and in the interview narratives the creation of a learning space, a space for the development and unfolding of notions and practices of mediation can be observed, heard and shared.

As sociedades contemporâneas apresentam-se numa diversidade abrangente e pluriforme – de pessoas, de culturas, de pensamentos, de movimentos…

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