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Just before Christmas of 1970 I received a letter from a French friend who had enabled me during the period 1950–1960 to visit, in Paris, many of the new Industrial Complementary Courses which were being built up as part of the French post‐war drive to restore and advance the nation's industrial life after the sad years of the Occupation. These Industrial Complementary Courses represented the lowest level of technical education and recruited, in a fairly wide field of preparation for skilled factory work, boys and girls who, by their teachers, were regarded as some of the least able pupils. They were not educationally subnormal, and they were not those of the absolutely bottom stratum, academically speaking, but they were boys and girls for whom, in the academic eyes of the average secondary school teacher, normal bookish secondary schooling was impossible. The three years of Industrial Complementary schooling were a post‐primary alternative to any of the other forms of education from the age of 12 to the school‐leaving age of 15 years. The youngsters concerned had already shown that in the bookish studies which had hitherto constituted the bulk of their schooling, they were either thoroughly incompetent or had reached the stage of utter boredom and lack of interest. So, for them, there were now these various dust‐bins provided, under the heading Manual and Industrial.

Adolescence and emerging adulthood are key developmental stages with high risk for trauma exposure and the development of mental and substance-use disorders (SUDs). This study aims to compare the clinical profiles of adolescents (aged 12–17 years) and emerging adults (aged 18–25 years) presenting for treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and SUD.

Data was collected from the baseline assessment of individuals (n = 55) taking part in a randomized controlled trial examining the efficacy of an integrated psychological therapy for co-occurring PTSD and SUDs (PTSD+SUD) in young people.

Both age groups demonstrated complex and severe clinical profiles, including high-frequency trauma exposure, and very poor mental health reflected on measures of PTSD, SUD, suicidality and domains of social, emotional, behavioral and family functioning. There were few differences in clinical characteristics between the two groups.

Similarity between the two groups suggests that the complex problems seen in emerging adults with PTSD + SUD are likely to have had their onset in adolescence or earlier and to have been present for several years by the time individuals present for treatment.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to compare the demographic and clinical profiles of adolescents and emerging adults with PTSD + SUD. These findings yield important implications for practice and policy for this vulnerable group. Evidence-based prevention and early intervention approaches and access to care are critical. Alongside trauma-focused treatment, there is a critical need for integrated, trauma-informed approaches specifically tailored to young people with PTSD + SUD.

I was recently given a May 1978 copy of Industrial and Commercial Training by Stuart Sinfield who, as Education and Development Manager of A A Jones and Shipman Ltd, Leicester, was interested in my reaction to his article on ‘The Engineering Option’. This article, along with some of the points raised by Professor C H Dobinson and more particularly John Wellens' ‘Comment’ have prompted me not only to put a teacher's point of view, but also to attempt to draw together a number of ideas that may explain the paradox of practical subjects teaching in school. Nearly a year has passed since the May 1978 edition was published, but in relation to the time scale of changes in education this is not so long ago.

If things develop as they should, Canada and persons and things Canadian should become ever more important, in the decades ahead, to the people of the British Isles. There are several reasons for this. The first was expressed last August in the Calgary Herald in an article which stated firmly that, even though the United States dominates the economic life of Canada, the different international viewpoint of Canada ought, in the councils of the world, to be made ever more apparent. Canadians, as a whole, are very anxious to help the building up of a harmonious cooperating world and less fiercely doctrinaire than most Americans in their opposition to the allied ‘evils’ of socialism and communism and their delegates at international conferences have been very helpful in this respect.

Peaceful societies, groups of people described by social scientists as experiencing little if any internal or external violence, embrace the need for peacefulness, in contrast to most of the contemporary world, which accepts violence as normal and inevitable. The purpose of this article is to examine the ways that people in those societies view peacefulness, and to compare those ways with more “normal” violent societies.

The approach taken is a literature review of salient trends about anti‐violence among some of the more highly peaceful societies, and comparable trends in two state‐level societies—Norway, a relatively peaceful state, and the USA, a relatively more violent one.

The findings show that some of the peaceful societies avoid violence through nonresistance—not resisting aggression. In addition, many base their commitments to peacefulness on religious and mythological beliefs, though for others, peacefulness is based on cultural values or is seen as a practical, reasonable way to order their lives. The societies that appear to have very firm commitments to nonviolence are the ones where structures of peacefulness thrive.

The practical value of this research is that it points out how the peaceful societies can be contrasted with modern nation states, and it may suggest ways to challenge general patterns of violence.

France has recently redeveloped its system of vocational education and training, introducing more courses and qualifications for young people, and conferring upon all workers the right to paid leave for training or retraining at any point during their working lives. It is sometimes suggested that the introduction of this system of ‘Education Permanente’ into Britain would bring great benefits; however the system has drawbacks as well as advantages. This article aims to describe the system and then to point out some of its advantages and disadvantages.

The second extract above, from Professor Dobinson's Schooling 1963–1970, summarises all else in this article with the most ironical accuracy. For three centuries we have memorised the words of John Locke so faithfully that our entire educational system is the most efficient denial of them that could ever be constructed. The misgivings expressed by the Board of Education in 1937 were suppressed by the elaboration of a commercialised examination system that, by 1970, was driving more pupils out of schools than from those of any comparable country. Thus when the school‐leaving age was put up to 16 and pupils could no longer get free while still one or two years younger, large numbers of those forced by law to stay on sought their own forms of self‐expression. Most of these were to demonstrate their abilities to take action, normally of a kind calculated to draw attention to its perpetrators; our own studies of the attitudes of school leavers shows beyond all doubt that schools in which the initiatives of the individual pupils are overridden by the demands of the syllabus are those in which a significant number of pupils would wish to assert themselves by vandalising the premises or attacking the teachers. But these same studies also showed that when the pupils themselves were invited to join in classifying what might be going on in their lessons, they displayed the most intelligent motivation from which, had they been so inclined, even some experts in education might have learned. Again it would be interesting to involve a small number of comprehensive schools in all their variety, preferably in three or four local groups of five schools in each group, so that by action learning all associated with them — heads and staffs, parents and pupils — could study together their own and their colleagues' troubles and opportunities. There is no other way.

All over the world, it seems to me, it is becoming recognised that attitudes towards business, industry and work, are crucial determinants of a community's prosperity. It also seems that every country puts its own twist on the topic. It has to be recognised that the complex of attitudes towards business, meaning, largely, free‐enterprise manufacturing, although important, is not the sole determinant of prosperity. Some countries are favoured by good fortune denied to others. Global situations change to the extent that some countries suddenly find their assets of more value than they were at an earlier stage. For instance, in comparison with France, England is over four times more densely populated; France can feed itself and provide a surplus of food for export. In the Common Market it has found the means of marketing the surplus, or a large part of it. Britain can scarcely feed half of its population, and to feed the rest of it has to exchange the products of its factories for food. These same factories have to import the majority of the raw materials they process, which means that, as a nation, we have to allocate even more of our factory production to exchange for these raw materials. To Britain, for reasons such as these, the production of her factories is crucial to the attainment of any reasonable standard of living. Now, these basic economic facts are not secret: in some form or another they are well‐known to Mr Average Citizen, certainly to Mr Average Teacher or Mr Average University Lecturer or Professor. There is, however, in British society, this immense paradox: that, Japan apart, out of all the advanced nations Britain is the one most dependent for prosperity on the success of her industry and business and yet large sections of her populace have attitude sets which can accurately be described as anti‐business: they are not merely critical of business but are actually hostile. Putting it bluntly and again, with the arguable exception of Japan, that nation most in need of a pro‐business attitude set has the least favourable one. The problem is not new nor is the recognition of it. For as long as I can remember this feature of British life has been a recurrent talking point. Men like Lord Bowden, Principal of UMIST, who move freely between education, industry and government, have made it the central theme of their public utterances for a generation and more. But I can see no improvement, for all their effort. The attitude is most pronounced and is most serious in the world of education where it comes to a head. It is most serious because it ensures that every generation of young people is impregnated with the disease at an early age, before it can have the opportunity of judging for itself. Lord Bowden has, over the years, explained how this estrangement between the worlds of business and education can be traced back to the circumstances in which the industrial revolution came about in Britain. The Industrial Revolution owed nothing to the universities or to men formally educated in the traditional institutions. At that time the universities were at their lowest ebb and such educated men as contributed to industrial and technological innovation were the products of the dissenting academies, which no longer exist. The universities and industry started off at loggerheads and remarkably little has happened since to heal the wounds. British universities were unbelievably hostile to the establishment of departments of business and management: it was not until the late 1960s that this started to change with the establishment of university management departments and business schools. The importance of the universities in this connection stems from the fact that in Britain the universities set the standard, the pace and the very ethos of education not only for themselves but for all levels below. In other countries it is different: in the USA, for example, the dominant influence in schools is the local community. From the universities the attitude has spread to all branches of education with the possible exception of some technical colleges, though not all. But it appears in other quarters as well: the public pronouncements of Britain's present Chancellor of the Exchequer, as with those of most of his Cabinet colleagues, show the most appalling ignorance of the most elementary facts of business. We start our study of this problem facing Britain with a demonstration of the attitude in operation. By kind permission of the editor of Times Educational Supplement, we reproduce an article published in that journal, dated 16 April 1976. The author is Professor Maurice Peston, Professor of Economics at Queen Mary College, University of London. We follow this by comment upon it by Professor C H Dobinson, who first called our attention to Professor Peston's article. We invite readers to contribute to this study either by commenting on these two articles or by independent contributions dealing with other aspects.

France, world leader in innovation in the organisation of craft and technical apprenticeship, has taken another bold step forward in this field. This new model needs to be carefully and seriously studied in Britain as a possible means of overcoming the weaknesses which have now become apparent in the present system.

The defeat and occupation of France in the last war had at least one beneficial consequence; the complete reform of the education system. The principles developed at that time are still active today in promoting, especially in the field of vocational education, developments which are ahead of anything to be found elsewhere in the capitalist world and, judging from what I have seen on three visits to the USSR and read concerning developments in China, are probably ahead of anything in the communist world.