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International attention is increasingly turning to the challenge of creating age-friendly environments. This study aims to examine the application of asset-based approaches in undertaking community development projects with older people. The paper intends to share the learning that may be useful when designing community development projects for older people in the future.

This study followed a multiple project case study design, with a focus on project delivery practices. It was undertaken as a co-production exercise involving university researchers and trained older volunteer community researchers (CRs). Over 18–24 months of qualitative research was conducted in relation to six area-based urban projects between 2018 and 2020.

There were five leading themes as follows: mapping and building on assets in highly localised settings; creating governance and direction through steering groups; developing activities with diverse groups of older people; reaching isolated and lonely older people; building local capacity to embed sustainability.

The effectiveness of assets-based approaches in promoting age-friendly agendas appears to be contingent on the values, skills, capacity and resourcing of delivery agencies, alongside wider public sector investment in communities. Diversity and inequalities amongst older people need to be taken into account and community development that specifically focuses on older people needs to be balanced with the whole population and intergenerational practice.

This paper provides an empirical account of the practical application of assets practices specifically in the context of the age-friendly community agenda. The co-production method brings together insights from academic and volunteer older CRs.

The purpose of this paper is to set out three dilemmas that challenge historians of education who write for both professional and academic audiences. It focuses on the example of using fiction as a source for understanding the informal education of girls in the twentieth century. It contributes to the debate over the purpose of history of education and the possibilities that intersecting and contested analytical frameworks might contribute to the development of the discipline.

The paper discusses the rules of engagement and the duties of a historian of education. It reforms current concerns into three dilemmas: audience, method and writing. It gives examples drawn from research into girls’ school stories between 1910 and 1960. It highlights three authors and stories set in Australia, England and an international school in order to explore what fiction offers in getting “inside” the classroom.

Developed from a conference keynote that explored intersecting and contested histories of education, the paper sets up as many questions as it provides answers but re-frames them to include the use of a genre that has been explored by historians of childhood and literature but less so by historians of education.

The vast quantity of stories set in girls’ schools between 1910 and 1960 necessarily demands a selective reading. Authors may specialise in the genre or be general young people’s fiction authors. Reading such stories must necessarily be set against changing social, cultural and political contexts. This paper uses examples from the genre in order to explore ways forward but cannot include an exhaustive methodology for reasons of space.

This paper suggests fiction as a way of broadening the remit of history of education and acting as a bridge between related sub-disciplines such as history of childhood and youth, history and education. It raises practical implications for historians of education as they seek new approaches and understanding of the process of informal education outside the classroom.

This paper suggests that the authors should take more seriously the impact of children’s reading for pleasure. Reception studies offer an insight into recognising the interaction that children have with their chosen reading. While the authors cannot research how children interacted historically with these stories in the mid-twentieth century, the authors can draw implications from the popularity of the genre and the significance of the legacy of the closed school community that has made series such as Harry Potter so successful with the current generation.

The marginal place of history of education within the disciplines of history and education is both challenging and full of possibilities. The paper draws on existing international debates and discusses future directions as well as the potential that girls’ school stories offer for research into gender and education.

The purpose of this paper is to report on an evaluative study which used appreciative inquiry (AI) to explore the processes of change during the Cancer Services Collaborative Improvement programme instituted by the Department of Health in the UK. This was a three‐stage programme which expanded from nine pilot projects to a national service change, focussing on improving the patient's experience throughout the journey from diagnosis to treatment.

The paper uses AI questions in interviews with a range of CSC staff who had had different roles and length of involvement.

The study identified a range of strategies and skills that participants had developed in order to support and facilitate service change.

The paper offers a discussion of skills and strategies that can facilitate change in health care across clinical areas, and a discussion of the use of AI as a method of evaluation.

This study is one of the first to use AI in health care evaluation in the UK, and thus makes a contribution to understanding change from an AI perspective.

This paper describes how one specialist learning disability health service has attempted to increase its focus on meeting the complex needs of people with profound learning disability (PLD) both with and without additional physical, sensory and medical impairment. Through individual assessment and intervention, carer consultation, training and supervision, research, and audit and advice to management, a multi‐disciplinary group has influenced the development of more proactive community teams for people with learning disability. This is in the context of both the publication of Signposts for Success (NHSE, 1998) and of a changing organisational culture which has embraced essential lifestyle planning, person‐centred teams, supported living and direct payments. The challenge remains of ring‐fencing sufficient resources (of time, skill and equipment), given the high‐profile and competing demands of people with milder learning disabilities but with complex mental health needs and/or challenging behaviour.

Recent years have seen the development of intra‐industry trade models based upon the work of Lancaster (1979). Although these models demonstrate the conditions which lead to intra‐industry trade they cannot, in general, predict the direction of bilateral trade flows in the same commodity. Work by Lancaster (1984) and Lyons (1984) identifies two possibilities — the interleaved case (each domestically produced variety is bordered on both sides by a foreign produced variety) and the split case (domestic firms produce on one half of the preference spectrum and foreign firms on the other). Which of the two cases applies is seen as being determined by historical demand patterns. This paper seeks to model these patterns by a simple adaptation of the model of Lancaster (1980).

In this phenomenological study, the experiences of seven Black women faculty at predominantly White institutions (PWIs) who are working toward tenure and promotion are presented. The use of phenomenology, specifically in-depth interviews, gives voice to the women as they share the essence of their experiences including their perceived supports and barriers. Understanding their experiences adds to the literature on women of color in education and has the implications for schooling and community, and support structures essential to the success of Black women and all women of color in academe.

Q‐analysis is a methodology for investigating a wide range of structural phenomena. Structures are defined in terms of relations between members of sets and their salient features are revealed using techniques of algebraic topology. However, the basic method can be mastered by non‐mathematicians. Q‐analysis has been applied to problems as diverse as discovering the rules for the diagnosis of a rare disease and the study of tactics in a football match. Other applications include some of interest to librarians and information scientists. In bibliometrics, Q‐analysis has proved capable of emulating techniques such as bibliographic coupling, co‐citation analysis and co‐word analysis. It has also been used to produce a classification scheme for television programmes based on different principles from most bibliographic classifications. This paper introduces the basic ideas of Q‐analysis. Applications relevant to librarianship and information science are reviewed and present limitations of the approach described. New theoretical advances including some in other fields such as planning and design theory and artificial intelligence may lead to a still more powerful method of investigating structure.