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Children's services agencies in England are increasingly expected to work together to plan needsled interventions in their locality. Such planning requires good information on local need and service take‐up, yet this is often lacking. Connecting data from single agency, multi‐agency and community studies in one district shows how the severity of need overlaps with different service and administrative categories. The findings point to the value of such mapping exercises, while the pattern that emerges highlights the importance of planning provision for all children and of linking intervention to thresholds of severity of need. The approach will have relevance to other care groups.

One of the themes that cut across most of the cases is the importance of spending time forging relationships with participants in the research setting. Whilst this can be a long process which under the drivers of the current ‘neoliberal academy’ may appear to yield few tangible outputs, we argue that dedicating effort to building relationships – and being willing to take a ‘slow’ approach – is an essential methodological aspect of researching non-formal education. In this chapter, we first outline the importance of developing relationships and embracing slowness in research, illustrating how these concepts play out in Case Study 2 – Youth Sports Programmes, Case Study 6 – Geographies of Youth Work, Case Study 7 – Parents' Everyday Maths, and Case Study 9 – Theories of Change. Finally, we distil two key recommendations from the four cases: trusting relationships can lead to richer data collection, and building relationships can lead to a more ethical and caring form of research.

This chapter reflects on the concept of knowledge – or perhaps, more accurately, the multiple knowledges – generated in this field of study. We consider, through drawing on some of the examples of ways in which knowledge about out-of-school learning is constructed in the case studies, issues such as the authenticity and value of knowledges pertinent to this field, the power structures and knowledge hierarchies involved and the localised sites of such knowledge production. We conclude with some thoughts about how researchers can manage the tensions involved in making decisions about whether to try to integrate or to keep separate such multiple forms of knowledge.

The latest information from the magazine chemist is extremely valuable. He has dealt with milk‐adulteration and how it is done. His advice, if followed, might, however, speedily bring the manipulating dealer before a magistrate, since the learned writer's recipe is to take a milk having a specific gravity of 1030, and skim it until the gravity is raised to 1036; then add 20 per cent. of water, so that the gravity may be reduced to 1030, and the thing is done. The advice to serve as “fresh from the cow,” preferably in a well‐battered milk‐measure, might perhaps have been added to this analytical gem.

Recent research has proposed a specific female phenotype within autism spectrum disorder (ASD). It suggests females exhibit differences in social communication styles with higher levels of camouflaging and compensatory strategies, as well as variance in restrictive repetitive behaviours (RRBs); however, many existing studies have been based on either small, disproportionate or child and adolescent samples, leaving questions about the specific phenotype. This study aims to explore the sex difference and phenotype in a clinic sample of individuals diagnosed with autism.

A service evaluation of sex/ gender differences on 150 historical ASD assessment reports (75 males, 75 females) using a 103-item questionnaire developed from a quantitative review of existing literature was undertaken.

Females camouflaged more significantly than males in five different areas (thinking how to act next, preparing conversation in advance, making lists of prompts/social responses, wearing a mask/acting, less monotone voice); however, these were not maintained in post-analysis correction.

This study points the evidence towards a different phenotype of Autism that is more common in women than men rather than a unique female phenotype.