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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to verify whether an evolutionary model outperforms logistic regression in determining the institutional placement decisions made by a London social service department panel. Design/methodology/approach – Genetic chromodynamics models an algorithm within the Michigan evolutionary classifier. Hence multiple classification rules evolve simultaneously. The dataset as described by Xie et al. is used. Two‐thirds of randomly selected cases are for training and one third for testing. Indicator weights are set between 0 and 1. Findings – Of 275 placements, 40 per cent represent residential homes, 48 per cent nursing homes, 12 per cent nursing long‐stay and two hospital long‐stay. In ten runs, 89.18 per cent were correctly placed (range 81.6 to 97.7 per cent); 5.07 per cent wrongly placed (range 1.2 to 8.0 per cent) and 5.75 per cent unplaced (range 0.0 to 11.5 per cent). Changing the 0.99 weights to 0.90 and 0.80 placed 87.6 and 87.9 per cent correctly. Research limitations/implications – Data came from written records. Errors in transcription and placement could not be checked. Other facts, or the weights, may be influencing placement decisions. Practical implications – Xie et al. matched 78 per cent of 195 placements. The evolutionary model outperformed logistic regression both in placements evaluated (275/195) and accuracy (89/78 per cent). Therefore, it could be used as a first line management information tool, revealing whether guidelines are followed. Originality/value – The authors have developed and tested a computational model, which could be used to evaluate institutional placement decisions in the UK “market”. Further development and exploitation would facilitate greater understanding of the needs old people and the resources necessary for their appropriate management.

The benefits of teacher leadership have attracted the attention of policymakers, practitioners and researchers. It is increasingly advocated as one of the most crucial and indispensable components of the school, college and university administration. The present study tends to investigate the role of gratitude in developing teacher leadership through examining sufficiency and necessity of thankfulness for educational leadership.

The study explores sufficiency and necessity of gratitude for seven dimensions of educational leadership with the help of correlation, regression and necessary condition analysis.

The paper concludes that gratitude is both sufficient and necessary condition for overall teacher leadership and its seven dimensions.

The paper is based on original data.

Despite the new ‘needs driven’ criteria for public funded admission to nursing homes, there remains concern that older people are entering such care inappropriately. However, neither previous research or policy makers have sub‐divided such inappropriate entries into their constituent groups: those who are inappropriate because they are too independent and those who are inappropriate because they are too dependent. The aims of this study were to determine the extent of inappropriate nursing home admission amongst older people in nursing homes in six areas of England and Wales between 1995‐96. This was done through a retrospective case‐note review using a structured data‐collection pro forma. Although the study found no evidence of extensive inappropriate placement, extrapolation of these data suggests that 6,750 of those admitted to nursing care could have coped in a more independent environment. The inappropriately admitted group were more likely to have lived alone, be female, elderly and not to have seen a geriatrician. It is concluded that the most effective way to prevent such admissions would be to ensure the involvement of specialist geriatricians in the multidisciplinary team involved in admission decisions.

This paper makes a comparison between the electrical properties of cement grout with and without monofilament polypropylene fibre additions. The findings show a small, but significant difference between the electrolytic transport properties of cement grout with monofilament polypropylene fibre additions when compared to grout without fibre additions. The grout with fibre additions suggests a reduced probability of water and ion transmission, due to higher measured resistivity, which will result in enhanced durability and lower life cycle costs. Durability of reinforced concrete structures, is known to be closely linked to the water permeability of the concrete matrix. This potential trend for enhanced durability can be added to the other benefits of using monofilament polypropylene fibre in concrete, such as low absorption, freeze/thaw resistance, fire resistance and micro reinforcement.

Draws on Neo‐Weberian theory to argue that commodification is itself a cultural process, whilst not discounting the potentially negative effect of commercialisation. Examines product conception in the early US recording industry citing three disparate periods. Shows that in the late 1870s, recording firms sold and leased phonographs to entrepreneurs for public exhibitions, the the late 1880s firms leased phonographs and graphophones for dictation purpose and in the 1890s, firms exploited the phonograph by offering musical recordings. Concludes that structural power helped shape the product concepts of the industry.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the writing development of Hong Kong kindergarten students over 12 months. They attended 18 kindergartens territory-wide and were followed from June 2002 to June 2003 for the collection of three waves of teacher-rated data at six-month intervals.

First, the construct validity of the translated and culturally adapted version of Morrow’s (2012) checklist which assesses writing development was confirmed, considering that the students attended Hong Kong kindergartens who wrote in the Chinese language. The multilevel analysis, which employed corrected measures captured through Wolfe and Chiu’s (1999a, 1999b) five-step Rasch scaling method for a common frame of reference, estimated the effects of the factors, namely, student age, gender, class level and schools.

The children’s progress over the second six months was also apparently much smaller than the first SIX months for this cohort. The dramatic slow-down in the second six-month period for both cohorts might be partly attributed to the peculiar arrangement of schooling at that time.

The recommendation from this study is that random sampling and student test scores on writing need to be taken for the identification of the general trend of young children’s writing development in Hong Kong, as well as other Chinese communities alike.

The profile of the student’s emergent writing development at each six-month follow-up and over the 12 months was explored. Differences between the groups based on age, gender, class level and school in terms of student writing development on average were statistically significant.

This chapter argues for the development of a model of tutor/student interaction, applying experiential theory and using a learning community framework to improve the student learning experience and to enhance the quality of course curriculum and content. A further value is the opportunity for students, to ‘find’ potential solutions to workplace problems and, as public sector managers, to challenge and change workplace practices and attitudes.

This chapter explores the practice of using course participants’ own experiences to inform course content and increase the currency and value of teaching and initiates development of what could eventually become a real co-production process.

The chapter applies an experiential approach to education and learning, contending that this could lead to a potential co-production process. It argues that this combined approach is a useful model by which to examine current workplace issues using the professional experiences of course participants.

The chapter advances the argument put forward in ‘Another Look at Research’ (Oldfield, 2016) by placing experiential learning within the context of a co-production approach to the delivery of education and learning and delineating a distinctive pedagogical approach to mid-career education.

The roots of the present human rights regime vis-a-vis children go back to the aftermath of World War I, when Eglantyne Jebb – cofounder of the Save the Children Fund – drafted, as part of her work with refugee children in the Balkans, a Children's Charter. In this document, she argued that there were certain rights for children that should be claimed and universally recognized and indeed that it was the duty of the international community to put such rights to the very forefront of their planning decisions: ‘[i]t is our children’ Jebb argued ‘who pay the heaviest price for our shortsighted economic policies, our political blunders, our wars’ (Hammarberg, 1990, p. 98). What Jebb in fact created was a practical document later used as the basis for the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child that was adopted by the League of Nations in September 1924 and that set out five precepts governing the ‘duties’ that mankind had, ‘beyond and above all considerations of race, nationality or creed’. These included allowing the child to be first in receiving relief in times of distress and providing all manner of support to the ‘needy’ child (defined at the time as being those suffering hunger and sickness, orphans and those who were ‘backward’ or ‘delinquent’). The language of the Declaration may have moved on, but it remains a landmark document in that it set the tone for many of the child's rights initiatives that followed, in particular, in terms of the ‘children first’ ethos that was to become a fundamental element in later child rights campaigns (Hammarberg, 1990, p. 98). Indeed, the 1924 Declaration has been widely depicted as a turning point for international political efforts relating to the child, and too for the advocacy movement that surrounds them, providing inspiration for many of the efforts on their behalf that were to follow. Like many of these subsequent efforts towards putting children first, however, political events overtook political will, and the attempt to improve children's lives at this time stalled as the world moved once again towards war. It would therefore be much later – in the aftermath of World War II, and following the 1948 approval by the UN General Assembly of the Universal Declaration – before the international community turned its attention once more to the welfare of the child, and it is in the work that was done during this time that the roots of the current international legal regime governing children can perhaps most clearly be recognised.