Author Archives: Alison Fox

On A-Level results day, we bring you an except from the introduction to Mary Richardson’s excellent open access book Rebuilding Public Confidence in Educational Assessment,  which explores the nature of trust in assessment discourses.

In June 2013, I was conducting research in Finland. It was part of a longitudinal study with six European partner universities, and we had spent a week together writing and planning. On the final day, the weather was uncharacteristically hot for the Arctic Circle and, given the option of an indoor university tour or a trip to Santa’s village, we all chose the latter.

The village includes shops and, of course, Santa’s Post Office, where, after posting some cards, I wandered into the post room. I struck up a conversation with an ‘elf’ about the types of request they get and she showed me the files of letters, pulling out that year’s collection from England. One letter, handwritten on pink notepaper (in typically girlish writing – very rounded, with hearts instead of dots above the letter ‘i’), caught my eye. It said:

Dear Santa, What I’d like for Christmas is to get 10 A stars in my GCSEs. If I fail, I will let everyone down – they think I can do it. I try really hard at school but don’t always get the grades I want. Please help Santa. Love, xxx

I was struck by the fact that a child of 15 or 16 years old (the age when GCSE examinations are sat in England) was writing to a mythical figure for help and by the innate desperation of the request. This letter suggests that the pressure is too much, the expected level of achievement is wrong, and its presence is causing such anxiety that it led to this desperate cry for help.

Throughout this book, I use many examples from my own context in England, but I also include examples from international contexts, to demonstrate that we are facing a global crisis in education. The examples and focus for the issues in educational assessment are based on ‘discourses’ – the many ways in which we communicate and share ideas, and how we understand and make sense of the world. The letter to Santa not only reflects a discourse of high expectations (a desire to achieve top grades), it also reveals an opposing discourse framed by doom, of concern about letting people down or not being good enough.

It is important to understand that discourses are not the ‘truth’; rather, they are narratives constructed by individuals or groups to try to characterise what is meant in a particular situation. What makes discourses problematic is when they become an accepted norm or an ideal that skews how people see and understand the world around them. In educational settings, this is definitely an issue. The theory of discourses in education is explained further in Chapter 1.

Globally, the emphasis on comparative achievement in educational assessment has become more prominent since the 1990s (Unterhalter, 2019). This has radically changed our perceptions about the aims and purpose of education, and has consequently impacted on how we view educational assessment. Essentially, assessment is characterised by a received culture of competition, leading to a belief that the grade is everything. This idea is so important now that some tests are called ‘high-stakes’ tests, because their results shape us: they determine our careers, our access to higher education, our access to certain opportunities and places, and our socio-economic prospects (Torrance, 2017). The addiction to high-stakes testing is often framed by claims (which lack substantive evidence) that exams are fairer and more rigorous than any other type of assessment, so they present a more truthful, measured picture of academic achievement of which we can be more confident.

Assessment and its outcomes matter deeply to us, so I am concerned by a global lack of confidence in both policy and practice. This low confidence comes from poor understanding of two things: what assessment is and how assessment works. These two deficits have preoccupied me for some time, and this book is an attempt to present some answers to each of them in an accessible, evidence-based way.

When I tell people that my work is in educational assessment, their response is either a barely disguised yawn or, more commonly, a barrage of questions about why national testing and standards have collapsed. Despite the notion that assessment is not a very interesting topic, it appears to preoccupy a great deal of public interest. It is time for an honest, clear explanation and conversation about its key constituents, while also challenging some of the misconceptions that emerge in public settings. Testing, particularly the examination system, is often in the news.

This leads me to question how something so influential can be regarded with suspicion and framed by challenges and anxiety.

Views of assessment are broadly influenced by a complex series of discourses that surround our understanding of its development, use and outcomes. However, an examination of popular discourses within public domains reveals an unsatisfying binary level of argument – a love–hate relationship with the whole idea of assessment. We ‘love’ the certification and selection that the results of standardised testing bring, but we ‘hate’ the extent to which grading and measuring from the same tests has the capacity to influence opportunities and can lead to personal labelling.

Much of the vast range of assessment literature that has evolved since the 1990s comprises evidence of how formative assessment could challenge our reliance on testing as ‘the best’ form of assessment and demonstrates that assessment can be a way of informing and supporting learning. But despite a plethora of resources and global engagement with the idea of assessment for learning theories, when the chips are down we do not necessarily engage with formative assessments; we prefer to rely on grades to summarise ability, skills or knowledge. Such patterns of behaviour are not unique to England, but are seen from Canada to Kazakhstan, and from Slovenia to Hong Kong. Grades are a universally accepted way of characterising achievement and understanding success in academic terms.

Much research has been conducted on this theme and it reveals consistent patterns of anxiety and pressure. Obsession with exams and the continual promotion of competition as a foundation for a sense of educational achievement has been noted as problematic since the 1950s (Fielding, 2011). Yet we continue to repeat the cycle. In England, Reay and Wiliam (1999) found that national testing schemes in English statemaintained primary schools were leading children to judge themselves based on their scores. Children were literally describing themselves as a ‘four’, or even a ‘nothing’. Their scores referred to what was called the common attainment scale across the three key stages in education. These were numbered from 1 to 8, and the children in this study (aged about 10) were working towards a national average grade of 4, so anything below this would be considered a ‘failure’. The study suggested a need to change the concern and to focus on test outcomes as a measure of potential.

However, this unhealthy obsession with grading at a young age continues. It is implicit in the public messaging shown in Figure 0.1, which appeared on an advertising hoarding at the end of my road.

Clearly aimed at the teenagers who walk by it each day en route to the nearby secondary school, this advertisement promotes an online resource designed to provide support for anxious students. What surprised me about this is the order of concerns listed: exams are at the top of the list, outranking relationships – very different to my experience of teenage years at school!

There is an inconsistency in the perceived purpose of assessment clashing with a flawed understanding of a framework of educational achievement. Politicians and policymakers claim that our education system is now more sensitive than ever to the needs of all children, yet we accept a system of testing that is increasingly reductive. Those who create and produce our high-stakes examinations claim that such assessments provide balanced ways of capturing how students demonstrate knowledge, skills and/or understanding in the subjects they study in school. In terms of test construction, reliability and validity, this may be so, but how these tests demonstrate the achievements of individuals is more ethically troubling. Teachers are increasingly forced to focus their students’ attention on grades and not necessarily because they matter to the student. Chapters 1 and 2 explain this issue and introduce the continual quest for an elusive gold standard.

This book is not an attempt to identify and challenge all of the ways in which we talk about educational assessment. Instead, I explore them using what I have identified as dominant discourses on screen, in print and online. There are literally hundreds of thousands of articles that analyse assessment in a range of ways – from the social and political, through policymaking, to technical construction and classroom practice. However, I am interested in how assessment is discussed broadly too. Look beyond the limited readerships of academic publishing and there are so many public discourses about this issue. There is no single, correct interpretation of those beliefs and perceptions that circulate how we talk about assessment, and I’m not seeking to reveal the right way that it should be undertaken. Rather, I want to try to understand the prevailing discourses, so that there are other ways to reflect on what is happening in this controversial and contested area of education.

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About the Author

This an excerpt from the open access book Rebuilding Public Confidence in Educational Assessment by Mary Richardson.

Mary Richardson is a Professor of Educational Assessment at IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society.

On International Day of World’s Indigenous Peoples, we bring you an except from Zeremariam Fre’s superb Knowledge Sovereignty among African Cattle Herders, which argues that there is much to learn from established indigenous knowledge, challenging the preconceptions that regard it as untrustworthy when compared to scientific knowledge from more developed regions.

Knowledge Sovereignty among African Cattle Herders focuses on the description, elicitation, documentation and analysis of major aspects of indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) among the Beni-Amer in the Horn of Africa. My fundamental point of departure is that Beni-Amer cattle owners (Seb-ahha) in the western part of the Horn of Africa are not only masters of cattle breeding, but also knowledge-sovereign in terms of owning cattle with productive genes and the cognitive knowledge base which is key to sustainable development.

The strong bonds between the Beni-Amer, their animals and their environment constitute the basis of their ways of knowing, and much of their knowledge system is based on experience and embedded in their cultural practices. Notions that this knowledge is somewhat ‘untrustworthy’ when compared to western scientific knowledge are explored further in the book. The evidence also shows that the Beni-Amer’s knowledge system includes elements of western knowledge; for example, the Beni-Amer incorporate western veterinary knowledge into their practice. The learning is mutual, however, since elements of pastoral technology, such as on animal production and husbandry, make a direct contribution to our scientific knowledge of livestock production. It is this hybridisation and dynamism which are at the core of this indigenous knowledge system.

This premise also affirms that indigenous knowledge can be seen as a stand-alone science, and that a community’s rights of ownership should be defended by government officials, development planners and policy makers, making the case for a celebration of the knowledge sovereignty of pastoralist communities. Throughout the book I demonstrate that the hybridisation of ‘indigenous’ and ‘scientific’ knowledge is a key factor in the sustainability of the Beni-Amer’s pastoral practices.

Pastoral knowledge is embedded in the cultural, spiritual, political and social system of pastoral societies. The cultural aspect is particularly important; the knowledge is often transmitted orally and passed down to each generation through stories, songs and other rituals, where cattle are revered. Pastoralists around the world have historically praised their cattle in verse; among the drovers in the Highlands of Scotland in the late seventeenth century, the commercial importance of an ability to sing about the good points of a Highland cow drew on long-nourished skills (Cheape 2011).

Sadly, the pastoralist culture is becoming eroded as the practice of pastoralism continues to be under threat from political and environmental stresses. Also, pastoralism itself is subject to many misconceptions. It is still viewed by some policy makers as outdated, ‘quaint’ or ‘backward’, and such myths need to be dispelled. Given the wealth of literature produced by decades of research into the environmental and economic advantages of pastoralism, it is important that we see the future of pastoralism not as declining, nor as a linear progression, but as offering many versatile options for dealing with new and emerging challenges in the African drylands and elsewhere. Indigenous pastoral knowledge, as demonstrated by the case of the Beni-Amer, has proved itself to be resilient to change and open to new approaches, offering evidence-based and modern solutions to present and future climatic and other pressures.

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About the Author

Zeremariam Fre is the founding director and former head of regional NGO, the Pastoral and Environmental Network in the Horn of Africa (PENHA). He currently works at the Bartlett Development Planning Unit at UCL as a teaching fellow and course tutor. His research and teaching are inspired by his work experience in development planning, dry land agriculture, land use policy, food security, peri-urban agriculture, indigenous knowledge systems, the role of women in food production, NGOs and social movements.

Summer might have been a bit of a wash out (again!) but July has been a fertile month for new publications. In July we published a bumper crop of SIX new open access books, including the second publication from our new open access textbook programme!

First up was Newman University Church, Dublin: Architectural revivalism in the British Isles and the authority of form, which is a fascinating study of Dublin’s Newman University Church, situating it not only in terms of its connection to John Henry Newman’s views on and achievements in education, but also in terms of the overlooked significance of the church in relation to architectural revivalism. A must read for scholars of religious buildings and architectural history.

Another open access gem, Between Design and Making: Architecture and craftsmanship, 1630–1760 followed soon after. This exciting book re-evaluates the social and professional fabric that binds design to making, and the asymmetry that has emerged between architecture and craft. (If you enjoyed this one, you’ll also enjoy Enriching Architecture: Craft and its conservation in Anglo-Irish building production, 1660–1760 from some of the same team)

Next up was Methods and Methodologies in Heritage Studies, an essential textbook that offers succinct, easily accessible analyses of the disciplinary debates, intellectual legacies, and practical innovations that have led to understandings of heritage value today. Well worth a read if you are interested in research methods used in heritage studies.

Readers might also like to take a look at Collections Management as Critical Museum Practice. With a superstar cast of museum studies contributors, this open access book brings into focus the knowledges, value systems, ethics and workplace pragmatics that are the foundation of collections management. The book creates a critical dialogue about the underlying philosophies, values and ethics that determine what are and what might be acceptable collections practices.

The month ended with two titles that focus on the world of STEM. Generalism in Clinical Practice and Education outlines a generalist philosophy of practice that is brought to life through interleaved examples. Written by a range of international clinicians, patients and academics it seeks to inspire readers’ future engagement with generalism in practice and learning through sharing underpinning concepts, values and principle.

The second title, Belonging and Identity in STEM Higher Education, leading scholars, teachers, practitioners and students explore belonging and identity in STEM fields. STEM ways of thinking, such as those underpinning abstract and complex mathematics, can form the basis of new ways of conceptualising belonging for both staff and students.

As always, happy reading and stay safe!

We are delighted to announce that A History of Scientific Journals has been shortlisted for the 2024 BSHS Pickstone Prize, awarded biennially by the British Society for the History of Science (BSHS).

A History of Scientific Journals explores 350 years of scientific publishing through the lens of the Royal Society’s prestigious publication Philosophical Transactions. It has been downloaded more than 10,000 times in 121 countries and territories across the world since its publication in October 2022.

Unrivalled insights from the Royal Society’s comprehensive archives enabled the authors to investigate the editorial management, business practices and financial difficulties of the Philosophical Transactions and its sibling Proceedings reveal the meaning and purpose of journals in a changing scientific community.

The BSHS Pickstone Prize is awarded every two years to the best scholarly book in the history of science (broadly construed) in English. The Prize aims to recognize pioneering works that advance the scholarly understanding and interpretation of the scientific past.  The winner will be announced at the Annual Conference of the BSHS in Aberystwyth, 10-13 July 2024.

The London Review of Education, IOE’s flagship open-access, peer-reviewed journal published by UCL Press, is currently seeking a new Editor-in-Chief to lead the journal in its next phase.  

We are now inviting applications from IOE academic staff to join the journal in this key senior leadership role. This is a voluntary role. Applications close on 14th July 2023.

Founded in 2003, it reflects the Institute’s broad interests in all types of education in all contexts – local, national, global – and its commitment to analysis across disciplines using a variety of methodologies. It shares the Institute’s aspiration to interrogate links between research, policy and practice, and its principled concern for social justice. Joining the journal offers many opportunities for professional development as well as collaborating/networking with a broad group of international academic and professional experts. You will find further information about the journal, the current Editorial Board, as well as all its publications and future series, indexing and full aims and scope, online at https://uclpress.co.uk/lre. 

This senior leadership position may form part of personal research or scholarship time and would be considered commensurate with activities at Grade 10 or above in the Academic Careers Framework. The role is voluntary with a 5-year term (subject to renew) and provides the unique opportunity to run and directly shape the future direction and development of this growing journal, by defining journal strategy, policies and the journal aims and scope. The role holder will also be required to sit on the IOE Research Committee as representation of the Journal. Other duties also include:

1. Actively working with UCL Press and the Journal Editorial Board to develop strategies to improve processes and grow its reputation;
2. Oversight and delegation to other Journal Editors handling peer review of submitted papers (including supporting and educating Editors on best practice in these processes, e.g. providing critical and objective assessment and review);
3. Triaging submissions for suitability to proceed with peer review;
4. Making appropriate editorial decisions for publication (accept, reject, revise);
5. Occasionally writing editorials and other copy as required in producing an online journal.

If you would like to apply for this role, as well as any enquiries, please email the UCL Press Journals Manager, Ian Caswell, at i.caswell@ucl.ac.uk with your CV and a brief covering email about why you would like to join.

How does the media read climate science and present it to the public and consequently to decision-makers? In this guest post, UCL Open: Environment Editor-in-Chief, Prof. Dan Osborn highlights the way scientific climate research is disseminated for public consumption through the media.

Why 1.5°C matters

The BBC recently issued a climate-related story and other media have done likewise. The BBC article is important as it tells readers that, in what looks like a strong El Niño period, humanity might well fail in its ambition, set out in the Paris Agreement on climate change, to keep the global average temperature below 1.5°C above the pre-industrial average. This is serious. Something that decision-makers and the public need to know about if they are to gather the will to make the necessary lifestyle and economic choices to tackle climate change and avoid its worst impacts such as the fatal heatwaves experienced recently all over the world.

Having initially made strong points in the article, the message is diluted by explaining that exceeding 1.5°C may be only temporary. Many scientists might be pleased to see this caution by the BBC providing a balance. But, readers may dismiss the 1.5°C as just another “blip” in the climate, showing again that the climate has always varied and as such there is not too much to be concerned about and, certainly nothing that requires any radical action or changes to lifestyle now. This is not the kind of outcome needed if climate action is to succeed.

Why is 1.5°C important? What’s the context? This means looking at another kind of article: Article 2 of the Paris Agreement. Paragraph 1(a) is clear about what the aim is. It involves:

“Holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change”.

There is nothing temporary or transitory in Article 2, a major international agreement ratified by almost every government on the planet. There is no time frame to this Article and yet the UNFCC website says that subsequent discussions suggest this is something to aim for by the end of the century, 2100. It is now mid-2023 and we are talking about passing 1.5°C by the end of 2027. It seems to me that 1.5°C might be thought to be the really important figure in the Paris Agreement as it can be argued to be “well below 2°C”. And we might see that threshold passed in just a few years.

The great biogeochemical cycles of the planet in the shape of an El Niño are giving us all a wake-up call. Maybe the IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and the UNFCC COPs need to take more note of these massive physical and biological systems than is already done? People’s behaviour and economic activity is now great enough to change these great cycles in major ways, with serious negative consequences and these cycles, some that play out over geological timescales, some with much shorter time cycles, are the source of our health and wealth (for example, at the extreme, there is no AI without silicon and maybe not enough renewables without certain perovskites).

A Global average may be the wrong kind of figure to focus on

One problem the media and the scientific community face in delivering impactful messages on climate change is that the figures in the Paris Agreement are for the global average. A key issue for an ever-increasing number of populations – often living in poorer countries or environments that are fragile or marginal in different ways – is that their world, their environment, is already warmer than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. We can see this happening progressively with data up to 2019 with a static map for 2022 here and in a 30 second video on YouTube with the latest data, freely accessible here.

These areas of warming are spread and are spreading across the globe. The Arctic is warming about three and a half times as fast as the average. 1.5°C in such places is becoming a memory – especially for the Inuit but also for the peoples of the Middle East and parts of Asia. For those living in these areas, 1.5°C already looks like a permanent issue and not a blip that will come and then go around the late 2020s (as per the way the first BBC article I speak about here, tends to imply).

Instead, we should be braver in the way climate change is being covered in the media. There is an audience that wants to know the facts and what needs to change and how to go about it. There is an enthusiasm for “doing your bit” that is not at all difficult to engage with. So, let’s take the international agreements seriously and take 1.5°C as the value not to be exceeded at any time not just by the end of the century. Let’s make it clear that 1.5°C keeps being exceeded in parts of the world where people are struggling to cope already with adverse environmental conditions. The time to act is now.

More radically but usefully perhaps, let’s abandon the focus on the global average and focus instead on what is happening at much more local scales and what the best of the models tell us is likely to happen in the future. For all we know an average of 1.5°C might lead to unacceptable change in one region or even for one population/people. What if the Inuit culture disappeared entirely because of this? Is that not a bad thing? A lot of people get focused on perhaps aspects like polar bears, but what about the people in the environment in which they live? What matters, as Georgina Mace once pointed out, is nature and people, together (Georgina Mace, 2014 https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1254704).

When it comes to it, no part of the world is immune from climate change and its variables. We all, media and academics alike, need to say clearly that for many people 1.5°C is already here and give the examples. Point out that liveability is becoming an issue for people in some places on Earth and point out that there is no need to continue on the current path (see Peter Schlosser’s piece on that here). Point out that a cleaner world – and climate change essentially is just another form of pollution – is a better world; healthier because there is less pollution and wealthier because of the new technologies that will be deployed; and more sustainable as we are not putting the biogeochemical cycles under so much strain that the planet might start to really “complain”. Maybe we should be keeping an even closer eye on that seasonal pattern of atmospheric carbon dioxide changes at the key observing stations than we already do? In some ways that pattern is the planet “breathing”. Do we want that to stop?

Some people still argue that we don’t need to act now for a whole complex of reasons. Some feel that if climate change were really serious then politicians would change their lifestyles more noticeably and be driving home measures that will help everyone make the necessary adjustments. Others in this camp have vested interests at heart or argue that measures to improve the environment in some ways are some kind of plot to limit freedoms. These kinds of reactions are best tackled by pointing up what the evidence shows and what actions can be taken by people, and that the more we invest in the future, the faster and more positive the payback will be. It is, of course, better to act now rather than delaying and panicking later when much of the damage will have been done and the world may have moved passed Lenton’s Tipping points (e.g. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003331384-17/climate-change-tipping-points-historical-collapse-timothy-lenton) or the limits identified by Rockstrom and colleagues as pointed up in a recent editorial (which, interestingly, with regards to our open review journal UCL Open: Environment, points readers to the many benefits of an open peer review process to improve knowledge exchange and debate).

In all that its worth remembering that climate change, left untackled, will not only be causing its own problems but will be making almost all other problems worse as well. With  impacts of climate change all pervasive, for all our sakes, and that of biodiversity and our food chain, we need to stick to temperatures that are “well-below 2°C” and that means as, Johan Rockstrom has said, not treating 1.5°C as if it is some kind of acceptable target.  It may well be the functional limit we really cannot cross and to avoid that we need to up our game and up the pace of our response. There may be no better place to start than by visiting www.fivetimesfaster.org with Simon Sharpe’s recent book Five Times Faster, a must read for scientists, media, and decision-makers of every kind. The message? Act now; act differently; act much faster.

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About the author

Dan Osborn is Emeritus Professor of Earth Sciences at UCL and Editor-in-chief of UCL Open: Environment

About UCL Open: Environment

UCL Open: Environment  is a fully non-commercial, Open Access and Open Science scholarly journal, publishing high impact, multi-disciplinary research, on real world environmental issues, with the overall aim of benefitting humanity. Read more at journals.uclpress.co.uk/ucloe

UCL Open: Environment is seeking submissions from any researcher or professional at knowledge-based universities, institutions, and organisations (including Non-Government Organisations, Think Tanks, Inter-Government Organisations, and the United Nations) broadly across environment-related research, covering climate change, the character and functioning of the environment, Planetary Health (its resources and limits), public health grounded in environmental factors, and the environment in which people live.

Today’s guest post is by Professor Dan Osborn, who is Chair of Human Ecology, Earth Sciences, at UCL (University College London, UK) and Editor-in-Chief of the UCL Press journal UCL Open: Environment

In June 2021, when the evidence report for the 3^rd UK climate risk assessment (CCRA3) was released, talk was of southern England summer temperatures over 40°C being experienced sometime “before 2050” (Baroness Brown in launching the evidence report) and in the detail the message of the Technical Report seemed to be that the chances of 40°C before 2040 was small. 

Events have now overtaken these projections. 40°C came to the UK in mid-July 2022, just a year after the launch of the CCRA3 work and 2 years after the UK heatwave of 2020 was linked to over 2,000 excess deaths. Is there some readily available consistent context for this that people can look at so they can have some evidence on which to base their views and decisions? The BBC runs a service for the public to discover how hot it could get in their area of the UK under climate change. It is based on climate modelling. Some of the temperatures recorded in the last few days in the UK don’t feature in the results from the BBC tool even for a world where 4 degrees of warming occurs. The results for Coningsby in Lincolnshire where the new UK record temperature (40.3°C) was provisionally recorded are interesting: warmest summer of past 30 years: 34.9°C; projected figures for the future under 2 degrees of global warming: 37.1°C; and only under 4 degrees of global warming do we get close to what happened a few days ago: 40.2°C. Now, the BBC has a tool for extreme heat vulnerability, and even though this is based on 3 years’ worth of data analysed by a consultancy, it represents an interesting development in public information provision. And so far – on average – the world has warmed a little more than 1°C.

Right now, the UK is reflecting on an event where the previous high temperature record was simply busted by over 1.5 degrees and record temperatures were recorded not just in one place in southern England but in places as far north as North Yorkshire and, in the provisional data, at 39 separate locations. On top of this, night-time temperature records were also broken along with records for Scotland and Wales for both day and night. This was a really very exceptional event. Of course, the UK is not alone in experiencing these high temperatures as the data and mapping from many agencies, including that of the ECMWF (https://www.ecmwf.int). Wildfires across Europe, including in the UK, have led to deaths, injuries and destruction of property and are the most obvious dramatic impact of a European wide heatwave.

The climate model results all point in the right direction – they just did not, it seems as far as readily available public evidence has been concerned, reached the exceptional heights of the temperatures experienced although the weather modelling for the public was remarkably accurate. This is not particularly surprising as near-term projections will almost inevitably be more accurate than ones in the mid to far future. Quite possibly, the high temperatures were in the model outputs but just residing in the extreme tails of the distribution of the results.

So, maybe, more attention is needed to the tails of model projections so that potential extremes can be built into emergency planning, engineering designs, homes and lifestyles and, maybe, even the best climate models need to be improved in the challenging area of the extremes or the way their outputs are communicated. Other improvements to the processes of climate change work might also be needed.

There is, it seems, also a tendency towards conservativism in some climate change work in international and national fora driven by the need to strike that delicate balance between what the science might indicate and what is possible in both the policy and the political arenas. This issue came to the fore most recently when the COP26 agreement included that infamous ill-defined phrase about phasing down unabated coal – which really gets a lot of people off the hook in terms of cutting fossil fuel emissions anytime soon.

Perhaps the balance needs to shift towards the extremes the science points to as well as the long-term trends. Maybe also, the language of average global temperature rises has been in play too long and now is the time to be more local and make clear that people’s local experiences are going to be very different and sometimes very far from the average. Our language, our behaviour and our legal frameworks need to take account of what evidence is on real temperatures, real rainfall (and the lack of), and real-world problems such as new buildings that are just not ‘climate ready’.

Some will say it would be wrong to base actions on just one set of extremes, but the point is that the UK’s recent experience is just one set of extremes amongst many. There is a point at which what was extreme starts to look like an unpleasant norm. The world simply cannot afford the consequences of our changing climate. They are simply not sustainable in social, economic or environmental terms. Some 16 years after the Stern Report these facts must be faced by everyone. Finding a way through the challenges means acting fast and with the urgency evident in much of the CCRA3 reporting on risks that needed to be immediately addressed.

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 About the author

Professor Dan Osborn is Chair of Human Ecology, Earth Sciences, at UCL (University College London, UK) and Editor-in-Chief of the journal UCL Open: Environment (https://journals.uclpress.co.uk/ucloe), published by UCL Press.

This week saw the publication of an important new open access book  for anyone interested in inclusive education: The Inclusion Illusion: How children with special educational needs experience mainstream schools. In an excerpt from the foreword, Professor Paul Croll of the University of Reading, explains why The Inclusion Illusion is vital reading for anyone with an interest in SEND education

This is an important and valuable book which makes a significant contribution to the study of special educational needs and inclusion and has the potential to improve the educational experiences of pupils with significant learning and related difficulties. It combines an insightful account of the many issues and difficulties surrounding inclusion with a rigorous analysis of the outcomes and implications of the large-scale empirical work with which the author is associated. As the book demonstrates, the concept of inclusion has been central to the consideration of special educational needs since the Warnock Report of 1978 and features in all discussions of policy and practice. Over the last decade Rob Webster and colleagues at UCL Institute of Education have conducted a series of large- scale studies focused on the experiences in school of children with Statements of special educational needs and the extent to which these experiences can be regarded as inclusive. This carefully collected and analysed empirical evidence provides a compelling basis for the discussion of the difficulties and limitations of current practice presented here.

The results of these studies show that in the supposedly inclusive setting of mainstream schools, children with Statements often have rather separate educational experiences and less satisfactory pedagogical diets than their peers. Children with Statements may be withdrawn from the mainstream for substantial periods of time and even when they are within the mainstream class their experiences may be heavily mediated by teaching assistants (TAs) who manage their work and their interactions both with teachers and peers. The very heavy reliance on TAs by mainstream schools as a way of coping with the inclusion of children with difficulties emerges strongly from these studies, as does the way it limits these children’s experiences.

The research studies described here are on a very considerable scale. A particular strength is the way in which major quantitative studies based on systematic classroom observations have been combined with insightful interview- based projects. This combination means that very xirobust accounts of classroom contexts and interaction can be related to the detailed description by participants of their classroom experiences. These studies have been well conducted and carefully analysed and reported. Their conclusions about the limitations of inclusion are convincing. There is also extensive reference to other research studies and analyses and the book provides an up-to-date overview of the field of considerable relevance to teachers, educational leaders and policymakers.

The book concludes with an analysis of the policy implications of the research and ways in which inclusion can be made more of a reality. It deals with the limitations of policy and failures of leadership at all levels and ways in which the operation of school inspections and accountability regimes can inhibit inclusive policies. The book is balanced in its view and is careful not to be overcritical of schools and practitioners. The book also recognises what a difficult field this is and how problematic the education of children with serious difficulties can be. It is particularly timely when provision for special needs is being reconsidered and the central importance of inclusion perhaps needs to be restated.

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About the Author

This is an except from the introduction of  The Inclusion Illusion: How children with special educational needs experience mainstream schools by Rob Webster., with a foreword by Paul Croll.

Paul Croll is emeritus professor of education at the University of Reading, where he was the first director of the Institute of Education.

UCL Press is saddened by the recent death of Professor Marcelle BouDagher-Fadel, whose landmark books Biostratigraphic and Geological Significance of Planktonic Foraminifera and Evolution and Geological Significance of Larger Benthic Foraminifera were published by UCL Press.

Marcelle was a Professorial Research Associate at UCL, where she spent her academic life for over 40 years. She was an internationally recognised expert on foraminifera, microscopic marine organisms that are vital to today’s marine ecosystems.

Marcelle BouDagher-Fadel was a Professorial Research Associate at UCL, where she spent her academic life for over 40 years. She was an internationally recognised expert on foraminifera, microscopic marine organisms that are vital to today’s marine ecosystems. In the fossil record they play a vital role in enabling the reconstruction of past environments and stratigraphic dating.

Marcelle’s virtually unique microscope skills enabled her to identify, at the species level, fossil foraminifera in thin rock sections dating from the Holocene to the Carboniferous. This truly remarkable capability made her a highly sought-after collaborator, and she worked with many research teams from around the world. She authored over 200 scientific outputs, perhaps the most noteworthy being her two open access, definitive monographs on Larger Benthic Foraminifera and on Planktonic Foraminifera, published by UCL Press, which together have currently been downloaded over 67,000 times in more than 150 countries across the world.

Her work was wide-ranging and, for example, provided constraints on the timing of the Himalayan orogeny, the effect of the opening of the Atlantic on the distribution and migration of marine genera, the archaeology of Phoenician ports, and the effect of the opening of the Suez Canal on the Eastern Mediterranean fauna.

Marcelle studied for her first degree in Lebanon and came to the UK in 1980. She studied at UCL for her MSc and graduated from UCL with a PhD in 1986. She then worked for a year as Curator of the Micropalaeontology Collection in the then UCL Department of Geology, before taking a family career break.

In 1993 she was awarded a Royal Society Daphne Jackson Fellowship, which she held at UCL and that allowed her to return to research in a part-time capacity. From 1996 to 2005 she worked in UCL as a post-doctoral research fellow with Professors Alan Lord and Fred Banner. In 2005 she was employed as an Editorial Assistant for Elsevier’s Earth and Planetary Sciences Letters, working with the then Editor, Professor David Price in the UCL Department of Earth Sciences. In 2007 she was appointed as a Senior Research Associate working again with Professor Price in his then Office of the UCL Vice-Provost (Research). Her personally led research activity blossomed, working with industry and collaborators from around the world. She was promoted to Principal Research Associate in 2009, and then to Professorial Research Associate in 2016.

She will be fondly remembered by the UCL Press team for the warmth, kindness and drive towards making her work as accessible as possible to as many as possible. Our thoughts are with her family, friends and collaborators. She will be sorely missed.

UCL Press has joined a collaborative pilot project with five other well-established, quality-led University Presses from the UK to seek funding for a number of first books by UK-based early career researchers each year. OpenUP has been approved as a participant in Jisc’s new Open Access Community Framework, which is supporting diamond open access initiatives.

The OpenUP initiative acknowledges the significant barriers that ECRs may face in securing funding to publish OA. This three-year pilot project aims to raise £96,000 per year to fund Open Access publication for 12 books in each period. The first batch of books will publish in 2023. UCL Press will use the fund to publish first books by non-UCL ECRs (UCL authors at all levels are funded by UCL to publish OA). Full details of the scheme can be found in the accompanying press release and more information will be released in due course.

Link: OpenUP ECR Monograph initiative: Open Access Community Framework 2022-2024