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This article focuses on the conditions that are conducive to effective work on reducing children's vulnerability to social exclusion. It draws on three studies of practitioners who are collaborating to prevent the social exclusion of children and young people. Two ideas are discussed: distributed expertise and relational agency. Distributed expertise recognises that expertise is distributed across local systems and that practitioners need to become adept at recognising, drawing on and contributing to it. Relational agency offers a finer‐grained analysis of what is involved in working in systems of distributed expertise. Findings include the need for professionals to develop relational agency as an extra layer of expertise alongside their core professional expertise and a concern that interprofessional work may result in seeing clients as tasks to be worked on rather than people to be worked with relationally. Implications for training and professional development are outlined.

This article describes a research study conducted in Brisbane, Australia, that sought to establish older people's views on what contributes to their quality of life in residential settings. Focus group interviews were used to explore the key aspects of residential life that equated with a high‐quality experience. A number of key themes were identified, particularly relating to issues about autonomy, control and staff‐resident interactions. The article concludes with recommendations for those working in, or providing, residential care.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce in detail a research tool, which was first used to examine how the motivated actions of leaders in public services, such as Directors of Children's Services, take forward their strategic purposes and subsequently adapted for revealing the strategic actions of Family Support Workers.

The theoretical bases for the research tool are given in some depth and examples of the tool and its possibilities for adaptation are provided.

This conceptual paper provides a resource for examining the connection between strategic purposes and motivated actions in everyday leadership practices.

The explication of theoretical foundations of the tool prepares the ground for further adaptations to meet the needs of other research studies which aim at analytically linking actions and strategies in studies of leadership in the public services.

The tool has proven potential as a resource for reflective practice and professional learning.

The arguments are based in cultural-historical approaches to understanding motivated action in institutional practices. This approach has been employed in a study of leadership in children's services, and the present paper gives detailed access to the main methodological device used in that study.

This paper examines the interaction between changes in governmental accounting, ideology and global capital markets. Based on a historical analysis from the late 1800s to the turn of the 21st century it provides support for the general hypothesis that the strength and support of global capital markets and pro-market ideologies is positively related to the likelihood of the adoption by governments of accounting methods geared toward exposing full costs and total debt. The analysis also illustrates that governments are more likely to use accounting methods that allow for greater flexibility for spending, borrowing and off balance sheet financing during times when global capital markets and pro-market ideologies are in decline.

This paper examines the possibility of using sense of belonging as an indicator for social capital. Social capital, from the collective social capital theory perspective, is constructed from three main elements: trust, social network and participation. Social capital is crucial to civil society and well-being, but there is no consensus on how to define and measure it. This paper approaches this problem with the different but related concept of sense of belonging, as belonging overlaps with social capital conceptually, but also is more amenable to measurement.

Qualitative and quantitative data was collected from approximately 800 university students and used to explore the relationship between belonging and social capital both conceptually and empirically in the higher education context.

The mixed methods research analysis in this paper provides strong evidence to show how sense of belonging and social capital are theoretically and empirically intertwined, Conceptually they occupy overlapping spheres and their connections can be clearly traced and measured. This is supported by substantial statistical evidence of their relatedness, despite their independent origins in social research. For these reasons, this paper argues that sense of belonging can be used as a simplified alternative way to measure social capital.

This paper explains the advantages of using sense of belonging to understand social capital. It sets out a conceptual framework and provides a statistical demonstration. This paper develops and enriches a current strand of social capital and sense of belonging research in the fields of sociology and higher education policy.

To assess and plan alterations in outpatient clinic structure, produces a computer simulation of an outpatient clinic based on detailed time and role measurements from the authors’ clinic. The simulation which used an object‐oriented design method is able to indicate the impact of changes in clinic structure using patient and doctor waiting times in clinic as endpoint measures. Examines the effects of changes in clinic size, consultation time, patient mix, appointment scheduling and non‐attendance. Finds that patient waiting time could be shortened considerably by using an optimizing appointment scheduler to determine appointment intervals. Clinic mix influences patient waiting time, which was shorter with a 1 in 4 ratio of new to follow‐up patients. In mixed clinics, new patients appointments are optimally spread throughout the clinic to reduce patient waiting time. In all new or all follow‐up clinics, waiting time is improved if the appointment interval reflects the consultation time. Computer modelling can help in optimizing clinic management so improving the delivery of care in outpatient services.

The growing use of small unmanned rotorcraft in civilian applications means that safe operation is increasingly important. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the fault tolerant properties to faults in the actuators of an C ₁ adaptive controller for a quadrotor vehicle.

C ₁ adaptive control provides fast adaptation along with decoupling between adaptation and robustness. This makes the approach a suitable candidate for fault tolerant control of quadrotor and other multirotor vehicles. In the paper, the design of an C ₁ adaptive controller is presented. The controller is compared to a fixed-gain LQR controller.

The C ₁ adaptive controller is shown to have improved performance when subject to actuator faults, and a higher range of actuator fault tolerance.

The control scheme is tested in simulation of a simple model that ignores aerodynamic and gyroscopic effects. Hence for further work, testing with a more complete model is recommended followed by implementation on an actual platform and flight test. The effect of sensor noise should also be considered along with investigation into the influence of wind disturbances and tolerance to sensor failures. Furthermore, quadrotors cannot tolerate total failure of a rotor without loss of control of one of the degrees of freedom, this aspect requires further investigation.

Applying the C ₁ adaptive controller to a hexrotor or octorotor would increase the reliability of such vehicles without recourse to methods that require fault detection schemes and control reallocation as well as providing tolerance to a total loss of a rotor.

In order for quadrotors and other similar unmanned air vehicles to undertake many proposed roles, a high level of safety is required. Hence the controllers should be fault tolerant.

Fault tolerance to partial actuator/effector faults is demonstrated using an C ₁ adaptive controller.

This paper contends that dysfunctional patterns of communication can develop in family aged care dyads in response to stereotypical role expectations in the caregiving‐carereceiving relationship, thus giving rise to a role predicament of caring. If this argument holds it follows that more productive and effective forms of communication and relationship are dependent upon both members of the aged care dyad understanding the expectations of their role and if necessary reconstructing them. Part 1 of this two part conceptual paper develops the Communication Predicament of Ageing Model to include role expectations. The conceptions are grounded in important conclusions drawn from data contained in a large comprehensive study of older people and their family caregivers. Part 2 of the paper (to be published in the next issue of Quality in Ageing) introduces the health promoting communication model which was developed as a framework for guiding both prevention and intervention strategies to prevent or transform a role predicament of caring.

For over a hundred years the development of “public libraries” (that is libraries administered by local authorities, not the equally “public” libraries such as the British Museum) has been hesitating, blind, clumsy and uneven; but it is refreshing to remember that all along there have been people who have made a legend of the first librarian of Manchester. Dr. Munford has now done librarianship and history a great service by his latest book recently published by the Library Association. Edwards was not a good librarian, but had a vision of the desirable and possible future of libraries which only now is shown to be valid. The vision and the failures justified the publication of the new life of him, which completely supersedes Thomas Greenwood's book of 1902. Probably no other librarian has left behind him such a mass of letters and diaries as Edwards provided and no previous biographer of a librarian has so methodically and meticulously struggled with a mass of manuscripts such as those which confronted Dr Munford. It is hard to imagine that any other book of similar size has given so many footnotes (all assembled at the end of the book, to the amazing number of 1,564) as references to the material on which Dr. Munford has based his statements. This “portrait”, complete—“warts and all”—would not have been possible if the British Museum and the Manchester Public Libraries had not religiously preserved the great collection of Edwards's diaries and correspondence.