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In recent years, there has been considerable interest within education policy in collaborative professional enquiry/inquiry methodologies, both as an alternative to top-down implementation of change and for the purpose of fostering educational improvement. However, researchers have been critical of this approach, pointing to various concerns: these include the risk of reducing a developmental methodology to an instrumental means for delivering policy, as well as issues around sustainability of practices. The purpose of this paper is to describe a Scottish university/local authority partnership, which developed an approach entitled Critical Collaborative Professional Enquiry, designed to address some of these concerns. The paper also reports on empirical outcomes related to the partnership project.

This interpretivist study generated qualitative data from multiple sources, utilising a range of methods including semi-structured interviews with teachers and school leaders, evaluation surveys and analysis of artefacts developed during the inquiry phases of the project.

This programme exerted a powerful effect on the teachers who participated. The research suggests that teachers developed better understandings of the curriculum, and of curriculum development processes. There is evidence of innovation in pedagogy, some sustained and radical in nature, and further evidence of changes to the cultures of the participating schools, for example, a shift towards more democratic ways of working.

This paper reports upon an original approach to curriculum development, with considerable potential to transform the ways in which schools approach innovation.

THIS SEPTEMBER marks the seventy‐fifth birthday of J. B. Priestley, the ‘old rhinoceros of English letters’ as C. P. Snow once described him, probably the last of the old‐style writers, professionals to their finger tips, ready at an instant to write whatever was required of them, often at very short notice. More than thirty years ago Priestley outlined his ambitions in this direction. ‘I have a restless nature, easily bored,’ he confessed, ‘and so I flit from one kind of work to another, partly sustained by a very genuine interest in the technical problems of all forms of writing.’ He continued: ‘I have always wanted to be an all‐round man of letters on the eighteenth‐century plan, which allowed or commanded a man to write essay or poem, novel or play, just as he pleased.’

This study aims to explore the current situation of universal accessibility to multi-unit buildings in three European countries (Spain, Germany and Sweden), in view of the lack of effective European rules on this topic, with the aim to identify which legal frameworks and policies may be useful to favour it.

The results presented in this work are based on empirical data gathered from three surveys conducted in three representative countries of different housing models (Spain, Germany and Sweden). These surveys addressed the grade of accessibility at each point of the route that a person with mobility difficulties, with a physical deficiency or aged +70, has to do to access to their home from a public street or road.

The current paper shows that, in the end, there is still a long way to go in terms of universal accessibility to multi-unit buildings in, at least, three European Union Member States as, according to this study’s findings, the percentage of universally accessible multi-unit buildings is limited to 0.6 per cent in Spain, 2.5 per cent in Sweden and 1.5 per cent in Germany. The study also identifies successful legal frameworks and policies among the studied countries that may be useful to achieve a true universal accessibility to flats located in multi-unit buildings.

The legal frameworks and policies identified in this paper in terms of promoting universal accessibility to housing located in multi-unit buildings may provide guidance to other researchers and policymakers when addressing this topic, thus helping them to reach an egalitarian and inclusive society.

This paper goes one step further than previous works as it is based on up to date empirical data concerning accessibility and it identifies successful legal frameworks and policies in a comparative perspective.

A new senior curriculum and assessment policy in Queensland, Australia, is changing the conditions for teaching and learning. The purpose of this study was to consider the personal, structural and cultural conditions that mediated the agency of Senior English teachers as they negotiated these changes. Agency is conceptualised as opportunities for choice in action arising from pedagogic negotiations with students within contexts where teachers’ decision-making is circumscribed by other pressures.

An action inquiry project was conducted with English teachers and students in two secondary schools as they began to adjust their practices in readiness for changes to Queensland senior assessment. Four English teachers (two per school) designed a 10-week unit of work in Senior English with the aim of enhancing students’ critical and creative agency. Five action/reflection cycles occurred over six months with interviews conducted at each stage to trace how teachers were making decisions to prioritise student agency.

Participating teachers drew on a variety of structural, personal and cultural resources, including previous experiences, time to develop shared understandings and the responsiveness of students that mediated their teacher agency. Teachers’ ability to exert agentic influence beyond their own classroom was affected by the perceived flexibility of established resources and the availability of social support to share student success.

These findings indicate that a range of conditions affected the development of teacher agency when they sought to design assessment to prioritise student agency. The variety of enabling conditions that need to be considered when supporting teacher and student agency is an important contribution to theories of agency in schools, and studies of teacher policy enactment in systems moving away from localised control to more remote and centralised quality assurance processes.

The Geography of Tourism in Spain is now at a par in terms of its scientific production with other European countries. Since the middle of the '80s the quality and volume of contributions is analogous to the rest of the European Union, although as a part of University Geography in Spain it has not achieved the level of dedication reached by other subjects considering the importance of tourist activities to the economy, the society and the territory of Spain. It could be said that the Geography of Tourism in Spain is in the international vanguard in dealing with Mediterranean coastal tourism, with the relationships between the residential real estate and tourism sectors and with aspects related to tourism and leisure in rural and protected areas.

As our correspondent on another page suggests, the economic crisis may have reactions upon libraries. The most obvious one he mentions is the increased difficulty we shall experience in obtaining American books. Not all libraries, public or private, make any special collection of books published in the United States, although there has been an increasing tendency to buy more as the relations of the two countries have grown closer through their common struggle; in fact, we know libraries which have spent many hundreds of pounds in the course of the past year or two on the select lists of books which have been made for us by American librarians. It is most unfortunate that the manipulation of dollar currency should have brought about a situation in which even the exchange of ideas between the countries becomes more difficult. One suggestion might be made and that is that our American colleagues should continue to sift the literature of this time of famine for us, so that further select lists may be available in better days.

IT would be a hard‐hearted man who could speak harshly of the Book Society without some inward pang of regret or remorse. Was there ever a more praiseworthy institution? Or one that set out with a more unselfish desire to improve the minds of humanity? So amiable are its figureheads, so admirable its objects, so harmless and well‐intentioned its activities, that the scoffer is silenced and the cynic rebuked. What cause of complaint can one find in a Selection Committee which contains Hugh Walpole, John Boynton Priestley, Clemence Dane, Sylvia Lynd, and George Gordon?

I'VE said it before, and I'll say it again: Eastbourne is an excellent place for a conference, and I set out for it after five years' absence with the hope that its handsome and genial presence would produce something better than the mixture of ordinary, obvious and sometimes inaudible papers that have been a constituent of more than one intervening conference. That towns can affect such occasions is no doubt a farfetched conceit, but they certainly affect me; as soon as I arrived the environmental magic worked, and old friends and new faces were seen in the golden light of perfect autumn weather.

THIS number will appear at the beginning of the Leeds Conference. Although there is no evidence that the attendance will surpass the record attendance registered at the Birmingham Conference, there is every reason to believe that the attendance at Leeds will be very large. The year is one of importance in the history of the city, for it has marked the 300th anniversary of its charter. We hope that some of the festival spirit will survive into the week of the Conference. As a contributor has suggested on another page, we hope that all librarians who attend will do so with the determination to make the Conference one of the friendliest possible character. It has occasionally been pointed out that as the Association grows older it is liable to become more stilted and formal; that institutions and people become standardized and less dynamic. This, if it were true, would be a great pity.

The historical study aims to trace moves towards professionalising university teaching in the era of post‐war expansion in higher education using the University of Auckland, New Zealand, as the specific case study.

The historical analysis draws from published papers and original documents chronicling the state of teaching abilities in New Zealand in the late 1950s and 1960s and also draws from the University of Auckland's own archives.

University teaching by the early 1970s was no longer a private matter. Facing greater accountability from the New Zealand government and university students over the quality of teaching, New Zealand universities responded by creating professional development units to enhance the teaching capabilities of their academic staff.

This case study adds to the emerging histories of higher education academic and staff development units in Australasia and the United Kingdom. It demonstrates the growing realisation amongst academics, students and policy makers in the 1960s that lecturers could not be entirely left to their own devices given the potential harm poor teaching could have on student performance.