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Founded in 1960, with Dr Michael Young as its chairman, and Tyrrell Burgess as director, ACE does more than answer questions from worried mums: it publishes books, runs residential courses, and conducts more than a few educational experiments. Perpetual stirrers, they have recently held a conference on discipline in schools, and no one will be in any doubt why they held it or what side they're on. Largely owing to their constant badgering for the rights of parents, those old signs in primary school corridors reading ‘Parents must not proceed beyond this point’ are disappearing. Streaming — a subject present director Brian Jackson has always felt strongly about — may also owe its abolition in many areas to the force of ACE's arguments — which favour strongly grouping in the primary school, as much individual attention as possible from teachers for slower‐learning children, discovery methods to replace rote learning, creative writing, a new approach to music — creative rather than passive, again — Nuffield Science for juniors and a new deal for nursery toddlers — all have come under ACE's hammer at some time or another. Not content merely to keep reiterating Lady Plowden's recommendations for the primary school, Where has often researched far beyond the immediately obvious educational priority areas and has outlined the needs for deprived groups like gypsy children. Pressurizing for comprehensives doesn't go off the boil when the idea takes root even in High Tory enclaves: with ACE it goes on simmering for more flexible methods of learning and grouping inside such schools.

Using the case of the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, I argue that the catastrophe was less an example of a low probability-high catastrophe event than an instance of socially produced risks and insecurities associated with deepwater oil and gas production during the neoliberal period after 1980. The disaster exposes the deadly intersection of the aggressive enclosure of a new technologically risky resource frontier (the deepwater continental shelf) with what I call a frontier of neoliberalized risk, a lethal product of cut-throat corporate cost-cutting, the collapse of government oversight and regulatory authority and the deepening financialization and securitization of the oil market. These two local pockets of socially produced risk and wrecklessness have come to exceed the capabilities of what passes as risk management and energy security. In this sense, the Deepwater Horizon disaster was produced by a set of structural conditions, a sort of rogue capitalism, not unlike those which precipitated the financial meltdown of 2008. The forms of accumulation unleashed in the Gulf of Mexico over three decades rendered a high-risk enterprise yet more risky, all the while accumulating insecurities and radical uncertainties which made the likelihood of a Deepwater Horizon type disaster highly overdetermined.

WHY is it, may we enquire, that so few work study technicians write about work study?

TODAY, as a result of so‐called technical advance, few individuals remain. Save, perhaps, in the arts, few jobs are completed by one man; the accent is on team work with each member doing part of a job.