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The development of electronic monitoring policy over the last decade in Scotland has contributed towards its expansion and the intensification of what McNeill (2019) refers to as mass supervision. Often posited as a solution to relieve problems in the criminal justice system such as prison overcrowding and high remand populations, electronic monitoring can be punitive and problematic, exposing more people to diffused forms of social control and functioning more as a supplementary feature of prisons as opposed to a substitution for prisons. In this chapter, I explore the existing and emerging policy landscape of penal electronic monitoring Scotland, drawing upon qualitative, experiential data about being subject to and enforcing penal electronic monitoring in Scotland (see Casey, 2021) to highlight how policy is enacted in practice. Ultimately, I argue that there are fundamental issues with how electronic monitoring is currently enacted in terms of what it promises, in terms of fairness and in relation to the potential harms of integration. I call for a fundamental and holistic reframing of policy and regulation of penal electronic monitoring in Scotland that avoids siloed approaches towards policymaking, attending to both the social and digital impacts of electronic monitoring in people’s lives, thus contributing to arguments about how ‘mass supervision’ should be moderated and resisted.

Although part of the United Kingdom, Scotland has its own distinctive education and schooling system, with university-based teacher education preparing teachers for an all-graduate profession. Through the establishment, in 1965, of the General Teaching Council (GTC) as the regulatory body for the teaching profession in Scotland, the General Teaching Council of Scotland became one of the first teaching councils in the world. In the twenty-first century, there have been two major reform programs impacting the teaching profession: A Teaching Profession for the 21st Century in 2001 and Teaching Scotland's Future in 2011. Currently, there is a major reform program underway arising from the recommendations of a further review looking at aspects of education reform and structural and functional change of key national agencies (the Scottish Qualifications Authority and Education Scotland). The reform program will have a number of implications for teacher education. These developments are explored in this chapter which situates them in the wider context of teacher education reform globally and current challenges such as recruitment downturns and retention issues, strengthening research on teacher education and the pressures of increasing accountability.

This paper aims to examine housing need for older people and people with dementia, with reference to Scotland. This paper also examines policy responses and tensions arising from such need and looks critically at the evidence of care needs and what older people want in relation to later life conditions, including dementia.

Taking the Being Home: Housing and Dementia in Scotland report (2017) as a baseline descriptor, the authors have collated evidence from a range of sources to help them examine what has changed in terms of policy, practice and population ageing. Set against this backdrop, using desk-based analytical methods, the authors interrogate existing planning processes and systems in Scotland.

Scottish Spatial Planning has a policy blindness on the overwhelming evidence of the housing needs derived from an ageing population. Policy focus is geared towards the amount of housing supplied, rather than appropriate types of housing, leaving older people with little choice of suitable accommodation. A key area to improve is in establishing greater co-operation and policy synthesis between health, social, housing and planning functions. Broad policy ambition must be transferred into detailed reality for older people and people with dementia to benefit.

The integrated approach and in-depth analysis, linked to planning policy and housing need, is highly original and much needed.

This paper explores the challenging nexus of police custody, risk and intra-organisational boundaries in the context of a recently reformed national police service. Police custody is an often-hidden aspect of policing, away from the public gaze and scrutiny. Although there is increasing recognition of the importance of rural policing (e.g. Harkness (2020); Mawby and Yarwood (2011); Ruddell and Jones (2020); Yarwood and Wooff (2016)), there has been little or no focus on rural police custody. This paper seeks to begin to redress this by focussing on the challenges faced by rural police custody in the context of large-scale organisational change.

This paper draws on data from a study funded by the Scottish Institute for Policing Research (2016–2018), entitled “Measuring Risk and Efficiency in Police Custody in Scotland”. The paper adopts a qualitative methodology to develop an understanding of the varying nature of police custody across Scotland. Two contrasting case study locations were selected, one urban and one rural. 12 semi-structured interviews and 15 hours of observation were carried out. Data was transcribed, coded and analysed and thematic analysis enabled themes to be developed. This paper draws on the data from the rural custody suite.

Drawing on the theoretical framework of Giacomantonio (2014) and more recent considerations of abstract policing Terpstra et al. (2019), this paper offers insights into the ways that police custody in rural Scotland has been organised, against the backdrop of challenging organisational change. I argue that as policing services in Scotland have become increasingly “abstract” from communities, police custody as a national division has witnessed the impact of this more greatly than other parts of local policing. Intra-organisational management around staffing has led to complex management of risk, illustrating some of the challenges of national organisational change on police custody.

This paper focuses on the impact of large scale organisational change on rural police custody and intra-organisational relationships and dynamics. Rural policing is still a largely neglected area of study and rural police custody is even less understood. This paper therefore provides an original contribution by focusing on this under-researched area of policing. It also illustrates complexity around risk, staffing and management of people being held in rural police custody suites. It is therefore of value to policing scholars in other contexts, as well as rural criminology more generally. It has applicability to international contexts where macro level policing reform is occurring.

In recent years, there has been a growth in research aimed at understanding the foundations of modern activist communication in media-rich and multi-platform environments. For example, Chon and Park's analysis of the American Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement built on Kim and Grunig's STOPS model. Yet, social and political injustice can exist for extended periods of time without successful movements emerging, so what leads people to demand social and political change through activism? This paper posits that crisis is trigger that motivates people to activism and evaluates that within the context of the Scottish independence movement.

The study is based on in-depth interviews with 26 advocates for Scottish independence, which yielded more than 32 h of data. Data were analysed using Strauss and Corbin's (1990) constant comparative method approach using open coding, axial coding and selective coding finding thematic saturation after only 10 interviews.

The study provides a clear extension of Chon and Park's model of activism by finding that crises are critical triggers for activism. Moreover, these findings also provide insights into not only the Scottish independence movement but more broadly the extension of traditional public relations and communication theory in multi-platform and multi-actor environments.

There are several contributions this piece makes. First, this paper extends activist, crisis and strategic communication research to more systematically consider the role that crisis plays in social and political advocacy. Second, this paper affords the opportunity to consider the challenges of communication, democracy and activism in the social media age. Finally, this paper supports an international view that discrimination and affective injustice experiences cut across many different kinds of identities and experiences instead of the traditionally considered ethnic, religious and gender-based experiences traditionally addressed.

Research highlights that residential care experienced children and young people in Scotland have poorer educational outcomes than their peers within the wider population. Despite this, poor educational attainment is not inevitable, and further research is needed to increase the understanding of long-term trajectories. This paper aims to address a gap in contemporary literature that is of benefit to practitioners, academics and policymakers. Despite experiencing adversity, attachment, separation and loss, school attainment data on leaving care only reflects part of the educational journey.

Using a mixed methodology and social constructionist theoretical framework, a practitioner-led PhD study gathered data from questionnaires and qualitative information from 13 semi-structured interviews with young people who had experienced residential care in Scotland. Recruitment was through a gatekeeper within a national third-sector organisation. The educational trajectories for young people with experience of residential care in Scotland are complex. A lived experience perspective from a PhD study illustrates that statistical data only captures part of the journey and the author needs to reconsider how success is measured.

Of the 13 participants in the study, 12 achieved success educationally, although for the majority of those interviewed, attainment continued after leaving compulsory education. Barriers to greater success included placement uncertainty and movement, stigma, low expectations, pressure to not become a statistic, procedural obstacles and inconsistency or poor relationships.

Supportive relationships and stable placements can create circumstances conducive to effective learning, but evidence reflects that support is necessary throughout the life course if children, young people and adults with care experience are to reach their full academic potential.

Research into the educational outcomes for those with experience of residential care in Scotland is limited. This paper, from a PhD, provides lived experience accounts from a practitioner-led study.

With the increased flow of Syrian Muslim refugees entering new places such as Scotland, attention has been given to Syrians’ adaptation to their new settings. This chapter explores refugee parents’ roles in mediating their children’s educational experiences. The study is informed by theory of identity (Hall, 1996), Orientalism (Said, 1978), framing (Bernstein, 2000), and hegemony in curriculum (Apple, 2004). Snowball sampling was used to recruit participants in Glasgow. Semi-structured interviews and vignettes were used to generate data with 12 parents and 12 school-aged children in 12 refugee families. The chapter explores how these families have encountered new aspects of their education, such as different pedagogy and Eurocentric curriculum. By examining the participants’ various ways of dealing with these aspects, the chapter explores educational challenges that did not exist before their displacement, demonstrates the inherent diversity within refugee populations, and conceptualizes their negotiation with new contingencies using Hall’s concept of identity as a relational and contingent process.

Adopting a welfare stance, this paper considers whether the neoliberalist approach which has been adopted by successive UK and Scottish governments will achieve optimal societal outcomes or lead to the under provision of senior housing.

Data collection centred on informed multi-stakeholder groups that have significant experience working in the retirement and senior housing sector. Core techniques included desk-based study of secondary academic, consultancy and policy documents. Primary data collection techniques involved primary participation of three Scottish taskforce meetings and interviews with key stakeholders from across the sector.

The paper concludes that without direct government intervention in the market, the welfare ambition to provide adequate housing for an ageing population will not materialise with significant shortfalls in appropriate stock predicted. To prevent this scenario developing, increased public and private sector interaction is essential.

The research follows the growing concern to provide research that has “real world” relevance. The paper conducts a detailed analysis of the Scottish government's housing strategy and reports on the findings of interviewees with key stakeholders. The paper makes recommendations for greater public/private partnerships.

The purpose of this paper is to examine lived experiences of opioid agonist treatment (OAT) during and immediately following release from detention in prisons in England and Scotland.

Surveys were completed by serving prisoners in both countries and by those recently released from prison (England only). The survey findings were discussed in focus groups of people with lived experience. The combined findings from the surveys and focus groups were shared with an expert group of prison OAT providers and people with lived experience with the purpose of making recommendations for more accessible and effective OAT in custodial environments and continuity of OAT on release

The quality and accessibility of OAT varied considerably between establishments. It was reported to be harder to access OAT in Scottish prisons. It was often hard for people in prison to get the dosage of OAT they felt they needed and it was generally harder to access buprenorphine than methadone in English prisons. Only Scottish people in prison were aware of long-lasting forms of buprenorphine. People in English prisons had mixed experiences of the help available in prison, with no improvement recorded since a 2016 study. People in Scottish prisons were more likely to rate the help available as poor.

The number of people accessed while actually in prison (73) was reduced by the impact of the pandemic, making it more difficult to access people in prison and because some were resistant to participating on the basis that they had already been consulted for a wide variety of research projects focused on the impact of COVID. The Scottish cohort (a total of 19 individuals comprising 14 survey respondents and five focus group members) is clearly too small a number on which to base robust claims about differences in OAT provision between the English and Scottish prison systems..

The study identifies key barriers to accessing OAT in prisons and suggests key components of more user-friendly approaches.

This study provides an overview of the recent lived experiences of people accessing OAT in prison and on release and offers valuable recommendations on how to make service provision more effective and consistent.

This study provides an overview of the recent lived experiences of people accessing OAT in prison and on release in England and Scotland and offers valuable recommendations on how to make service provision more effective and consistent.