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This paper demonstrates the need to anticipate employers’ future skills requirements, and shows how London Skills Forecasting Unit is addressing this problem. The paper first suggests that employers require advice and labour market intelligence in order to determine their skill requirements effectively, and to ensure their future competitiveness. It then shows that educational and training institutions also need to anticipate employers’ requirements, and so supply side institutions also need to anticipate employers’ skills demand. Finally, some theoretical evidence for skills forecasting is presented together with some practical developments of forecasting techniques undertaken by the Unit.

Creativity is nowadays seen as a desirable goal in higher education. In artistic disciplines, creative processes are frequently employed to assess or evaluate different students' skills. The purpose of this study is to identify potential pitfalls for students involved in artistic practices in which being creative is essential.

Three focus groups involving Education Faculty members from different artistic disciplines allowed for the identification of several constraints when creativity was invoked. This initial study used a quantitative approach and took place in the “Universitat de Vic” (Catalonia, Spain).

Findings suggest a correlation with existing literature and simultaneously point at some nuances that require consideration: emerging aspects embedded in creative processes that may help decrease some limiting effects that being creative can generate.

The main limitations of this research derive from the very nature of the methodological approach. Focus group has been the single used source. Other means of collecting data, such as the analysis of programs, could be used in the future.

This case study, while culturally specific, offers a useful insight into the potential of further work in non-artistic disciplines but crucially across disciplines. It has tremendous value for the development of intercultural understanding in the higher education sector, specifically in terms of assessment.

Bullying at the school or college level can have much more serious repercussions for students than educators may be aware of. Neuroscience research is suggesting more than ever that traumatic childhood is associated with the theory of vulnerability – in other words, a greater likelihood of psychiatric disorder spanning across a lifetime. This is the heart-wrenching story of the author’s younger sister, for whom racial school bullying at a school in England wreaked havoc. Almost four decades on she is marked by deep, indelible scars. Since the author’s life is inextricably intertwined with hers, this evocative autoethnographic account is the author’s story too.

Heritability studies attempt to estimate the contribution of genes (vs. environments) to variation in phenotypes (or outcomes of interest) in a given population at a given time. This chapter scrutinizes heritability studies of adverse health phenotypes, emphasizing flaws that have become more glaring in light of recent advances in the life sciences and manifest most visibly in epigenetics.

Drawing on a diverse body of research and critical scholarship, this chapter examines the veracity of methodological and conceptual assumptions of heritability studies.

The chapter argues that heritability studies are futile for two reasons: (1) heritability studies suffer from serious methodological flaws with the overall effect of making estimates inaccurate and likely biased toward inflated heritability, and, more importantly (2) the conceptual (biological) model on which heritability studies depend – that of identifiably separate effects of genes versus the environment on phenotype variance – is unsound. As discussed, contemporary bioscientific work indicates that genes and environments are enmeshed in a complex (bidirectional, interactional), dynamic relationship that defies any attempt to demarcate separate contributions to phenotype variance. Thus, heritability studies attempt the biologically impossible. The emerging research on the importance of microbiota is also discussed, including how the commensal relationship between microbial and human cells further stymies heritability studies.

Understandably, few sociologists have the time or interest to be informed about the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of heritability studies or to keep pace with the incredible advances in genetics and epigenetics over the last several years. The present chapter aims to provide interested scholars with information about heritability and heritability estimates of adverse health outcomes in light of recent advances in the biosciences.

To start this discussion, I should like to give a brief account of the events that led to the establishment of the Joint Standing Committee on Records of Science and Technology of the Royal Society and Historical Manuscripts Commission and thus, ultimately, to proposals about the systematic preservation of the papers of present‐day scientists and technologists. In 1957 Mr Roger Ellis was appointed Secretary of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts and began his efforts to get the Commission more interested in records of science and technology. It was mainly at his initiative that a Commissioner with special responsibility for this type of work was appointed in the person of Mr Roger Quirk, a scientist by training, a mediaeval scholar and archaeologist. After lengthy consultations and discussions with scientists, Mr Quirk came to the conclusion that a useful first step would be the preservation of valuable labor‐tory records when their originators retire or die. To this end the Master of the Rolls and ex officio chairman of the Historical Manuscripts Commission, Lord Denning, wrote in 1964 to all Vice‐Chancellors and Principals asking them for their help. The response was very encouraging, but because of the untimely death of Mr Roger Quirk in 1965 and the failure to appoint another ‘scientific’ Commissioner, it seemed likely that the scheme might come to nothing.