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‘To fit in at school, you have to be a robot’: Do care farms offer a viable alternative?
No full textSport policy formation and enactment in post-devolution Wales: 1999–2020
No full textSport Wales (previously the Sports Council for Wales) is the lead non-government organisation for the delivery and management of sport policy in Wales and receives an annual grant from the Welsh Government, which is supplemented by additional money from the National Lottery. There are also 22 unitary authorities that are responsible for school and community-level sport and physical activity provision. The purpose of this article is to undertake a policy critique of sport in Wales since devolution. The provided commentary charts the development of Welsh sport policy since 1999 as part of an overall governmental emphasis on physical health and wellbeing. It is divided into the three organising themes that reflect three domains of sport and physical activity participation – school, community and elite. The analysis is predicated on a review of outcomes and impact on different sectors and draws upon (some) comparisons with the English context. The principal conclusion is that even though the Welsh Government has been led by the Labour Party since devolution, the adoption of neo-liberal principles has (at least implicitly) impacted negatively on policy formation and enactment. This article offers new insight into sports policy development and enactment in Wales since 1999 and draws attention, in particular, to the importance of sport and physical activity at a time of global pandemic as well as the neglect of black, Asian and minority ethnic groups in policy discourses
Editorial: Cognition during sleep: Hyperassociativity, associativity and new connections.
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Effects of a regional school-based mindfulness programme on students’ levels of Wellbeing and resiliency
No full textMindfulness has recently shown promise in mental illness treatment and preventative contexts with school-aged young people. However, there is a shortage of studies investigating the effects of school-based mindfulness interventions on young people of a pre-adolescent and early-adolescent age. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to investigate the effects of a regional multi-site school-based mindfulness programme on wellbeing and resiliency in UK school children aged 9–12 years old. A total of 1,138 children who received mindfulness training completed the Resiliency Scale for Children and Adolescents and the Stirling Children’s Wellbeing Scale pre- and post-intervention. Results showed significant improvements following intervention delivery in positive emotional state, positive outlook, and resiliency, with resiliency effects maintained at a six-month follow-up assessment. Findings indicate that mindfulness delivered by school teachers can improve wellbeing and resiliency in children and young people
‘Growing up in “a new sort of country”: charting transnational identities in the fairy tales of Margaret Collier Galletti di Cadilhac’
No full textIn the second half of the nineteenth century, Margaret Collier Galletti di Cadilhac (1846-1928), a little-known writer, published Prince Peerless: A Fairy Folk Story Book (1886), a collection of fairy tales that demands scholarly attention as a valuable experiment with imagining permeable national cultural borders. Collier’s writing appealed to the Victorian readership because it represented unfamiliar Italian geopolitics she understood well as a British resident in Italy. This article, for the first time, opens the door to her Anglo-Italian nursery to examine the ways in which her multilingual and multicultural family stimulated Prince Peerless, a Christmas book beautifully illustrated by John Collier (1850-1934), the author’s younger brother. It explores how, through fantasy, she moves beyond factual and practical experience of negotiating Anglo-Italian dynamics and speculates on the potential of growing up multinational. In her tales, fairies, elves, and gnomes are an effective vehicle in representing linguistic, cultural, and socio-historical diversity. Her fantastic creatures are an essential interlocutor for children to grow up understanding the value, as well as the challenge, of being other, of cultural differences, interaction, and negotiation. This article studies how Prince Peerless charts new geographies of encounters between children, or young adults, and magical creatures. In the fairy tale, I argue, Margaret Collier finds a subjunctive form to explore how childhood experiences of visiting fairylands can shape one’s cultural models of identity and transcend national borders by configuring identities that go beyond sociocultural expectations defined by nation states and assert a multilingual and multilayered identity
Engaging the student voice within Anglican school self-evaluation and statutory inspection within Wales: The Lankshear Student Voice Scales Revised
No full textDrawing on data provided by 4,803 year-four, year-five, and year-six students (between the ages of 8 and 11 years) attending 88 Church in Wales primary schools, this paper discusses the development of eight short scales designed to operationalise themes concerning aspects of the distinctiveness of Anglican church schools and school worship identified by the school inspection process. The eight themes include: attitude toward the general character of the school and attitude toward the religious character of the school. The data demonstrated the internal consistency reliability of these eight measures that comprise the Lankshear Student Voice Scales Revised and showed more positive attitudes to be associated with being female, with being younger, and with engaging in personal and public religious practices
Introducing the Junior Spiritual Health Scale (JSHS): Assessing the impact of religious affect on spiritual health among 8- to 11-year-old students
No full textThis study describes the developing and testing of a measure of spiritual health accessible to 8- to 11-year-old students that is consistent with the four-domain model as operationalised by Fisher’s family of measures, but avoids explicit religious or theistic content. Data generated by 4,803 students in Wales confirm the rotated four-factor structure of the new 12-item measure and also the coherence of employing the total scale score as a unidimensional measure of global spiritual health (α = .90). After taking personal factors (school year and sex) and psychological factors (extraversion, emotionality, and toughmindedness) into account, regression analysis demonstrated that religious affect contributed additional power to predicting higher spiritual health scores on this new measure that was not itself contaminated by explicit religious or theistic content. This instrument is commended as providing a sound foundation for assessing the spiritual health of primary school students within a variety of religious and non-religious schools