This project seeks to complement and to extend traditional public awareness activities by bringing together schools and universities in the context of an engineering focus. Using Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE) as a pilot study, this will involve staff and students from schools and universities working together to create exciting and innovative programmes for school children, supported by world leading engineering research groups. In universities the focus will be on collaboration to redesign first year university programmes to build more closely on the experiences of young people as they move from school to university. To embed ideas in the education system, the project will work with policy makers, local and national, to develop policy implications from research and practice for the school university interface more generally. A primary objective of the project is to secure permanent awareness of engineering as a valued profession within the school community and through this, to increase the participation rates of young people embracing engineering as a career. Centred initially within the Scottish Education system, the findings will be disseminated through the provision of e- learning courses and information packages, ensuring uptake on a UK national basis.

Reading comprehension is vital to the success and self-esteem of school pupils, so much so that it is a high priority in the Scottish Executive's current education strategy. Yet it has proved an intractable problem for teachers. In recent years this has led to a prolonged and sometimes heated debate over the advantages and disadvantages of varying teaching methods, such as the method of synthetic phonics. However, this debate has focussed on problems of 'decoding' text rather than comprehending it. 'Decoding' means turning letters into sounds and words, and it is of course a crucial stage in learning to read. But research has shown that many pupils are proficient at decoding a text, yet when they are asked what the text is about, they find it difficult to answer. \n\nThis is where research on the history of reading and prose style can provide some answers. Dr Jajdelska's work on the rise of silent reading in the eighteenth century has shown that writers who assume a silent reader (as almost all writers do in the present day) construct their texts differently from those who write for readers who speak the text to themselves or an audience (as almost all writers did before the eighteenth century). Since the eighteenth century, texts have been constructed so that readers need to imagine a 'narrator' in order to make sense of it. If the reader cannot imagine this narrator, they will have great difficulties in understanding narrative, because they won't be able to make sense of movements in time and space. For example, if the narrator explains that a character has left the room, the proficient silent reader can adjust their mental model of what's happening accordingly. But if the reader has problems imagining the narrator, and working out the narrator's imaginary position, they will have problems both in creating and adjusting their mental model of the narrative in this way. In other words, they will have problems with comprehension, even though they are perfectly competent at decoding the text. \n\nDr Jajdelska's work explains in great detail exactly which kinds of textual features are likely to be difficult for readers (such as those in the early eighteenth century) who have learned to read but find it hard to follow texts written for silent readers. Given that these findings arose in an academic field unconnected to educational studies, how can this knowledge be made available to teachers? Ideally, the method should involve the teachers themselves and take place in a context of pupils reading. The literacy circles developed by Sue Ellis, a researcher in literacy and education, are ideal for this purpose. Dr Jajdelska and Ms Ellis will choose texts for children which highlight the comprehension problems in question. We will then work with teachers to explain the nature of these comprehension problems and how to spot them. The teachers will establish literacy circles, a reading context which maximises pupils' motivation to read. When comprehension difficulties arise, the teachers, with continued support from the researchers, will be able to identify and remedy them more effectively than in the past. In the final stage of the scheme, the researchers will help the teachers to write up their experiences in a suitable way for fellow teachers for the Learning and Teaching Scotland website.\n\nWe believe that the Dr Jajdelska's findings may prove invaluable to teachers. Communicating them this way will ensure that they are well understood by individual teachers in the first instance, who will then by responsible for communicating them as effectively as possible to the wider teaching community.

Federica Montseny Secondary School is located on the outskirts of Valencia, on the east coast of Spain and has a training offer in Compulsory Secondary Education, Upper Secondary Education (A levels) and Vocational Studies.The Compulsory Secondary students come from local Primary State Schools, one of which is a CAES Primary school (center for singular education action). The students coming from this school belong to families with low socio-cultural level, limited economic resources and at risk of social exclusion.On the other hand, our school belongs to the net of plurilingual schools of Valencian Community and is a pioneering centre in our Community on teaching through two foreign languages (English and French) simultaneously. This allows some of our pupils complete their studies in Secondary Education knowing four European languages: The two-cooficial and two foreign.Federica Montseny School wants to do the project “languages a motor of inclusion” to include all our students in the Educative system and also in the European reality through the learning of languages, favouring their personal development, social inclusion and feeling of European Citizenship.Our main objectives focus on the improvement of all the students’ linguistic competence in foreign languages, increase the multilingual courses on offer (levels and subjects), update / upgrade teacher’s expertise in didactics and methodology as well as their own language proficiency, applying new ICTs in the classroom, getting to know at close hand an educational system with a different way of grouping students which allows us lay the foundations for a more inclusive future, increase the number of teachers involved in European projects, enhance our institution’s capacity for international cooperation, increase our contacts network and contribute to develop a European citizenship awareness in our students and institution. From all the teaching staff, the selection panel will choose 7 teachers who best meet the established profile for each mobility according to the scale set out in the project. Participants will carry out the following activities:1. Job shadowing at “Grange Academy” in Kilmarnock, Scotland:two teachers, one in the scientific, technical field and another in the sociolinguistic field will visit a school in the Spring of 2017 in order to get to know the Scottish educational system, its curriculum and institutional linguistic policies. They will analyse/ how this policy is applied and how ICTs are used in the classroom.2. Study visit to secondary schools and Training seminars in Belgium. 2 teachers will do job shadowing and training activities for 7 days, from 12 to 18 February, 2017. Its aim is to take a close look at how different subjects are taught in English, to exchange professional and cultural experiences and discuss problems found at schools, educational systems and students regarding the topics mentioned. 3. Course on CLIL methodology in England: 1 teacher during 12 days from 18 to 29 July 2016 will take part in a course which aims to learn the fundamentals, develop and evaluate didactic resources and design didactic units which will help promote integration of all the students in the multilingual approach. 4. Course for teachers of English in Ireland: ““Exploring English and Culture in Ireland: Inquiry based methodology for Teachers of English” 2 TEACHERS of English will do a 12 day training course in July 2016 the aims of which are to create an active Portfolio, analyse Irish culture and literature, share didactic resources with other teachers, literacy across the curriculum, promote the European dimension in education through strategies likely to lead to future KA2 partnershipsThe teachers taking part in the project will round out their teacher training in different points. Once the project has been accepted and after the selection panel has chosen the suitable teachers, each one will sign an agreement with the school, commiting to accomplishing the task program and the settled schedule for the mobility, and also to all the activities that will be carried out while the project is on. We expect the project “languages a motor of inclusion” will motivate our students, increasing their self-esteem and encouraging their adaptation to school. A distinguishing mark of our school is our concern about offering our students a high standard in foreign languages. Thanks to this project, we will improve and increase our multilingual courses on offer, so that it reaches the most students at our school.The language training and direct watching of the methodology used by other schools will let us address high quality plurilingual programs.We mean to get the training needed to integrate all the students in the educative system and in the European reality, through language learning, favouring their personal development, their social inclusion and awareness of European citizenship.

The last deep coal mine in the UK closed in 2015. The Coal Authority has a record of 177,000 known mine entries. This proposal examines the potential to use abandoned mine shafts for interseasonal storage of curtailed wind energy in the form of thermal energy. In 2020, wind curtailment payments in the UK were £282M: enough to power 1.25 million homes and equivalent to £4 per MWh of energy generated. There is 120GW of 'spare' electricity in East Ayrshire alone. Thermal stores have been studied previously but are limited by size and the need to insulate. Flooded mine shafts are ubiquitous across much of the UK, yet the thermal storage opportunity within shafts has never been explored. The rock mass around the shafts are insulators and pilot work by our consortium has shown that as the rocks heat up the efficiency of the heat extraction rises considerably in as little as three years. We will investigate the feasibility of using the spare electricity on windy days to heat up water in abandoned mine shafts, to be extracted on cold days by heat pumps into homes and businesses. The UK is peppered with mine shafts from the days of coal mining - we want to turn these holes in the ground into thermal stores to help balance the electrical grid and to decarbonise homes and businesses. Mine shafts were lined with concrete or brick (sometimes unlined). To safely and efficiently utilise this legacy subsurface infrastructure we need to understand the effect of heating up the water in the mine shafts on: the water body in the shaft, which may be naturally stratified and will contain minerals that could cause contamination or scaling; on the lining material, which is likely to have degraded in the decades since mine closure; on the surrounding rocks and the water they contain (in pores and fractures). We will develop sophisticated coupled thermal-hydraulic-chemical-mechanical (THCM) modelling informed by case studies we develop from an assay of the UK's shafts, as well as data collected from a test site. We will also take a whole-systems approach to looking at how such an energy store could sit within the wider energy system, taking into account the economics of such a project, and any carbon emissions generated through construction and operation of a site. We are planning a test at a site where we drill into a shaft to retrieve samples of water and capping materials for analysis, and then monitor the injection of heat to validate our models. The example shaft that we are proposing to work on is the Barony colliery, once the deepest in Scotland. Our project partners, East Ayrshire Council have funding for an observation hole close to the site that will provide a baseline of data for the modelling and for observing the progress of our experiment. The outputs of this work will be applicable for assessing the mine shaft thermal store resource at mine shaft sites across UK coalfields, any risks associated with utilising that resource, and the optimal way to use that resource within the local energy system. We will also provide useful new data for the more well-understood concept of extracting natural geothermally recharged heat from mine workings; for consideration of the best way to abandon active mines so that they are thermal storage-ready; produce a fully coupled THCM model of mine shafts and the surrounding rock mass; and develop the first integrated energy system model to include subsurface infrastructure and geology.