The Authority's Human Resources Unit has for some years been working on new initiatives whereby its staff is exposed to a new dimension of professional development structured on short working experiences abroad. This ensures that staff development within our respective fields is expanded, whilst providing them with a new dimension to capture knowledge, which they may adopt in the course of their work. The familiarity of our planning system with the British one tends to favour our choice of seeking UK planning agencies.The Authority carried out this project with a view to allow its personnel to experience work in organisations undertaking similar work and tasks. In this way the participants could experience different work practices to those found in Malta and thus brought back new and fresh ideas of how work is undertaken in other overseas organisations.The primary objectives of this project were to ensure that participants are kept abreast with new developments and to become more conversant with general management aspects, primarily those related to the planning process. Furthermore, the project was also a means to expose participants to different technologies and systems that the host organisation used to support planning, building control and enforcement functions. The number of participants who participated in this project was two. The two participants have been working with the Authority for over twenty years. David Cassar is a Customer Relations Unit Manager working in the Customer Care Unit who also works closely with all the various units and sections within the Authority, especially the Development Control Unit and Information Communications Technology Unit. Sven Farrugia is a Principal Officer (ICT Operations Support) working in Information Communications Technology. Both the Customer Care Unit and the Information Communications Technology Unit fall under the Operations Section of the Authority. The two participants carried out their placement during the same two-week period. During the first week of the placement the two participants participated in the same activities. Amongst others, they were introduced to the various functions, policies and processes, attended a presentation on the processes involved in street naming, carried out a number of site visits and inspections, attended planning committee meetings and had briefings on how information is inputted and recorded. The second week of the placement was different for the two participants. David Cassar continued to focus on the planning function of the Council and hence reviewed in more detail the role of the planning technician, how major project applications are dealt with, how decisions and records are managed, how reports are processed and followed-up, attended more planning committee meetings and had discussions with service managers. Sven Farrugia on the other hand, was introduced to the GIS function in planning and transport, P & BS systems, reporting using MS access databases, social media outreach, forums and surveys and overviewed mini-projects incorporating GIS. Throughout the two weeks, both officers had daily reviews with the host organisation’s project coordinator, Mr. Mike Bell.The end result of the project was successful. Both participants stated the placement allowed them to acquire knowledge and specific know-how from good practice abroad and to gain practical skills relevant to their current job and professional development. Furthermore, it also allowed them to expand their professional network and to improve on the services currently offered by the Authority.

"The project""Teaching approaches in communication for learning, for students with severe articulation difficulties or non-verbal (in the mild , moderate,severe range of learning ability)-How to improve practice through shared experience, expertise and research."" arises out of the needs and difficulties of a section of students identified in each of the 4 applicant schools. This group of students have complex needs in the areas of AAC(Alternative Augmentative communication) devices, specialised and specific teaching approaches, Literacy and numeracy, social and emotional communication. the project has 4 partner schools who have a similar cohort of students but each with various degrees of co-morbidity and assessed conditions (physical, visual and hearing impaired, sensory difficulties, ASD, specific learning difficulties)This project aims to improve these students communicative access, learning abilities, skills in the use of AAC devices, and social opportunities.The project will involve parents, staff, therapists and the students themselves in contributing their accounts of current practice, in expressing experienced difficulties, learning of other schools practice and incorporating the best approaches from each into their schools.The project will establish a body of new knowledge from researching the most up to date teaching approaches and technological supports available, collating same, access training where necessary and putting into practice.The project will draw outside agencies and teacher training bodies into the projects activities as it moves forward in year 2.The project has 4 partner schools from Ireland, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Each school has extensive experience and staffs of SENs teachers, speech and language therapy, and occupational therapy. These are special schools which support inclusion through supporting all students to realise their potential in whatever educational setting is most appropriate to their needs, at any given point in their learning lives. The cohort of students whom the project focuses on are students who have the greatest challenge of all, difficulty in communication. Each school has at least a third of their students fall into this category. This difficulty poises challenges not only for the students but for their parents and challenges schools to offer the best possible supports. As much as schools already do, there is only so much time in the school day and this project aims to provide a space, forum and focus for schools, teachers, therapy staff, support staff, parents and the students themselves to address limitations in current practice and provide models of practice which will address the primary communication and learning needs of students with articulation difficulties and who are non verbal""Communication of needs and events,Information transfer, social closeness (being cited most important for AAC users) and social etiquette"" Light (1988),Beulelmar and Mirenda(1988). This project can update, inform and develop more supportive and innovative resources, approaches , devices and methodologies.The project will give a predominance to these students. It will improve access, training, motivation, and attainment levels amongst this student body.The project will provide students and parents with ""a voice"" in their educational provision.The number of students supported will be 80+ however the projects aims and objectives when achieved will be of importance and benefit to all special schools in the jurisdictions but also throughout the European school community.Project activities include,Coordination, planning and progress meetings of central team from 4 schools.Transnational school staff learning, training and observational exchanges.Student and parent forums with communication activity based workshops.Formation of research teams from each schools studying and collating current research and practice in 4 areas-Communication for learning, AAC device advances-Literacy development and social networking and skills.Incorporation of practices currently in schools between schools and introduction of new research results, devices and practices with training where necessary being provided.Conference at project end incorporating teacher trining and Special education departments and agencies from each schools jurisdiction.Creation of tangible outputs available for dissemination during and after project.Methodologies include direct experience and observation/designated studies by individual schools/questionaires and surveys/ formal and informal assessments/attitudional studies/creation and collation of data (use for Masters and Phd, further studies). Exchanges and forums, publications.Description of results- direct benefits in communication and learning for target group of students/upskilling and training of teachers, therapists and support staff/empowerment and forum for dialogue for parents/creation of innovative educational materials."

Child protection systems across the English-speaking world have been subject to damning critique in recent decades, to the extent that some commentators conclude that they may be doing more harm than good. A recent UK government-sponsored review conducted by Professor Eileen Munro argues for fundamental change in child protection practice and culture. Specifically, Munro argues that 'Local authorities and their partners should start an ongoing process to review and redesign the ways in which child and family social work is delivered, drawing on evidence of effectiveness of helping methods where appropriate and supporting practice that can implement evidence based ways of working with children and families' (2011, p.13)' Munro identifies the need to 'help professionals move from a compliance culture to a learning culture' (2011, p.6). Munro's recommendation forms the central objective in this proposal: to help children and families social workers in two local authorities review and redesign their services in line with evidence of what is known to be effective and to do so in the context of a learning culture. The project partners include social work and knowledge exchange (KE) academics at the University of Edinburgh and key managers and practitioners in two neighbouring local authorities, The City of Edinburgh and East Lothian. The proposal builds upon a previous successful project, which involved academics and social work practitioners from six local authorities working together on small pieces of practitioner research around effective practice in working with involuntary social work service users, involuntary being understood as those whose contact with social work was mandated. The focus of three of these projects was on children and families social work. This new proposal takes the findings of this project forward, casting the spotlight across a wide spectrum of social work practice with children and families. Historically, social work agencies have invested in training events and initiatives in the hope that learning on these might be cascaded from participants into wider organisational structures. The evidence for this sort of transfer of learning is not strong. On the contrary, it is known that very little training activity results in positive changes to practice. One of the reasons for this is that training often occurs as a free-standing activity that is not clearly linked to organisational or practice objectives. Models of knowledge exchange, through recognising the prior knowledge, skills and values that practitioners bring to a subject, are considered to be more effective than traditional training initiatives in getting knowledge into practice. In this project we will utilise specific knowledge exchange activities, derived from the literature and shown to be effective in our previous project, to help bring about cultural change in the partner local authorities. Our proposal consists of three strands, a horizontal one that will operate across organisations to discuss key themes relating to the current discourse on child protection; a vertical strand, which will aim to support practitioners develop examples of what is known to be effective practice and a third strand, which will work with managers around effective learning transfer. Together, the various strands are in line with Nutley et al's (2007) organizational excellence model of knowledge exchange whereby organisations, working in partnership with universities, become the locus for local experimentation, evaluation and practice development. Our project will offer pointers and models about how cultural change in child protection might be brought about more widely. As such, it will be of interest to local authorities and to Government bodies across the UK and thus holds out the potential to evidence demonstrable social policy and practice benefits.

The project stems from Transnationalizing Modern Languages (TML), one of three large grants awarded under the AHRC's Translating Cultures scheme. TML's established group of Modern Languages experts has conducted research revealing the centrality of a variety of language practices, ranging from multilingualism to translation, in migration contexts and multicultural societies. An important part of TML has been to develop methodologies aimed at embedding awareness of linguistic and cultural diversity within educational practices, from primary to higher and adult education. TML has cemented links with The Phoenix Project (http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/phoenix-project), led by Prof. Judith Hall, that links Cardiff University and the University of Namibia (UNAM) and which supports the Welsh Government's International Development Wales for Africa initiative, promoting mutual capacity building and sustainable collaboration. The aim of the project is to take the expertise and practical knowledge acquired within TML to Namibia by working closely with The Phoenix Project and its educational partnerships. Methodologies developed in TML will be adapted and refined to co-produce with researchers from UNAM and local practitioners materials tailor-made for the Namibian context. The new research seeks to facilitate educational and professional development through multilingual education in the local environment, identifying the school and health systems as key areas of social wellbeing and economic development. The promotion of multilingual education has been identified as a key target with social and economic benefits for Namibia with clear connections to a number of UN sustainable development goals. Issues relating to languages and communication affect the country's ability to grow economically; they are central to successful healthcare provision; they have a clear impact on poverty, income disparity and gender and generational inequality; they impact upon capacity building and access to job markets; they are relevant to conflict resolution as well as to the promotion of human rights; and they are clearly related to issues of cultural heritage and memory. The project concentrates on two specific areas: supporting multilingualism and translingual practices and their embedding in school education; and sensitizing health specialists to the role played by multilingual communication, including translation and self-translation, in their professional practice. In both cases, the focus is on co-research practices, mutual learning and capacity building. The aim is to achieve enduring impact through curriculum development, the production of teaching resources, and the creation of a transnational mentoring network that will amplify the effects of the project throughout the country and beyond. By promoting awareness of the impact of language capabilities and translation practices in Namibia's multilingual environment, the project aims to support sustainable action regarding cultural heritage and cultural memory (in education and the media), produce new research insights on the impact and sustainability of language and translation practices in a variety of locales and landscapes, and promote more efficient communication within health and medical practices (working with multilingual teams in multiple local contexts), all of which involve complex interactions among indigenous, colonial and post-colonial linguistic and cultural heritages. By engaging with creative practices of translation and language learning in Namibian schools and by building on an on-going project between Cardiff University's Phoenix Project and UNAM in health education, the project will make an enduring contribution to educational provision and access to healthcare for excluded sectors of the population as well as to the conservation of cultural memory and intangible heritage in Namibia through the validation of indigenous tongues as languages of education and information.

Focus of the project Eastern Europeans who have arrived in the UK in the last decade are the fastest growing ethnic groups in the UK. This study will be the first to focus specifically on Eastern European migrant children who have lived in the UK for at least three years, and to compare their everyday lives and sense of cultural and national identity and belonging in Scotland and England. The primary aim of the research is to inform public debate, policy makers and service providers on the issue of children of Eastern European migrants settled in Britain. The study will promote social inclusion, by exploring the experiences of settled migrant children in relation to the distinct discourses around migration, identity and citizenship in the UK and by ensuring that voices of children from the 'new' minority groups are taken into account in current debates on national identity. Settled migrant children's perspectives help us understand whether or not they are being socialised into their local communities' culture and can highlight the spatial and temporal dimensions of their social lives and opportunities for future. Concepts of ethnic and diasporic identity, belonging, transnationalism, culture and nation are taking new meanings across Europe and need reassessment and questioning when discussing national identity and social inclusion. Evidence to be produced By bringing together discourses on migration and integration of migrant groups with knowledge on how children experience these discourses in their everyday interactions, the study will generate new knowledge on the UK's new ethnic minority children and their long-term experiences of integration. Focussing on children aged 12-18 of Eastern European migrants living in the UK for 3+ years, the study will provide a unique understanding on migrant children's long term experiences of settlement, exploring family, peer and community social networks. Another key area of investigation will be children's expressed needs in terms of the array of services they use, issues in access and the extent to which services are meeting their needs. Third, we will explore the factors that enable children of Eastern European migrants to adapt to the new social, economic and political context of the regions in which they live, as they negotiate national, social, cultural and political identities in the context of a changing Europe. Data will be generated through a review of existing evidence, a survey of between 500-600 children across six urban, semi-urban/rural areas in the UK and focus groups with between 70-100 children. In depth case studies 16-20 families will also be conducted. A young people's advisory group will have a central role in the project development and dissemination. Originality, contribution to knowledge and anticipated impact The originality of the project stems from the consideration given to the ways in which Eastern European children living in diverse geographical spaces are engaged in on-going, dynamic processes of making sense of the world, and their place within it, at local, national and global levels. The study will fill a gap in information on newly settled migrant communities, with a view of informing policy and practice. Information on settled migrant children's social practices, educational achievement and aspirations, sense of cultural and national identity and belonging will provide insights into the extent of European migrant communities' integration in the UK, in the context of various representations of 'nation' that circulate in policy, political and public discourses. The study will address the relative absence of migrant children's voices in public debates and provide policy makers and the public with an improved understanding of the lives of children who were originally migrants, but have settled long-term in the UK. This information will be disseminated widely, to benefit children, service providers, policy makers and the general public.