The overarching aim of this pilot project is to investigate whether school teachers and pupils could be engaged at a suitable level to develop and deliver real research projects with the Centre for Astrophysics and Planetary Science (CAPS) in the School of Physical Sciences (SPS) at the University of Kent. In order to have students developing and delivering real observational astronomy research projects we have come up with a series of objectives over a two year period which should lead to our observatory being used by schools to conduct their own research. Firstly this project aims to produce a tool kit which will enable schools to develop research level projects to undertake at the University of Kent's Beacon Observatory which is equipped with a 17" optical Astrograph, a 4k x 4k CCD and an optical filter set. The tool kit resources will consist of a jargon free explanation of the capabilities of the telescope along with examples of projects that could be done and possible targets. This will be produced by one of our postgraduate students who has extensive experience with the observatory and who also acts as a student ambassador for various outreach events hosted by SPS. The resources will be developed in collaboration with a small focus group of teachers. To investigate the success of the toolkit some previously prepared curriculum linked project material will be introduced into three schools, with the idea that they would choose targets and plan observations. Schools targeted will be co-ed partner schools of the University of Kent based in areas of low socioeconomic status, to target students with low science capital. The schools will be visited by academics outlining the project and invited to bring a teacher and up to 10 students to spend the night (possibly two) at the University, attending workshops and running observations to collect data themselves. They will then be supported in the analysis of the data once back at their school. Once these initial projects have been run all the participants will work to develop a strategy by which schools could confidently come up with their own projects. The secondary aim of this project will then be to evaluate the impact of the project on the students, teachers and academics to help guide our future public engagement activities. Key questions to be answered will be: 1. Has a suitable strategy/set of resources been developed to allow teachers and students to design an observational astronomy project to be carried out using the Beacon Observatory 2. Has this project improved teachers and students knowledge of observational astronomy and the work of an astrophysicist 3. Has this project contributed to the academic research of CAPS

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

Between 1947 and 1970, around 3,200 children were sent from Britain to Australia, unaccompanied by their parents, through child migration schemes funded by Australian and British Governments and delivered by churches, religious orders and charities. Unlike earlier British child migration schemes (such as those which sent around 90,000 children to Canada between 1869-1924), the post-war migration schemes to Australia operated against the grain of current trends in the out-of-home care of children. Building on concern with standards of residential care for children, an awareness of the trauma of family separation through war-time evacuation and professional support for psychological theories emphasising the importance of the parent-child bond, the influential Care of Children Committee (Curtis) Report in 1946 established the principle that the out-of-home care of children should offer an environment resembling a 'normal' family home. The migration schemes to Australia, however, sent children almost entirely to residential institutions, many of which were remote, large and impersonal, and of the kind that the Curtis Report had criticised. Despite the efforts of the Home Office, child migration work to Australia undertaken by voluntary organisations remained largely unregulated. This project will undertake the first comprehensive historical study of these migration schemes, exploring the reasons for their post-war resumption, the interactions between the various governmental and voluntary organisations involved in them in both Britain and Australia, and their evolution and closure. In the context of public memories of these schemes that tend to represent them as a homogenous phenomenon, this project will provide a more differentiated account of varying cultures and working methods of organisations undertaking this work that had an important bearing on child migrants' experiences overseas. It will also undertake unprecedented work in examining the extent to which the schemes were anomalous in comparison to broader currents in the out-of-home care of children in the post-war period and consider the implications of this for understanding the mixed economy of the emergent post-war welfare state. These migration schemes remain a focus for public attention through recent and on-going investigations in the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry, Northern Ireland, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Australia, and the Home Office's Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA). Former British child migrants sent to the Fairbridge Farm School in Molong, New South Wales, have also recently received the largest proposed settlement ($24m AUD) for a class action concerning historic child abuse in Australian legal history. This project will provide essential historical understanding on which this continuing public re-evaluation of these schemes' work can draw. Building on the experiences of a range of experienced international practitioners (including the PI's experience of working with IICSA), the project will also examine the ways in which historical understanding is used in historic child abuse inquiries and consider the potential and challenges of different models for academic historians' engagement in these processes. In addition to producing an academic monograph that will be a key historical text on these schemes, the project will also extend and deepen public understanding of them through new permanent display material for the V&A Museum of Childhood and a national tour of the Ballads of Child Migration at major venues involving leading British folk-musicians which is also expected to receive further regional and national media coverage. In addition to the academic beneficiaries of this project, material produced through it will engage an expected public audience of between 4-5 million people over the next five years.

The work uses hypervelocity impacts (crudely impacts at speeds above 1 km/s) to probe a series of phenomena relevant to planetary science, We will look at the question of whether the shocks involved in hypervelocity impacts onto targets of mixtures of diferent ices and chemicals, can make amino acids and other complex organic molecules which are the ingredients of life. If they can, this may be a means for producing large amounts of these key molecules in space on icy bodies (such as comet nuclei or icy satellties of the outer planets). We will also investigate if ices which are doped with such compounds can successfuly deliver the compounds to targets during hypervelocity impacts. This could be a route for these compounds to arrive on an early Earth for example. We will explore this via both laboratory experiments and computer simulations. Regarding cratering process, we will start with impact cratering in hot rocks, typical of the surfaces of Venus and Mercury, where we have data from space missions, showing the presence of impact craters. That the properties of rocks change with temperature is well know, but not widely considered in impact cratering. We explore this using heated targets in our own gun and then trying to model the results using computer programmes, testing the validity of the models in the codes. We will also look at cratering in ices which have sand mixed into them. This is realistic of some types of icy body in the Solar System which are not pure water ice, but can have different amounts of silicates mixed into them. Again we will back up the experimental work (from our gun) with computer based modelling. As well as this, we will directly study cometary and interstellar dust by working on data analysis for the NASA Stardust mission, which in 2006 returned samples of these dusts from space to the Earth. We have a history of succesful involvement in studying these samples and will continue to do so. We not only study them in our laboratory, but also create analogue samples using our gun to understand any modification the real samples may have undergone when captured in space by the NASA Stardust spacecraft in hypervelocity impacts. As with all our proposed work, we will back the impact experiments with computer modelling, to more fully understand what is occurring. Finally we will also study some of the underlying physics in hypervelocity impacts, by studying impacts of small particles onto targets. When these projectiles are smaller than 10 millionths of a metre in size, the size of the resulting impact craters are a particularly sensitive test of our ability to correctly model high strain rate impact processes. We will carry out shots of various types of materials using our own gun and compare to what modelling predicts. In all our work, the combination of experimental work and computer modelling will provide a powerful tool for studying these impact processes. The results and insights gained will greatly aid our understanding of a wide range of phenomena of fundamental importance in the Solar System.

The UK's withdrawal from the European Union was an opportunity to reform agricultural policy to better align with sustainability goals and address limitations of agri-environment schemes (AES) in addressing environmental impacts of modern agriculture (Helm, 2017). The government's aims for reform emphasised 'public money for public goods' and the need for landscape-scale action via cooperative management, and these ideas around farmers as public good providers and landscape-scale actions have been particularly contested and changeable aspects of new policy regime (DEFRA, 2023; Harvey, 2023). My research identified challenges in applying these principles to improving agricultural sustainability, and so has timely insights to offer farmers, policy makers, and academics. Of the many approaches to studying drivers of farmer adoption behaviours, researchers trying to understand the deeper meaning behind farmer decisions increasingly focus on farmer identities, status, and cultural ideals of what a 'good farmer' should be doing (Burton, 2004; Cusworth & Dodsworth, 2021). I used interviews to apply these concepts in investigating how farmers interpret the idea of being providers of public goods and doing so in collaboration with other farmers. This work highlighted how the 'public goods' concept was adapted by farmers to align with their identities and expectations of their role, and that targeting relationships and information exchange will be important to resolve potential conflicts between landscape-scale public good delivery and established farmer identities. Alongside these interviews, I used spatial analysis to show how AES participation in England is clustered at the district level, and to suggest factors driving this clustering. To further study how drivers of adoption distribution relate to regional sustainability, I combined scenario analysis, impact mapping, and network analysis, to assess how the rate and distribution of regenerative farming (which stands on the frontier of agricultural change in the UK) adoption could impact sustainability in south-east England. This identified key pathways to explain how the high, clustered adoption of regenerative farming can enhance regional sustainability, showing the importance of information sharing and relationships in linking aspects of sustainability at different scales. This is the first time this mix of methods has been applied in agricultural sustainability research, allowing me to bring a fresh perspective to this topic. My research therefore made a worthwhile contribution to knowledge, and this project is an opportunity to ensure these findings reach their desired audiences and influence discussion about the future of farming in England. The 5 candidate journal articles I have identified will make new connections between different disciplines, provide recommendations that could inform implementation of post-Brexit agricultural policy, and advance our understanding of the contribution of alternative farming approaches to regional sustainability - a neglected topic in the literature, which has focused on farm-level sustainability (Inwood et al., 2018; Nogués et al., 2019). My research also highlighted the importance of considering different spatial scales in studying the adoption and sustainability performance of alternative farming approaches, so this project will involve limited further research (20% of the project, i.e., 2.5 months), adapting my methods to incorporate a multi-scale approach, which will drive expansion of this frontier in agricultural sustainability research. To maximise impact of this work, I will also attend at least 2 conferences to widen my network and share my findings and create a web-based mapping tool to present my research themes in an interactive manner for wider audiences. Additionally, I will continue teaching in areas relevant to my research and undertake training to support my professional development as an early career researcher.