Family learning: "What's the score?"

Family Learning through Football and Coaching (FLTFC) was developed with Sunderland Association Football Club (SAFC) Foundation, an adult basic skills provider, a primary school and the Open College Network. Ten years on this programme has high participation rates and is recognised for its capacity to engage the ‘hard-to-reach’ in learning. This paper provides a focused historical analysis and attempts to locate family learning in relation to policy, local authority structures and educational discourse. As cuts to public services continue, there is an expectation that the third sector, including social enterprises such as SAFC Foundation, will step in to fill the gap. The success of FLTFC could be presented as evidence of the effectiveness of the Big Society agenda however taking the long view it is evident that partnership with the public sector is an essential element in the development and continuity of successful provision. The theoretical framework which informs the paper incorporates brief consideration of the concept of lifelong learning and an examination of informal learning in the context of the family. The emerging localism agenda and issues relating to the current Coalition government's Big Society concept also inform the discussion. The paper will contribute to understanding of support for learning within families by providing a historical analysis of the endurance and success of a specific family learning programme. The findings of this study have the potential to contribute to the implementation of policy arising from the current review of adult informal community learning (BIS, 2011)

Varieties with maximum likelihood degree one

We show that algebraic varieties with maximum likelihood degree one are exactly the images of reduced A-discriminantal varieties under monomial maps with finite fibers. The maximum likelihood estimator corresponding to such a variety is Kapranov's Horn uniformization. This extends Kapranov's characterization of A-discriminantal hypersurfaces to varieties of arbitrary codimension.Comment: 14 pages, changed title, minor revisio

Is civil discourse simply about good manners

Campuses around the country are confronting a movement that represents a segment of students and faculty who claim to have been forced into silence for decades. Civil discourse cannot be promoted as a means of suppressing this movement. Rather, civil discourse must be a mechanism for engaging faculty and students alike on our common ground

Book Review-- Prison Pedagogies: Learning and Teaching with Imprisoned Writers

Prison Pedagogies, Learning and Teaching with Imprisoned Writers Edited by Joe Lockard and Sherry Rankins-Roberson Syracuse University Press, New York, 2018 ISBN 9780815654285 Reviewed by JUNE EDWARDS Mountjoy Prison, Dublin, Irelan

Book review: Unlocking Minds in Lockup

Education is a powerful tool that not only opens doors within prisons, but international research would indicate education also, and more crucially, prevents men and women from re-entering those same doors back to prison. Therefore Jan Walker’s recently published Unlocking Minds in Lockup: Prison Education Opens Doors is a welcome addition to the already rich literature on this subject

Book Review: Interpreting Ramakrishna: Kali\u27s Child Revisited

A review of Interpreting Ramakrishna: Kali\u27s Child Revisited by Swami Tyagananda and Pravrajika Vrajaprana