Andy Brown

Abstract This paper reviews the development of coaching in schools and presents findings from a multi-school site longitudinal study in the UK. The paper starts by reviewing the coaching educational literature and identifies the growth of coaching in educational settings for teacher development and principal/head teacher performance. The paper uses as an example leading work in Sandwell Council to explore the potential for coaching to be extended to working with non-adult populations, specifically with children preparing for examinations and builds on previous studies in this area. The paper highlights the processes involved in training coaches in this project, the coaching process and the outcome of a three-year longitudinal study. It moves to discuss the emerging potential for coaching in working with non-adult students and how educational authorities can use the Sandwell example to develop their own programmes. The study shows the benefits of coaching when used as a personal development tool to support learning. It also reveals the potential for coaching as an intervention for non-adult populations, specifically in enhancing examination performance and its potential to become a government tool to address social disadvantage and, if targetted, to increase the number of children from lower socio-economic groups progressing to university. The paper lastly raises the question whether coaching can be used to address challenges faced by young people during periods of stress.

The new generation of short-read sequencing technologies requires reliable measures of data quality. Such measures are especially important for variant calling. However, in the particular case of SNP calling, a great number of false-positive SNPs may be obtained. One needs to distinguish putative SNPs from sequencing or other errors. We found that not only the probability of sequencing errors (i.e. the quality value) is important to distinguish an FP-SNP but also the conditional probability of "correcting" this error (the "second best call" probability, conditional on that of the first call). Surprisingly, around 80% of mismatches can be "corrected" with this second call. Another way to reduce the rate of FP-SNPs is to retrieve DNA motifs that seem to be prone to sequencing errors, and to attach a corresponding conditional quality value to these motifs. We have developed several measures to distinguish between sequence errors and candidate SNPs, based on a base call's nucleotide context and its mismatch type. In addition, we suggested a simple method to correct the majority of mismatches, based on conditional probability of their "second" best intensity call. We attach a corresponding second call confidence (quality value) of being corrected to each mismatch.

The paper provides an evaluation of client perceptions of a community‐based physical activity project (MUSCSEL) in Leeds. Over a period of five months, all newcomers to the project were invited to take part in the evaluation by completing a questionnaire. All were living independently in the community. All 34 respondents were unemployed, and perceived themselves as less active and less fit than the norm for their age and gender. Incidence of smoking was higher than the national average, and the majority of respondents would have liked to be more active than they were, but perceived many barriers. Subsequent interviews (n=17) found that the project increased self‐confidence and self‐esteem, perceived fitness levels and perceived habitual physical activity levels. It also facilitated social contact and enabled the service users to manage their mental health issues better, supporting previous research findings. Further work is needed to follow subjects living independently in the community on a longitudinal basis, to determine the time course of any benefits, particularly over the period of transition from hospital to independent‐living status.

This article reports the findings of a pilot research project that investigated the perceived educational value of sharing narrative practice amongst graduate students from the School of Education and the School of Nursing and Midwifery at the University of Tasmania. During a semester the graduate students reflected upon and wrote about a ‘critical incident’ which had occurred during their recent practical experience. These narratives were exchanged with the graduate students in the other discipline in order for the lecturers to examine the perceived educational value of sharing narrative practice. Analyses of written responses and questionnaire results were framed within a social constructivist perspective and drew on notions of peer feedback, critical reflection and the value of shared stories. The findings revealed that the graduate students appeared to revert to discipline-specific behaviours within this cross-disciplinary context.

We know almost everything about the exterior of the earth, but for most people its interior is completely unknown. Beneath us, stretching for a distance comparable to that between Paris and New York, lies an underground realm associated with darkness and death. It has inspired writers and artists since time immemorial; when trying to imagine hell, they have usually located it under the ground. In Why Hell Stinks of Sulfur, geologist Salomon Kroonenberg uses subterranean mythology as his point of departure. Starting with Dante's Inferno, he takes the reader on a journey in the footsteps of Homer, Virgil, Leonardo, Descartes and Jules Verne. Along the way he turns a scientific spotlight on the background to myths of the underworld. At a small lake near Naples he searches for the gates of hell, as described in Virgil's Aeneid. Describing the multi-layered nature of the inside of the earth, exposing colours, gasses, liquids and metals as well as underground rivers and lakes, Kroonenberg sees the earth beneath our feet as a source of information about this unimaginably ancient planet. We have never penetrated beyond a depth of 7.5 miles, but beneath us is a unique archive, a living ecosystem whose riches we can still barely guess at. Why Hell Stinks of Sulfur is a fascinating search for the geological foundations of hell and also an appeal to find ways to ensure that mankind's thirst for natural resources does not exhaust the earth.