Evaluating the Impact of a Raising School Standards Initiative
Concern about the quality of schooling in disadvantaged urban areas has been especially marked throughout the United Kingdom during the 1990s. This led to the instigation of a major school improvement project in Northern Ireland, known as the Raising School Standards Initiative, that was intended to help schools address significant disadvantage and under-achievement amongst their pupils. The project, based on the knowledge base of the school effectiveness tradition, was designed to target a small number of secondary schools and their main contributory primary schools. The project sought to improve the quality of school management, the pupils’ standards of literacy and numeracy, the levels of qualifications, links with local industry, parental involvement in schools, attendance and punctuality, and to deal with problems of discipline in class. The improvement strategy selected can be seen as an attempt to integrate a ‘top down’ external approach (distal) with a ‘bottom up’ (proximal) strategy developed within individual schools. This chapter describes selected aspects of the full evaluation: the launch and selection of schools and the process of ‘action planning’. It also looks at the impact of the project on management, teaching and learning and educational standards. It concludes with findings which will have implications for other initiatives which seek to raise school standards in the urban context.
School improvement in an era of change
Introduction - school improvement in an era of change. Part 1: perspectives on educational reform making sense of change school and classroom effectiveness approaches to school improvement collaborative cultures and school improvement. Part 2: improving the quality of education for all staff development involvement inquiry and reflection leadership co-ordination collaborative planning. Part 3: seeing school improvement whole. Appendix: the conditions scale.
Improved Skin Penetration Using In Situ Nanoparticulate Diclofenac Diethylamine in Hydrogel Systems: In Vitro and In Vivo Studies
Delivering diclofenac diethylamine transdermally by means of a hydrogel is an approach to reduce or avoid systemic toxicity of the drug while providing local action for a prolonged period. In the present investigation, a process was developed to produce nanosize particles (about 10 nm) of diclofenac diethylamine in situ during the development of hydrogel, using simple mixing technique. Hydrogel was developed with polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) (5.8% w/w) and carbopol 71G (1.5% w/w). The formulations were evaluated on the basis of field emission scanning electron microscopy, texture analysis, and the assessment of various physiochemical properties. Viscosity (163–165 cps for hydrogel containing microsize drug particles and 171–173 cps for hydrogel containing nanosize drug particles, respectively) and swelling index (varied between 0.62 and 0.68) data favor the hydrogels for satisfactory topical applications. The measured hardness of the different hydrogels was uniform indicating a uniform spreadability. Data of in vitro skin (cadaver) permeation for 10 h showed that the enhancement ratios of the flux of the formulation containing nanosize drug (without the permeation enhancer) were 9.72 and 1.30 compared to the formulation containing microsized drug and the marketed formulations, respectively. In vivo plasma level of the drug increased predominantly for the hydrogel containing nanosize drug-clusters. The study depicts a simple technique for preparing hydrogel containing nanosize diclofenac diethylamine particles in situ, which can be commercially viable. The study also shows the advantage of the experimental transdermal hydrogel with nanosize drug particles over the hydrogel with microsize drug particles.