The purpose of this thesis is to develop an understanding about internal fraud and corruption problem in Turkish construction industry. During the research, the reasons behind the internal fraud and corruption problem, types of internal fraud and prevention methods for internal fraud and corruption were investigated and various recommendations were developed. Moreover, fraud risk awareness questionnaire was implemented to understand the likelihood occurrence of internal fraud types in construction sector and proactive and reactive measures against these problems. Moreover, types of fraud incidences experienced by Turkish construction companies were also investigated with the questionnaire. The questionnaire reached to 89 respondents and, recommendations to prevent internal fraud and corruption problem were developed by detailed statistical analyses.

In 2002 a contractually differentiated teaching–focused post, University Teacher (UT), was created within my Russell Group HEI. This interpretivist study seeks to explore the impact of the ‘lived experience’ of this recent post on both myself and a group of 11 colleagues, some of whom were transferred and others employed as UTs. A narrative approach is adopted to evaluate existing public stories of the UK HE sector and changing definitions of academic functions and identities alongside original private stories, both my own and those co-constructed with participants. My primary research comprised in-depth narrative interviews with four Senior UTs, six UTs and one research-focused Lecturer recently transferred from a UT post. The interviews sought to elicit participants’ storied accounts of professional identity construction and management on the career paths towards their current posts and beyond. The interview data was examined reflexively using a pragmatic hybrid model based on a range of narrative analytic lenses: structural and linguistic narrative analysis of three case studies, together with thematic analysis of narratives across all 11 interviews. The participants shared highly personal, emotional and reflective accounts. The case study analysis centred on the identification and scrutiny of overarching plotlines, key episodes, genres and characterisation. The thematic analysis revealed common concerns around the job title, the relative weightings and status of teaching and scholarship, the nature of scholarship and career progression. The complex connection between intra-, inter-, cultural and structural dimensions proved key; personal values and agency, relationships with peers and managers, and institutional and sectoral priorities were all essential to the achievement of a progressive, as opposed to a regressive or static, UT identity typology. UTs clearly had some control over their own agency. However, institutional leaders and line managers were seen to have more significant power to promote or inhibit identity growth for academics on differentiated contracts. Changes have recently been made to the UT post in relation to the job title and promotion criteria. In the conclusions I suggest that further research is needed on the effect of these changes and on the impact of contractual differentiation on staff and students across the HE sector. Implications for institutions and staff on how to facilitate teaching-focused academics’ positive identity growth are also put forward.

This thesis aims to elucidate perceptions and practices in relation to learning disabilities in different contexts over a period of a hundred years, between 1780 and 1880. Previous studies have concentrated on institutional and professional contexts, on informed medical opinion for example, or on focused studies of local practices. Here a wider range of opinion and practice is sought. The Introduction includes a discussion of nomenclature, and explains why 'intellectual impairment' is used rather than the familiar term 'learning disability'. Part I of the thesis explores perceptions of, and responses to, intellectual impairment held by different people in various contexts, while Part II employs biographical methods to examine the life histories of a number of intellectually impaired people in their familial setting. Part I starts with the views of professionals - educationists,doctors (who were at the forefront of the well documented emergence of idiot education in the 1840s) and also charity workers. Concentrating on previously neglected issues, the thesis shows that educational theory and practice offered nothing to families with an intellectually impaired child, and medical dominance had negligible competition. In a chapter on the efforts of charity workers as well as doctors to promote and raise money for the new idiot asylums, the focus is on the notion of idiocy that they put forward. Here ideas from the past mingled with new ideas. The question of the nature and origin of the image, or images, of the idiot is continued in two chapters that explore the varied and changing portrayals of intellectual impairment in imaginative literature. Part II uses family papers in a novel way to investigate the lives of individuals who had an intellectual impairment, and the responses of their families. These families, well known because of at least one eminent member, and well documented, are at the least, comfortably off. But within these parameters there is variation. Augustus, son of William and Caroline Lamb, is from the aristocracy, while Laura, daughter of Leslie Stephen of DNB fame, is from the middle class intelligentsia. This makes the similarity of responses to an intellectually impaired child the more interesting. For the most part, a child's difficulty was conceptualised as an educational, health or social problem, and not in terms of idiocy or a related all inclusive notion. The final chapter of Part II, that explores experiences of the modestly off or the poor, uses, in the absence of family papers, other sources of information. The inclusion of both the familial and private, and the public, contexts enables this thesis to reveal a wider range of perceptions and practices in relation to intellectual impairment during the period than have previous studies.

Government policy emphasises the role higher education is expected to play in the era of the "information society" and the benefits the increasing use of new technology in teaching and learning within the university will bring. Accordingly, the purpose of this research was to explore the influence of the WWW in teaching and learning in universities. The study was designed in response to a rejection of technological deterministic approaches and the call for more empirically grounded study of the relationships between society and technology. It examines the use of the WWW in six case study modules in two universities in England from a staff, student and institutional perspective, located within the national context. A case study design, utilising a communications framework, was adopted to guide the research process. The methods utilised were: literature review, analysis of national and university policy documents, semi structured interviews with staff and students, two student questionnaires, focus groups with students and analysis of the case study websites. The cases explored here provide a rather different picture to that painted by the dominant discourses about ICTs and higher education. The use of the web in teaching and learning neither appears to be radically transforming the university, nor to be providing (or even regarded as) a ready solution to the problems the sector currently encounters. Yet, the technology is, in places, adding to the experiences of staff and students in a variety of complex ways. Through exploring practical instances of educational innovation this research has indicated the mesh of interrelating factors that are at work when using the web in teaching and learning, and the importance of considering the full range of experiences of the individuals involved, the variable purposes of using the technology, and the influence of the social contexts that surround initiatives. The benefits of the use of a communications model in further research is highlighted, and the use of mixed model studies promoted to gain greater understanding, aid with generalizability, and provide arguments to counter techno deterministic accounts prevalent in this area.

No description available.

This study examined the relationships and differences amongst selected physical education and psychological characteristics of boys before and after secondary school transfer. The purpose of the study was to determine the significance of boys' attitudes to physical education, motor performance and physical education self-esteem (self-perceptions of performance in physical education) at the age of school transfer, and establish the role of physical education before and during adjustment to secondary school. Independent samples of Primary schoolboys (n = 50) and secondary schoolboys(n = 107) formed a cross-sectional study, whilst twenty-five primary school transferees formed a small-scale longitudinal study. Pupils' attitudes towards physical education, motor performance and physical education self-esteem (PESE) were assessed during the last term at primary school and on two occasions (December and June) during the first year at secondary school. In addition, global self-esteem and anxiety were measured at each stage, and a self-report school transfer questionnaire was administered at the end of the transfer year. From these sources, low self-esteem, high anxiety and negative attitudes to secondary school were used as indicators of poor school adjustment. Differences amongst the psychological variables across transfer revealed that the move to secondary school appeared to be a positive experience for most boys. However, those boys identified as poorly adjusted to secondary school were less sure of themselves, more anxious, and recorded lower global and physical education self-esteem. Correlational analysis and discriminant analysis of low, average, and high motor performers (actual and perceived) revealed that poor motor performance was not consistently associated with low global self-esteem, high anxiety, or poor school adjustment. In contrast, low physical education selfesteem was associated with negative psychological characteristics and all the indicators of poor secondary school adjustment. Findings also suggested that physical education self-esteem may serve (1) as a mediating variable between actual motor performance and global self-esteem, and (2) as a mediating variable between physical education experiences and school adjustment. On the basis of the results, a preliminary model of secondary school adjustment incorporating physical education is presented for discussion and empirical test. Also in light of the study's findings, the National Curriculum for England and Wales is analysed to consider the extent to which physical education experiences are likely to assist children's motor and psychological development before transfer and during secondary school adjustment.

Abstract: In recent years there has been an increasing emphasis on the promotion of collegiality as an impetus for management in Scottish schools. Collegiality is promoted as having the potential to transform teachers and hence education. This study confronts this ambitious claim arguing that the concept of collegiality has suffered from a lack of theoretical and intellectual scrutiny. Collegiality lacks proper understanding as a concept and as a discourse. Terms associated with it are frequently used in perfunctory ways which are inattentive to its conceptual sophistication. This study attends to complications which emerge when we reflect rigorously on what collegiality means, and how it impacts on various organisations, but in particular school management. Current attempts at developing a collegiate culture in schools are underexploiting its potential as a transformative management model. We are not managing to be collegiate in the most normative of understandings because we are not Managing collegiality in ways which take account of its conceptual and discursive complexity. The key research questions are: From where has the discourse of collegiality come and how has it been promoted? Whose interest might the discourse of collegiality serve? The study takes two main approaches in addressing these. It considers collegiality as a concept, focussing on meaning and implications arising from the application of limited understandings of the idea in a variety of organisational contexts. It then draws on continental philosophy to uncover arguments which position collegiality, currently promoted, as a discourse. The dissertation locates key sources of the discourse of collegiality and the politics and practices of its promotion. It explores the interests claimed to be served by collegiality, contrasts these with the interest more likely to be served, before going on to make normative claims about a rehabilitated understanding of collegiality. It identifies current approaches to collegiality more as being technologies for organisational expediency rather than as conduits of the more attractive and normative understandings which could contribute creatively to a more democratic and ‘dialogic’ school organisational culture. In seeking a more creative and potentially transformative conception and practice of collegiality, the study looks at one particular example of a radical reappraisal and critiques this, finding it attractive in some senses but at odds with the parameters within which school managers work. A discussion develops which explores more attractive and normative understandings and casts these before a backdrop of common approaches to the professional practice of school management. The dissertation contributes to a discussion by which popular understandings of collegiality may be rescued to become more befitting the democratic and socially oriented facets of a school, rather than as a managerialist technology, impacting on learners, teachers and the wider constituency of interest in schooling in rather more limited ways. The study defends normative understandings of collegiality as an organisational impetus tailored for professional arenas, but in so doing it defends management as a necessity in organisational contexts characterised by complexity. Collegiality cannot be an alternative to Management. It is an attractive approach for schools which can be managed if Managed appropriately.

Pupils who present with Behavioural, Emotional and Social Difficulties (BESD) at school have been the focus of extensive study, research and reports for many years in England. These have focused on exploring the nature of BESD, contributing factors relating to school and the schools that have shown evidence of good practice when working with these pupils. This work has reflected the situation in the English education system. In Cyprus, however, answers to questions about how best to educate pupils who may demonstrate BESD remain elusive. In 2003, the Cypriot government approved a policy prioritising the education of pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds. The policy instituted ‘Zones of Educational Priority programme’ as it is an area-based initiative. The schools joining this programme and working under the policy have been selected based on the areas in which they are located and the local populations’ socio-economic and educational status. Additionally, many of the pupils registered in these schools present with BESD. Despite this fact, up to the time the research described in this thesis was conducted; the issue of good practice when working with these pupils seems to have been neglected by Cypriot researchers and educational authorities. The study reported here was begun in 2008 and continued in 2009. It involved two primary schools operating under the Zones of Educational Priority policy in Cyprus and is a case study of what ‘good practice’ is perceived to be in relation to pupils with BESD. For the purposes of this research, 22 semi-structured interviews were carried out, as well as 29 lesson observations and informal conversations. The collected data was subjected to content analysis and the findings are reported and discussed in a way that allow the readers to draw their own conclusions concerning how the study has reinforced what is already known in the area of study as well as how it has contributed to building new knowledge.

September 2012 English universities witnessed a near trebling of their tuition fees for full-time undergraduate courses to an average of £8,580 per year (UCAS, 2012). In the same period was the growing accountability for universities to publish and demonstrate their performance to students. The research was undertaken in 2012/13 allowing comparison of the students who began their studies on the increased tuition fees, and the students who had started their studies in the previous year and who continued to pay the lower rate of fees. The research was undertaken across two English institutions: one ‘post 1992’ University, and one Further Education (FE) college which offered degree awards. The research includes survey responses from nearly 700 students, 97 academics and five interviews with senior university staff. The study provides evidence that students choose to study to improve their future earnings, seen in the motivating factors on choosing their university. Students taking on the persona of consumers is reflected in the expected rises in standards and reported rises in institutional complaints. Both academics and students expect change within the higher education industry and in institutional cultures. In turn these have implications for developing policy and future research.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the educational disadvantage currently being suffered by Roma children in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia, and to identify the most appropriate human rights mechanism with which to remedy the situation. Education is vitally important for oppressed minorities such as the Roma since, without it, individuals will be unable to fully access the complete range of their fundamental rights and so will be unable to challenge the disadvantage and discrimination that they suffer. This thesis first submits, therefore, that the traditional liberal democratic model of governance as featured in contemporary Europe is insufficient to adequately address the needs of minorities. To address this insufficiency, states must recognise a version of multiculturalism that both embraces critical pluralism and is compatible with liberal theory. Secondly, this thesis suggests that the individualistic focus of rights protection should be enhanced through an increased recognition of children’s rights so that the individual child is firmly entrenched as an autonomous rights holder. The type of education system that would exist in such a rights environment should serve to develop the autonomy and competence of individual children but also to facilitate their security within their own culture. This type of multicultural education can only be achieved if the various international instruments concerning the right to education can be required to place a more onerous burden on states parties when it comes to minority accommodation. At a domestic level, this thesis suggests that the most appropriate means by which to accommodate the Roma within the national education systems of the four countries would be through a culturally sensitive mainstreaming approach adapted from that used in England.