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Notes from the Rethinking Digital Inclusion Event taken by Christina Evans, Somerset Libraries cyevans@somerset.gov.uk

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Don't ask what your priorities should be - find out what young people's priorities are!

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A report from the Children's Commissioner on the data collected about children and how it might shape their lives.

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A report on the data collected about children and how it might shape their lives.

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Power Up: resourcing women’s and girls’ movements for change

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Power Up: resourcing women’s and girls’ movements for change

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'We believe women and girls should have equal power and agency in decision-making at all levels'

The Opportunity

We are excited to launch this funding opportunity focussed on strengthening women's and girls' movements.

We believe that the material and practical considerations of women and girls' daily lives will only be significantly improved when we have full and equal power in decision making at all levels.

Studies have shown that women's rights organisations bring the greatest long-term change to women's lives, and we know that for women and girls to continue to drive change in their own lives, that of their families, communities and on a global stage, women's rights organisations are essential. However, The World Bank estimates that funding to women's rights organisations has fallen by more than half over the last 5 years.

The aim of this programme is to support a diverse range of women's rights organisations to fight against systems which perpetuate the injustices they encounter in their daily lives.

We are therefore launching an open programme to find and support women and girl's movements to seed, sustain and strengthen this change in the geographies we fund. Please be aware we expect this to be a competitive programme and so will be unable to fund in every country.

What do we mean by Women's and Girls' movements

We believe movements are made up of a number of constituents working collectively towards a shared long-term goal.

Constituents of women's and girls' movements that we might fund directly could include (though is not limited to):

Advocacy or Campaigning organisations

Service delivery organisations

Research bodies

Think tanks

Registered community organisation

Women's funds

Trades unions or professional bodies

Constituents of women's and girls' movements that we might support indirectly, through partners/devolved funding:

Individuals/activists

Informal groups and organisations

Small or newly formed organisations which do not meet our income threshold

What do we mean by power?

The ability to define, decide and do....

This can be individually about your own life, and collectively about structures and systems.

This includes being able to:

have control over your own body, labour and narrative

work with others to shape collective narratives, strategies and policies

influence and make decisions on how and by whom these are implemented and adapted over time

This could include:

Formal power i.e. preparing women to stand for election in local or national representation, leadership programmes, mentoring, individual development for org/movement leaders

The ability to organise (physically or digitally) to build collective power, i.e. to be able to influence and make decisions about community resources, or catalyse learning and incubate new ideas

Coming together to develop strategic advocacy or ways of working together more effectively, i.e. building stronger long-term alliances, or establishing a joint response to a particular situation (such as policy or legislation change, or outbreaks of conflict or epidemics)

What we want to learn from this work

As well as learning about the specific work you are doing and the impact/outcomes from this, we are interested in demonstrating the broader learning about the value of women's movements, and how funders can support them to create long-term change. We are therefore interested in working with people who are happy to engage in cohort and collective learning as part of this programme

Funding criteria

We want to work with amazing women and girl-led organisations, partnerships, consortia and women's funds who are supporting women to have collective power, build movements and become change agents.

We are interested in hearing about the work that you feel is most important and appropriate to secure long-term change for women and girls in your context. We understand that change takes time, and so are interested in what your long-term goals are and who else you are working with to achieve these, either in formal partnerships, or informally.

We are interested in supporting the development of specific work (such as campaigns, advocacy and/or services) when it is part of this long-term change. We are also interested in supporting work which helps movement constituents develop a common agenda for change, such as developing and sharing analytic frameworks, learnings and research, and work that is focussed on base building, such as growing membership and leadership, building/growing/supporting alliances and solidarity both between and within movements.

We're inviting locally-rooted organisations to tell us what solutions you believe will work, demonstrating how your solutions are rooted in and informed by an understanding and experience of delivery, centring the experiences of those most affected by the issue. This is to ensure that lived experience and learning from doing are at the heart of the work. There is evidence that your work is already making a demonstrable difference, this is an exciting opportunity to expand, learn and influence from that work.

We are inviting applications from any of the geographies we fund in. Please be aware that we expect this to be a competitive programme and so we will not be able to fund in every country.

What we will fund

Funding is available for 3 - 5 years

Funding can be used to cover the core costs / overheads of an organisation / partnerships, or specific projects and activities or a mixture of the two.

We also welcome applications using digital or Sport for Change approaches.

We are interested in the way that movements bring about change, approaches might include (but not be limited to):

Strategic litigation

Norm changing and behaviour change including with men and boys

Grassroots or frontline delivery of services*

Policy work

Campaigns

Advocacy

Network/alliance building

Research/building shared analytical frameworks

We are also interested in any number of issues as identified by those most affected, for example these may include (but are not limited to):

Gender based violence

Access to and control over resources, both within families, and over shared community assets (including land rights, water, protecting resources from extraction)

Women and girls in detention

Labour rights

Rights of minoritised or excluded groups, including BME, migrants, internally displaced people, disabled women, older women, rural women, sex workers

Work on the rights of LBTQI

Who can apply
This fund is for women and girl led organisations only
We will be offering grants for 3-5 years for the following total amounts:

1. Single organisations can apply for grants between £150,000 up to £300,000

2. Those working in partnership (2 or more organisations), up to £500,000**

3. For women's funds or others sub-granting we may consider larger grants (up to £750,000).

For sub-granters who aren't women's funds, the following criteria MUST be met:

Women and girls who are most affected by the issue being addressed must have a significant role in decision making about how the grants are distributed and what issues are centred

The money must be regranted to women or girls' led groups or women or girls if supporting individuals

Deadlines

There is a two-stage application process. The deadline for first stage applications will be 7th December 2018 12pm GMT. Shortlisted applications will be given 7/8 weeks to submit a full proposal and the deadline will be 15th March 2019 12pm GMT. Decisions will be made by the Comic Relief grants committee and Trustees by July 2019.
*grassroots or frontline service delivery work supported through this fund will need to demonstrate how it is movement focussed in the way that it is building and sharing learning or supporting women and girls who access services to identify and contribute to change in their contexts **Partnerships - we appreciate that partnerships can take time to develop well and so we are happy for these - if new - to be further developed through the second stage of the application process.

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We are excited to launch this funding opportunity focussed on strengthening women's and girls' movements. We believe that the material and practical considerations of women and girls' daily lives will only be significantly improved when we have full and equal power in decision making at all levels.

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The ClassLiving and Learning in the Digital Age

by Sonia Livingstone, Julian Sefton-Green - READ FREE ONLINE

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Do today's youth have more opportunities than their parents? As they build their own social and digital networks, does that offer new routes to learning and friendship? How do they navigate the meaning of education in a digitally connected but fiercely competitive, highly individualized world?

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Parent Zone is delighted to be working with Dove on its acclaimed Self-Esteem Project providing teachers and parents with free resources to help them raise a young person's self-esteem. Teachers, you

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Learning Labs in Libraries and Museums: Transformative Spaces for Teens

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Learning Labs in Libraries and Museums: Transformative Spaces for Teens

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Learning Labs in Libraries and Museums: Transformative Spaces for Teens, New Report out now!

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The Learning Labs in Libraries and Museums program is a joint effort of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to support the creation of innovative teen spaces at libraries and museums and to unite these sites in a national network.

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Summary

Conventional wisdom about young people's use of digital technology often equates generational identity with technology identity: today's teens seem constantly plugged in to video games, social networks sites, and text messaging. Yet there is little actual research that investigates the intricate dynamics of youth's social and recreational use of digital media. Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out fills this gap, reporting on an ambitious three-year ethnographic investigation into how young people are living and learning with new media in varied settings-at home, in after school programs, and in online spaces. By focusing on media practices in the everyday contexts of family and peer interaction, the book views the relationship of youth and new media not simply in terms of technology trends but situated within the broader structural conditions of childhood and the negotiations with adults that frame the experience of youth in the United States. Integrating twenty-three different case studies-which include Harry Potter podcasting, video-game playing, music-sharing, and online romantic breakups-in a unique collaborative authorship style, Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out is distinctive for its combination of in-depth description of specific group dynamics with conceptual analysis. This book was written as a collaborative effort by members of the Digital Youth Project, a three-year research effort funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and conducted at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Southern California. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning

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Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out Kids Living and Learning with New Media - Connected Learning Alliance

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Conventional wisdom about young people's use of digital technology often equates generational identity with technology identity: today's teens seem constantly plugged in to video games, social networks sites, and text messaging. Yet there is little actual research that investigates the intricate dynamics of youth's social and recreational use of digital media.

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Peer-Group Mapping

Jenny Lloyd (International Centre) talks about peer group mapping and the importance of considering peer groups when assessing risk for extra-familial abuse.

Profiling peer on peer abuse

In this video David Hancock (MASE Analyst, London Borough of Camden) and Carlene Firmin discuss the profiling peer on peer abuse. For more information, see our briefing on profiling.

Impact of Contextual Safeguarding on policing

What is a contextual safeguarding school assessment?

Involving schools in the response to peer on peer abuse

In this Video Lia Latchford outlines the importance of involving schools in the response to peer on peer abuse and what this might look like in practice.

Detached youth work

Belen Bueso-Alberdi (Targeted Youth Worker, London Borough of Barnet) and Danielle Fritz discuss intervening in young people's social spaces through detached youth work in this video. For more information, please see our briefing on detached youth work provision.

Detached youthwork: creating safety for young people in public spaces

In this webinar, Danielle Fritz discusses why detached youth work is a contextual approach to safeguarding young people, using quotes from field work research. This webinar complements the briefing on detached youth work.

What is participatory engagement?

In this podcast Dr Camille Warrington (International Centre) introduces the idea of participatory engagement with young people and explores the different ways engagement can occur. This podcast was originally published on the Our Voices website as part of the International Centre's Our Voices programme of work.

Gangs, exploitation and violence - research in practice

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Videos and Podcasts | Contextual Safeguarding Network

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Peer-Group Mapping Jenny Lloyd (International Centre) talks about peer group mapping and the importance of considering peer groups when assessing risk for extra-familial abuse. Profiling peer on peer abuse In this video David Hancock (MASE Analyst, London Borough of Camden) and Carlene Firmin discuss the profiling peer on peer abuse.

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Teenage Brain Development / Neuroscience

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Teenage Brain Development / Neuroscience

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New online forum and resources for children in care

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Manage multiple messaging platforms in one browser.

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Manage multiple messaging platforms in one browser.

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https://meetfranz.com/

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Our Travellers' Times Youth Advisory Group wanted to make a short film about what the new Youth Times section of the TT website was all about so we supported them to make this https://vimeo.com/268798437

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Our Travellers' Times Youth Advisory Group wanted to make a short film about what the new Youth Times section of the TT website was all about so we supported them to make this https://vimeo.com/268798437

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With their permission we filmed the whole 2 hr discussion session which focused on what they liked and didn't like about the current TT offer and discussed what they would like to us us offering in the future.

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BBC School Report have some useful articles and tools including this one of 'How to spot Fake News' https://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/collections/schoolreport#real-news

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BBC School Report have some useful articles and tools including this one of 'How to spot Fake News' https://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/collections/schoolreport#real-news

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While this is library focused there are some great activities in here about how to run design workshops with users.

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"Through Design Thinking I have learned to pay attention to details, to review each situation from other perspectives and most importantly to use the focus group. By collaborating with people of different ages and from different domains, new extraordinary ideas have been generated!" - Loredana, Librarian, Romania

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"Through Design Thinking I have learned to pay attention to details, to review each situation from other perspectives and most importantly to use the focus group. By collaborating with people of different ages and from different domains, new extraordinary ideas have been generated!" - Loredana, Librarian, Romania

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Q&A and Polling Platform

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It's how you include everyone
in your meetings

Slido gives you everything you need to engage your participants, capture their views and make everyone feel connected - whether you're running a team call, training or an all-company meeting.

Intuitive and easy

The attendees can join without any logins or downloads, and the setup for hosts takes only minutes.

5+ polling options

With Slido's 5 types of polls, Q&A, quizzes and surveys, you can engage your participants in a variety of ways.

Get started for free

Start with our forever-free Basic plan, or get more from Slido for only €10 per month.

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Slido is the ultimate Q&A and polling platform for live and virtual meetings and events. It offers interactive Q&A, live polls and insights about your audience.

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1. Ask yourself: Is this helpful or not helpful?

2. Translate.

3. Stay curious.

4. Hang in there until you receive actionable feedback.

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So when we release new products or ideas, harsh criticism can be shocking and emotionally devastating. Opinions can feel like objects thrown at you. And for a lot of companies that release updates or redesigns, they're not prepared for the reaction.

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ProMo-Cymru teamed up with Cub Scouts to carve some spooky Halloween pumpkins. The Cubs grew the smaller pumpkins and other seasonal fruit and veg themselves. We used this video fro evaluation and promotional purposes.

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ProMo-Cymru ran an environmental at Pencoed Primary School last summer to build benches out of unwanted pallets. We used this video for evaluation and promotion purposes.

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Pallet Furniture-Making Workshop at Pencoed Primary School

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5 fantastic ways you can get young people to love evaluation

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5 fantastic ways you can get young people to love evaluation

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Most cultural organisations understand how important evaluation is for improving programming, securing funding, and understanding impact. Here at The Audience Agency, we support arts and heritage organisations to evaluate their projects, and we often hear the same concern: it can be difficult to get audiences to participate in evaluation when they don't see a direct benefit for themselves, especially when it comes to under 16-year-olds.

We recently worked with the Wellcome Collection to create an evaluation toolkit for their youth teams, which was a great opportunity to share how evaluation can be an enjoyable experience for young people. Here are 5 of our favourite ways to get young people to love evaluation:

1. Tell them what it is

This might seem like an obvious one, but when your head is deep in evaluation mode it can be easy to forget that your audiences might not even know what it is. The word 'evaluation' can sound intimidating to younger people, conjuring up images of tests or school reports. Before you begin an evaluation workshop or survey, emphasise that evaluation is about what your organisation can learn from them, and how valuable their perspectives are.

2. Be stealthy

No, this doesn't involve dressing up like a ninja or James Bond (unless that's your thing), but using more subtle evaluation techniques. This means methods like structured observations of a group, keeping track of the most common questions, and recording most/least popular activities. These are simple ways of embedding evaluation data collection into your daily activity, without interrupting the flow. If your project or programme gets young people to produce any kind of content, don't forget that you can also use this to analyse what they've gained from it.

3. Reflect what you're evaluating

There's a lot more to evaluation than just standard feedback forms and focus groups. Cultural organisations are creative by nature, so why not make your evaluation methods reflect what your organisation or project is actually doing? If you're evaluating a visual art project, you could get young people to create structured drawings or collages about their experience. If you're a dance or drama organisation, you could use some of the physical and spatial forms of evaluation described in this resource. When your evaluation methods reflect the topic or activity that attracted your young audiences in the first place, they're more likely to want to join in.

4. Make it worth their while

Even with the most exciting and creative evaluation methods, you might still need to sweeten the deal a little more to encourage more young people to participate in your evaluation - especially after the main activity is already finished. Incentives don't have to be financial (and probably shouldn't be if your audience is under 16). They could be something as simple as snacks and refreshments, prizes, a sneak peek behind the scenes, or emphasising the skills they are developing whilst giving feedback (this could be interviewing, listening, filming, creativity, etc).

5. Put them in the driver's seat

If you really want your younger audiences to feel empowered by evaluation, why not actually give them some power? Peer evaluation is a great way to get young people invested in the evaluation process. You could get young people participating in a project or activity to interview and record each other using prewritten questions. This method can also encourage young people to be more open about their views, because they won't be worried about offending you as a member of the organisation, or intimidated by speaking in a large group.

It's useful to be aware of the Market Research Society's guidelines when conducting research and evaluation with under-16s.

Want to know a secret about these tips? They don't just work for young people - you can use these strategies to make evaluation more appealing for any audience.

Written by Ashleigh Hibbins, Learning and Participation Consultant
Featured in August's edition of The Learning Diaries. To receive The Learning Diaries, visit the sign up page.

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5 fantastic ways to get young people to love evaluation

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5 fantastic ways you can get young people to love evaluation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Most cultural organisations understand how important evaluation is for improving programming, securing funding, and understanding impact. Here at The Audience Agency, we support arts and heritage organisations to evaluate their projects, and we often hear the same concern: it can be difficult to get audiences to participate in evaluation when they don't see a direct benefit for themselves, especially when it comes to under 16-year-olds.

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Interland is an adventure-packed online game that puts the key lessons of digital citizenship and safety into hands-on practice. Play your way to being Internet Awesome.

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Illustration by Dougal MacPherson

by Published in Beth Raduenzel User Experience , Accessibility

The summer of 2017 marked a monumental victory for the millions of Americans living with a disability. On June 13th, a Southern District of Florida Judge ruled that Winn-Dixie's inaccessible website violated Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act. This case marks the first trial under the ADA, which was passed into law in 1990.

Despite spending more than $7 million to revamp its website in 2016, Winn-Dixie neglected to include design considerations for users with disabilities. Some of the features that were added include online prescription refills, digital coupons, rewards card integration, and a store locator function. However, it appears that inclusivity didn't make the cut.

Because Winn-Dixie's new website wasn't developed to WCAG 2.0 standards, the new features it boasted were in effect only available to sighted, able-bodied users. When Florida resident Juan Carlos Gil, who is legally blind, visited the Winn-Dixie website to refill his prescriptions, he found it to be almost completely inaccessible using the same screen reader software he uses to access hundreds of other sites.

Juan stated in his original complaint that he "felt as if another door had been slammed in his face." But Juan wasn't alone. Intentionally or not, Winn-Dixie was denying an entire group of people access to their new website and, in turn, each of the time-saving features it had to offer.

What makes this case unique is that it marks the first time in history in which a public accommodations case went to trial, meaning the judge ruled the website to be a "place of public accommodation" under the ADA and therefore subject to ADA regulations. Since there are no specific ADA regulations regarding the internet, Judge Scola decided the adoption of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 Level AA to be appropriate. (Thanks to the hard work of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) at the W3C, WCAG 2.0 has found widespread adoption throughout the globe, either as law or policy.)

Learning to have empathy

Anyone with a product subscription service (think diapers, razors, or pet food) knows the feeling of gratitude that accompanies the delivery of a much needed product that arrives just in the nick of time. Imagine how much more grateful you'd be for this service if you, for whatever reason, were unable to drive and lived hours from the nearest store. It's a service that would greatly improve your life. But now imagine that the service gets overhauled and redesigned in such a way that it is only usable by people who own cars. You'd probably be pretty upset.

This subscription service example is hypothetical, yet in the United States, despite federal web accessibility requirements instituted to protect the rights of disabled Americans, this sort of discrimination happens frequently. In fact, anyone assuming the Winn-Dixie case was an isolated incident would be wrong. Web accessibility lawsuits are rising in number. The increase from 2015 to 2016 was 37%. While some of these may be what's known as " drive-by lawsuits," many of them represent plaintiffs like Juan Gil who simply want equal rights. Scott Dinin, Juan's attorney, explained, "We're not suing for damages. We're only suing them to follow the laws that have been in this nation for twenty-seven years."

For this reason and many others, now is the best time to take a proactive approach to web accessibility. In this article I'll help you create a blueprint for getting your website up to snuff.

The accessibility blueprint

If you'll be dealing with remediation, I won't sugarcoat it: successfully meeting web accessibility standards is a big undertaking, one that is achieved only when every page of a site adheres to all the guidelines you are attempting to comply with. As I mentioned earlier, those guidelines are usually WCAG 2.0 Level AA, which means meeting every Level A and AA requirement. Tight deadlines, small budgets, and competing priorities may increase the stress that accompanies a web accessibility remediation project, but with a little planning and research, making a website accessible is both reasonable and achievable.

My intention is that you may use this article as a blueprint to guide you as you undertake a DIY accessibility remediation project. Before you begin, you'll need to increase your accessibility know-how, familiarize yourself with the principles of universal design, and learn about the benefits of an accessible website. Then you may begin to evangelize the benefits of web accessibility to those you work with.

Have the conversation with leadership

Securing support from company leadership is imperative to the long-term success of your efforts. There are numerous ways to broach the subject of accessibility, but, sadly, in the world of business, substantiated claims top ethics and moral obligation. Therefore I've found one of the most effective ways to build a business case for web accessibility is to highlight the benefits.

Here are just a few to speak of:

Accessible websites are inherently more usable, and consequently they get more traffic. Additionally, better user experiences result in lower bounce rates, higher conversions, and less negative feedback, which in turn typically make accessible websites rank higher in search engines.

Like assistive technology, web crawlers (such as Googlebot) leverage HTML to get their information from websites, so a well marked-up, accessible website is easier to index, which makes it easier to find in search results.

There are a number of potential risks for not having an accessible website, one of which is accessibility lawsuits.

Small businesses in the US that improve the accessibility of their website may be eligible for a tax credit from the IRS.

Start the movement

If you can't secure leadership backing right away, you can still form a grassroots accessibility movement within the company. Begin slowly and build momentum as you work to improve usability for all users. Though you may not have the authority to make company-wide changes, you can strategically and systematically lead the charge for web accessibility improvements.

My advice is to start small. For example, begin by pushing for site-wide improvements to color contrast ratios (which would help color-blind, low-vision, and aging users) or work on making the site keyboard accessible (which would help users with mobility impairments or broken touchpads, and people such as myself who prefer not using a mouse whenever possible). Incorporate user research and A/B testing into these updates, and document the results. Use the results to champion for more accessibility improvements.

Read and re-read the guidelines

Build your knowledge base as you go. Learning which laws, rules, or guidelines apply to you, and understanding them, is a prerequisite to writing an accessibility plan. Web accessibility guidelines vary throughout the world. There may be other guidelines that apply to you, and in some cases, additional rules, regulations, or mandates specific to your industry.

Not understanding which rules apply to you, not reading them in full, or not understanding what they mean can create huge problems down the road, including excessive rework once you learn you need to make changes.

Build a team

Before you can start remediating your website, you'll need to assemble a team. The number of people will vary depending on the size of your organization and website. I previously worked for a very large company with a very large website, yet the accessibility team they assembled was small in comparison to the thousands of pages we were tasked to remediate. This team included a project manager, visual designers, user experience designers, front-end developers, content editors, a couple requirements folks, and a few QA testers. Most of these people had been pulled from their full-time roles and instructed to quickly become familiar with WCAG 2.0. To help you create your own accessibility team, I will explain in detail some of the top responsibilities of the key players:

Project manager is responsible for coordinating the entire remediation process. They will help run planning sessions, keep everyone on schedule, and report the progress being made. Working closely with the requirements people, their goal is to keep every part of this new machine running smoothly.

Visual designers will mainly address issues of color usage and text alternatives. In its present form, WCAG 2.0 contrast minimums only apply to text, however the much anticipated WCAG 2.1 update (due to be released in mid-2018) contains a new success criterion for Non-text Contrast, which covers contrast minimums of all interactive elements and "graphics required to understand the content." Visual designers should also steer clear of design trends that ruin usability.

UX designers should be checking for consistent, logical navigation and reading order. They'll need to test that pages are using heading tags appropriately (headings are for semantic structure, not for visual styling). They'll be checking to see that page designs are structured to appear and operate in predictable ways.

Developers have the potential to make or break an accessible website because even the best designs will fail if implemented incorrectly. If your developers are unfamiliar with WAI-ARIA, accessible coding practices, or accessible JavaScript, then they have a few things to learn. Developers should think of themselves as designers because they play a very important role in designing an inclusive user experience. Luckily, Google offers a short, free Introduction to Web Accessibility course and, via Udacity, a free, advanced two-week accessibility course. Additionally, The A11Y Project is a one-stop shop loaded with free pattern libraries, checklists, and accessibility resources for front-end developers.

Editorial review the copy for verbosity. Avoid using phrases that will confuse people who aren't native language speakers. Don't "beat around the bush" (see what I did there?). Keep content simple, concise, and easy to understand. No writing degree? No worries. There are apps that can help you improve the clarity of your writing and that correct your grammar like a middle school English teacher. Score bonus points by making sure link text is understandable out of context. While this is a WCAG 2.0 Level AAA guideline, it's also easily fixed and it greatly improves the user experience for individuals with varying learning and cognitive abilities.

Analysts work in tandem with editorial, design, UX, and QA. They coordinate the work being done by these groups and document the changes needed. As they work with these teams, they manage the action items and follow up on any outstanding tasks, questions, or requests. The analysts also deliver the requirements specifications to the developers. If the changes are numerous and complex, the developers may need the analysts to provide further clarification and to help them properly implement the changes as described in the specs.

QA will need to be trained to the same degree as the other accessibility specialists since they will be responsible for testing the changes that are being made and catching any issues that arise. They will need to learn how to navigate a website using only a keyboard and also by properly using a screen reader (ideally a variety of screen readers). I emphasized "properly" because while anyone can download NVDA or turn on VoiceOver, it takes another level of skill to understand the difference between "getting through a page" and "getting through a page with standard keyboard controls." Having individuals with visual, auditory, or mobility impairments on the QA team can be a real advantage, as they are more familiar with assistive technology and can test in tandem with others. Additionally, there are a variety of automated accessibility testing tools you can use alongside manual testing. These tools typically catch only around 30% of common accessibility issues, so they do not replace ongoing human testing. But they can be extremely useful in helping QA learn when an update has negatively affected the accessibility of your website.

Start your engines!

Divide your task into pieces that make sense. You may wish to tackle all the global elements first, then work your way through the rest of the site, section by section. Keep in mind that every page must adhere to the accessibility standards you're following for it to be deemed "accessible." (This includes PDFs.)

Use what you've learned so far by way of accessibility videos, articles, and guidelines to perform an audit of your current site. While some manual testing may seem difficult at first, you'll be happy to learn that some manual testing is very simple. Regardless of the testing being performed, keep in mind that it should always be done thoroughly and by considering a variety of users, including:

keyboard users;

blind users;

color-blind users;

low-vision users;

deaf and hard-of-hearing users;

users with learning disabilities and cognitive limitations;

mobility-impaired users;

users with speech disabilities;

and users with seizure disorders.

When you are in the weeds, document the patterns

As you get deep in the weeds of remediation, keep track of the patterns being used. Start a knowledge repository for elements and situations. Lock down the designs and colors, code each element to be accessible, and test these patterns across various platforms, browsers, screen readers, and devices. When you know the elements are bulletproof, save them in a pattern library that you can pull from later. Having a pattern library at your fingertips will improve consistency and compliance, and help you meet tight deadlines later on, especially when working in an agile environment. You'll need to keep this online knowledge repository and pattern library up-to-date. It should be a living, breathing document.

Cross the finish line ... and keep going!

Some people mistakenly believe accessibility is a set-it-and-forget-it solution. It isn't. Accessibility is an ongoing challenge to continually improve the user experience the way any good UX practitioner does. This is why it's crucial to get leadership on board. Once your site is fully accessible, you must begin working on the backlogs of continuous improvements. If you aren't vigilant about accessibility, people making even small site updates can unknowingly strip the site of the accessibility features you worked so hard to put in place. You'd be surprised how quickly it can happen, so educate everyone you work with about the importance of accessibility. When everyone working on your site understands and evangelizes accessibility, your chances of protecting the accessibility of the site are much higher.

It's about the experience, not the law

In December of 2017, Winn-Dixie appealed the case with blind patron Juan Carlo Gil. Their argument is that a website does not constitute a place of accommodation, and therefore, their case should have been dismissed. This case, and others, illustrate that the legality of web accessibility is still very much in flux. However, as web developers and designers, our motivation to build accessible websites should have nothing to do with the law and everything to do with the user experience.

Good accessibility is good UX. We should seek to create the best user experience for all. And we shouldn't settle for simply meeting accessibility standards but rather strive to create an experience that delights users of all abilities.

Additional resources and articles

If you are ready to learn more about web accessibility standards and become the accessibility evangelist on your team, here are some additional resources that can help.

Resources

Articles

Ready to learn more about creating accessible animations? Val Head shares new resources to help you get started.

Empathy sounds great in theory, but how can we actually practice it for our users? Susan Robertson shows how to get started.
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by Published in Beth Raduenzel User Experience , Accessibility The summer of 2017 marked a monumental victory for the millions of Americans living with a disability. On June 13th, a Southern District of Florida Judge ruled that Winn-Dixie's inaccessible website violated Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

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Free expert articles on all things digital for families to embed in your own website

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Parent Zone | At the heart of digital family life

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Parent Zone is a parenting organisation working to make the online world a safer, more positive place for families and children. Explore the ways Parent Zone can help your family, school or organisation understand online safety.

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A seven day celebration for, by, and about people who love the internet, showcasing world-changing ideas and technology through workshops, talks, and interactive sessions.

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Mozilla Festival (MozFest) brings the world together to leave the internet better than we found it. Mozilla, the non-profit behind the Firefox browser, invites you to our annual interactive festival in London, England. Come shape our best future online.

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UKCCIS framework for the development of esafety curricula

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Only go outside for food, health reasons or work (but only if you cannot work from home) If you go out, stay 2 metres (6ft) away from other people at all times Wash your hands as soon as you get home Do not meet others, even friends or family.

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Interactive resources for children and families about digital resilience

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Digiworld - Helping children become safer and more confident digital citizens

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Helping children become safer and more confident digital citizens

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Game from Australia for teens on managing social media pressures

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The Lost Summer is a role-playing video game, designed to be a highly engaging experience for 11-14 year olds while building digital intelligence skills and encouraging online safety.

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In 2013, for the first time, a majority of public-school students in this country-51 percent, to be precise-fell below the federal government's low-income cutoff, meaning they were eligible for a free or subsidized school lunch. It was a powerful symbolic moment-an inescapable reminder that the challenge of teaching low-income children has become the central issue in American education.

The truth, as many American teachers know firsthand, is that low-income children can be harder to educate than children from more-comfortable backgrounds. Educators often struggle to motivate them, to calm them down, to connect with them. This doesn't mean they're impossible to teach, of course; plenty of kids who grow up in poverty are thriving in the classroom. But two decades of national attention have done little or nothing to close the achievement gap between poor students and their better-off peers.

From Our June 2016 Issue

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In recent years, in response to this growing crisis, a new idea (or perhaps a very old one) has arisen in the education world: Character matters. Researchers concerned with academic-achievement gaps have begun to study, with increasing interest and enthusiasm, a set of personal qualities-often referred to as noncognitive skills, or character strengths-that include resilience, conscientiousness, optimism, self-control, and grit. These capacities generally aren't captured by our ubiquitous standardized tests, but they seem to make a big difference in the academic success of children, especially low-income children.

My last book, How Children Succeed, explored this research and profiled educators who were attempting to put it into practice in their classrooms. Since the book's publication, in 2012, the idea that educators should be teaching grit and self-control along with addition and subtraction has caught on across the country. Some school systems are embracing this notion institutionally. In California this spring, for example, a coalition of nine major school districts has been trying out a new school-assessment system that relies in part on measurements of students' noncognitive abilities, such as self-management and social awareness.

But here's the problem: For all our talk about noncognitive skills, nobody has yet found a reliable way to teach kids to be grittier or more resilient. And it has become clear, at the same time, that the educators who are best able to engender noncognitive abilities in their students often do so without really "teaching" these capacities the way one might teach math or reading-indeed, they often do so without ever saying a word about them in the classroom. This paradox has raised a pressing question for a new generation of researchers: Is the teaching paradigm the right one to use when it comes to helping young people develop noncognitive capacities?

What is emerging is a new idea: that qualities like grit and resilience are not formed through the traditional mechanics of "teaching"; instead, a growing number of researchers now believe, they are shaped by several specific environmental forces, both in the classroom and in the home, sometimes in subtle and intricate ways.

The process begins in early childhood, when the most important force shaping the development of these skills turns out to be a surprising one: stress. Over the past decade, neuroscientists have demonstrated with increasing clarity how severe and chronic stress in childhood-what doctors sometimes call toxic stress-leads to physiological and neurological adaptations in children that affect the way their minds and bodies develop and, significantly, the way they function in school.

Each of us has within us an intricate stress-response network that links together the brain, the immune system, and the endocrine system (the glands that produce and release stress hormones). In childhood, and especially in early childhood, this network is highly sensitive to environmental cues; it is constantly looking for signals from a child's surroundings that might tell it what to expect in the days and years ahead. When those signals suggest that life is going to be hard, the network reacts by preparing for trouble: raising blood pressure, increasing the production of adrenaline, heightening vigilance. Neuroscientists have shown that children living in poverty experience more toxic stress than middle-class children, and that additional stress expresses itself in higher blood pressure and higher levels of certain stress hormones.

In the short term, these adaptations may have benefits, especially in a dangerous environment. When your threat-detection system-sometimes referred to as your fight-or-flight response-is on high alert, you can react quickly to trouble. But in the longer term, they can cause an array of physiological problems and impede development of the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that controls our most complex intellectual functions, as well as our ability to regulate ourselves both emotionally and cognitively.

On an emotional level, toxic stress can make it difficult for children to moderate their responses to disappointments and provocations. A highly sensitive stress-response system constantly on the lookout for threats can produce patterns of behavior that are self-defeating in school: fighting, talking back, acting up, and, more subtly, going through each day perpetually wary of connection with peers or teachers.

On a cognitive level, chronically elevated stress can disrupt the development of what are known as executive functions: higher-order mental abilities that some researchers compare to a team of air-traffic controllers overseeing the workings of the brain. Executive functions, which include working memory, attentional control, and cognitive flexibility, are exceptionally helpful in navigating unfamiliar situations and processing new information, which is exactly what we ask children to do at school every day. When a child's executive functions aren't fully developed, school days, with their complicated directions and constant distractions, can become a never-ending exercise in frustration.

Executive functions also serve as the developmental building blocks-the neurological infrastructure-underpinning the noncognitive capacities that educators are now so focused on. What this suggests is that if we want to help children demonstrate these qualities in school, there are two places where we need to change our approach. One is the classroom, where right now many fundamental practices of modern American pedagogy ignore this science of adversity. The second is where children's neurobiological identity begins to be formed, long before they ever set foot in kindergarten: the home.

The most important environmental factor in children's early lives, researchers have shown, is the way their parents and other adults interact with them. Beginning in infancy, children rely on responses from their parents to help them make sense of the world. Researchers at Harvard's Center on the Developing Child have labeled these "serve and return" interactions. An infant makes a sound or looks at an object-that's the serve-and her parents return the serve by responding to her babbles and cries with gestures, facial expressions, and speech. More than any other experiences in infancy, these rudimentary interactions trigger the development and strengthening of connections among the regions of the brain that control emotion, cognition, language, and memory.

A second crucial role that parents play early on is as external regulators of their children's stress. When parents behave harshly or unpredictably-especially at moments when their children are upset-the children are less likely over time to develop the ability to manage strong emotions and respond effectively to stressful situations. By contrast, when a child's parents respond to her jangled emotions in a sensitive and measured way, she is more likely to learn that she herself has the capacity to cope with her feelings, even intense and unpleasant ones.

But if a home environment can have a positive impact on a child's development, it can also do the opposite. One of the most influential studies of the long-term effect of a stressful early home life is the ongoing Adverse Childhood Experiences Study, which was launched in the 1990s by Robert F. Anda, a physician at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Vincent J. Felitti, the founder of the preventive-medicine department at Kaiser Permanente. Anda and Felitti identified 10 categories of childhood trauma: three categories of abuse, two of neglect, and five related to growing up in a "seriously dysfunctional household." They found that the number of these traumas a person experiences in childhood (a number that has come to be known as a person's ace score) correlates in adulthood with health problems ranging from heart disease to cancer.

More recently, researchers using variations on Anda and Felitti's ace scale have found that an elevated ace score also has a negative effect on the development of a child's executive functions and on her ability to learn effectively in school. A study conducted by Nadine Burke Harris, a pediatrician and trauma researcher in San Francisco, found that just 3 percent of children in her clinic with an ace score of zero displayed learning or behavioral problems. But among children who had an ace score of four or more, 51 percent had learning or behavioral problems. A separate national study published in 2014 found that children with two or more aces were eight times as likely as children with none to demonstrate behavioral problems and more than twice as likely to repeat a grade in school. According to this study, slightly more than half of all children have never experienced a serious adverse event-but the other half, the ones with at least one ace, account for 85 percent of the behavioral problems that children exhibit.

For children who grow up without significant experiences of adversity, the skill-development process leading up to kindergarten generally works the way it's supposed to: Calm, consistent, responsive interactions in infancy with parents and other caregivers create neural connections that lay the foundation for a healthy array of attention and concentration skills. Just as early stress sends signals to the nervous system to maintain constant vigilance and prepare for a lifetime of trouble, early warmth and responsiveness send the opposite signals: You're safe; life is going to be fine. Let down your guard; the people around you will protect you and provide for you. Be curious about the world; it's full of fascinating surprises. These messages trigger adaptations in children's brains that allow them to slow down and consider problems and decisions more carefully, to focus their attention for longer periods, and to more willingly trade immediate gratification for promises of long-term benefits.

We don't always think of these abilities as academic in nature, but in fact they are enormously beneficial in helping kids achieve academic success in kindergarten and beyond. Without them, the transition from home or day care to kindergarten is likely to be fraught, and the challenge of learning the many things we ask kindergarten students to master can be overwhelming. In the classroom, neurocognitive difficulties can quickly turn into academic difficulties. Students don't learn to read on time, because it is harder for them to concentrate on the words on the page. They don't learn the basics of number sense, because they are too distracted by the emotions and anxieties overloading their nervous systems. As academic material becomes more complicated, they fall further behind. The more they fall behind, the worse they feel about themselves and about school. That creates more stress, which tends to feed into behavioral problems, which lead to stigmatization and punishment in the classroom, which keep their stress levels elevated, which makes it still harder to concentrate-and so on, throughout elementary school.

Fast-forward a few years, to the moment when those students arrive in middle or high school, and these executive-function challenges are now typically perceived to be problems of attitude or motivation. When teachers and administrators are confronted with students who find it hard to concentrate, manage their emotions, or deal calmly with provocation, the first instinct often is not to look at them as children who, because of a lifetime of stress, haven't yet developed a healthy set of self-regulation mechanisms. Instead, the adults see them as kids with behavioral problems who need, more than anything, to be disciplined.

When children and adolescents misbehave, we usually assume that they're doing so because they have considered the consequences of their actions and calculated that the benefits of misbehavior outweigh the costs. So our natural response is to increase the cost of misbehavior, by ratcheting up punishment. One of the chief insights that recent neurobiological research has provided, however, is that young people, especially those who have experienced significant adversity, are often guided by emotional and psychological and hormonal forces that are far from rational. This doesn't mean that teachers should excuse or ignore bad behavior. But it does explain why harsh punishments so often prove ineffective in motivating troubled young people to succeed.

Most American schools today operate according to a philosophy of discipline that has its roots in the 1980s and '90s, when a belief that schools would be safer and more effective if they had "zero tolerance" for violence, drug use, and other types of misbehavior led to a sharp rise in suspensions. In 2010, more than a tenth of all public-high-school students nationwide were suspended at least once. And suspension rates are substantially higher among certain demographic groups. African American students, for example, are suspended three times as often as white students. In Chicago public high schools (which have particularly good and well-analyzed data on suspensions), 27 percent of students who live in the city's poorest neighborhoods received an out-of-school suspension during the 2013-14 school year, as did 30 percent of students with a reported personal history of abuse or neglect.

Sixty percent of Chicago's out-of-school suspensions in public high schools are for infractions that don't involve violence or even a threat of violence: They are for talking back to teachers, violating school rules, and disruptive behavior. With the neurobiological research in mind, it's easy to see that kind of behavior-refusing to do what adults tell you to do, basically-as an expression not of a bad attitude or a defiant personality but of a poorly regulated stress-response system. Talking back and acting up in class are, at least in part, symptoms of a child's inability to control impulses, de-escalate confrontations, and manage anger and other strong feelings-the whole stew of self-regulation issues that can usually be traced to impaired executive-function development in early childhood.

The guiding theory behind much of the school discipline practiced in the United States today-and certainly behind the zero-tolerance, suspension-heavy approach that has dominated since the 1990s-is behaviorism, which is grounded in the idea that humans respond to incentives and reinforcement. If we get positive reinforcement for a certain behavior, we're likely to do it more; if we get negative reinforcement, we're likely to do it less.

Clearly, on some level, behaviorism works. People, including children, respond well to behavioral cues, at least in the short term. But researchers are coming to understand that there are limits to the effectiveness of rewards and punishments in education, and that for young people whose neurological and psychological development has been shaped by intense stress, straightforward reward systems are often especially ineffective.

Roland G. Fryer Jr., a celebrated economics professor at Harvard, has spent the past decade testing out a variety of incentive schemes with public-school students in Houston, New York, Chicago, and other American cities that have school systems with high poverty rates. Fryer has paid parents for attending parent-teacher conferences, students for reading books, and teachers for raising test scores. He has given kids cellphones to inspire them to study harder. Altogether, he has handed out millions of dollars in rewards and prizes. As a body of work, Fryer's incentive studies have marked one of the biggest and most thorough educational experiments in American history.

And yet in almost every case, Fryer's incentive programs have had no effect. From 2007 to 2009, Fryer distributed a total of $9.4 million in cash incentives to 27,000 students, to promote book reading in Dallas, to raise test scores in New York, and to improve course grades in Chicago -all with no effect. "The impact of financial incentives on student achievement," Fryer reported, "is statistically 0 in each city." In the 2010-11 school year, he gave cash incentives to fifth-grade students in 25 low-performing public schools in Houston, and to their parents and teachers, with the intent of increasing the time they spent on math homework and improving their scores on standardized math tests. The students performed the tasks necessary to get paid, but their average math scores at the end of eight months hadn't changed at all. When Fryer looked at their reading scores, he found that they actually went down.

The stark fact that complicates incentive studies like Fryer's is that children who grow up in difficult circumstances already have a powerful set of material incentives to get a good education. Adults with a high-school degree fare far better in life than adults without one. They not only earn more, on average, but they also have more-stable families, better health, and less chance of being arrested or incarcerated. Those with college degrees similarly do much better, on average, than those without. Young people know this. And yet when it comes time to make any of the many crucial decisions that affect their likelihood of reaching those educational milestones, kids growing up in adversity often make choices that seem in flagrant opposition to their self-interest, rendering those goals more distant and difficult to attain.

Within the field of psychology, one important body of thought that helps explain this apparent paradox is self-determination theory, which is the life's work of Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan, two professors at the University of Rochester. Deci and Ryan came up with the beginnings of their theory in the 1970s, when the field was mostly dominated by behaviorists, who believed that people's actions are governed solely by their motivation to fulfill basic biological needs and thus are highly responsive to straightforward rewards and punishments.

Deci and Ryan, by contrast, argued that we are mostly motivated not by the material consequences of our actions but by the inherent enjoyment and meaning that those actions bring us, a phenomenon called intrinsic motivation. They identified three key human needs-our need for competence, our need for autonomy, and our need for relatedness, meaning personal connection-and they posited that intrinsic motivation can be sustained only when we feel that those needs are being satisfied.

In their writing on education, Deci and Ryan acknowledge that many of the tasks that teachers ask students to complete each day are not inherently fun or satisfying; learning anything, be it painting or computer programming or algebra, involves a lot of repetitive practice. It is at these moments, they write, that extrinsic motivation becomes important: when tasks must be performed not for the inherent satisfaction of completing them, but for some separate outcome. When teachers are able to create an environment that fosters competence, autonomy, and relatedness, Deci and Ryan say, students are much more likely to feel motivated to do that hard work.

The problem is that when disadvantaged children run into trouble in school, either academically or behaviorally, most schools respond by imposing more control on them, not less. This diminishes their fragile sense of autonomy. As these students fall behind their peers academically, they feel less and less competent. And if their relationships with their teachers are wary or even contentious, they are less likely to experience the kind of relatedness that Deci and Ryan describe as being so powerfully motivating for young people in the classroom. Once students reach that point, no collection of material incentives or punishments is going to motivate them, at least not in a deep or sustained way.

All of which brings me back to the question of how to help children develop those mysterious noncognitive capacities. If we want students to act in ways that will maximize their future opportunities-to persevere through challenges, to delay gratification, to control their impulses-we need to consider what might motivate them to take those difficult steps. What Deci and Ryan's research suggests is that students will be more likely to display these positive academic habits when they are in an environment where they feel a sense of belonging, independence, and growth-or, to use Deci and Ryan's language, where they experience relatedness, autonomy, and competence.

So what do those academic environments look like? And how do we help teachers to create them?

A few years ago, a young economist at Northwestern University named C. Kirabo Jackson began investigating how to measure educators' effectiveness. In many school systems these days, teachers are assessed based primarily on one data point: the standardized-test scores of their students. Jackson suspected that the true impact teachers had on their students was more complicated than a single test score could reveal. So he found and analyzed a detailed database in North Carolina that tracked the performance of every single ninth-grade student in the state from 2005 to 2011-a total of 464,502 students. His data followed their progress not only in ninth grade but throughout high school.

Jackson had access to students' scores on the statewide standardized test, and he used that as a rough measure of their cognitive ability. This is the number that education officials generally look at when trying to assess teachers' impact. But then Jackson did something new. He created a proxy measure for students' noncognitive ability, using just four pieces of existing administrative data: attendance, suspensions, on-time grade progression, and overall GPA. Jackson's new index measured, in a fairly crude way, how engaged students were in school-whether they showed up, whether they misbehaved, and how hard they worked in their classes. Jackson found that this simple noncognitive proxy was, remarkably, a better predictor than students' test scores of whether the students would go on to attend college, a better predictor of adult wages, and a better predictor of future arrests.

Jackson's proxy measure allowed him to do some intriguing analysis of teachers' effectiveness. He subjected every ninth-grade English and algebra teacher in North Carolina to what economists call a value-added assessment. First he calculated whether and how being a student in a particular teacher's class affected that student's standardized-test score. Then, separately, he calculated the effect that teachers had on their students' noncognitive proxy measure: on their attendance, suspensions, timely progression from one grade to the next, and overall GPA.

Jackson found that some teachers were reliably able to raise their students' standardized-test scores year after year. These are the teachers, in every teacher-evaluation system in the country, who are the most valued and most rewarded. But he also found that there was another distinct cohort of teachers who were reliably able to raise their students' performance on his noncognitive measure. If you were assigned to the class of a teacher in this cohort, you were more likely to show up to school, more likely to avoid suspension, more likely to move on to the next grade. And your overall GPA went up-not just your grades in that particular teacher's class, but your grades in your other classes, too.

Jackson found that these two groups of successful teachers did not necessarily overlap much; in every school, it seemed, there were certain teachers who were especially good at developing cognitive skills in their students and other teachers who excelled at developing noncognitive skills. But the teachers in the second cohort were not being rewarded for their success with their students-indeed, it seemed likely that no one but Jackson even realized that they were successful. And yet those teachers, according to Jackson's calculations, were doing more to get their students to college and raise their future wages than were the much-celebrated teachers who boosted students' test scores.

Jackson's study didn't reveal whether these teachers increased their students' grit or optimism or conscientiousness and by how many percentage points. Instead, it suggested that that's probably the wrong question to be asking. Jackson's data showed that spending a few hours each week in close proximity to a certain kind of teacher changed something about students' behavior. And that was what mattered. Somehow these teachers were able to convey deep messages-perhaps implicitly or even subliminally-about belonging, connection, ability, and opportunity. And somehow those messages had a profound impact on students' psychology, and thus on their behavior.

The environment those teachers created in the classroom, and the messages that environment conveyed, motivated students to start making better decisions-to show up to class, to persevere longer at difficult tasks, and to deal more resiliently with the countless small-scale setbacks and frustrations that make up the typical student's school day. And those decisions improved their lives in meaningful ways. Did the students learn new skills that enabled them to behave differently? Maybe. Or maybe what we are choosing to call "skills" in this case are really just new ways of thinking about the world or about themselves-a new set of attitudes or beliefs that somehow unleash a new way of behaving.

So which messages most effectively motivate young people to persevere? And how does a teacher convey them to students? These are particularly lively questions in education right now, and the scholar trying most comprehensively to answer them is Camille A. Farrington, a former inner-city high-school teacher who now works at the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research. When she was teaching, Farrington sometimes felt mystified by the choices that some of her students made. Why weren't they more consistently motivated to work hard and thus reap the benefits of a good education? As a researcher, Farrington has carefully investigated this question, and in 2012, she and a team of colleagues published a report titled "Teaching Adolescents to Become Learners," which offered some novel answers.

The report was in many ways a reaction to the recent push among educators to identify, assess, and teach noncognitive skills. While Farrington agreed with the growing consensus that a student's ability to persevere in school was important, she was skeptical of the idea that perseverance could be taught in the same way that we teach math, reading, or history. "There is little evidence that working directly on changing students' grit or perseverance would be an effective lever for improving their academic performance," Farrington and her colleagues wrote. "While some students are more likely to persist in tasks or exhibit self-discipline than others, all students are more likely to demonstrate perseverance if the school or classroom context helps them develop positive mindsets and effective learning strategies."

They went on to identify a phenomenon they called academic perseverance-the tendency to maintain positive academic behaviors despite setbacks. What distinguishes students with academic perseverance, they wrote, is their resilient attitude toward failure. These students continue to work hard in a class even after failing a few tests; when they are stumped or confused by complex material, they look for new ways to master it rather than simply giving up. Academic perseverance, in Farrington's formulation, shares certain qualities with noncognitive capacities such as grit and self-control and delay of gratification. But unlike those personality traits, which psychologists have shown to be mostly stable over time, a student's academic perseverance, according to Farrington, is highly dependent on context. A student might be inclined to persevere in school in 10th grade but not in 11th grade. He might persevere in math class but not in history.

In essence, what Farrington found was this: If you are a teacher, you may never be able to get your students to be gritty, in the sense of developing some essential character trait called grit. But you can probably make them act gritty-to behave in gritty ways in your classroom. And those behaviors will help produce the academic outcomes that you (and your students and society at large) are hoping for.

What makes a student persevere in any given classroom on any given day? Farrington's answer is that it depends on his academic mind-set: the attitudes and self-perceptions and mental representations that are bouncing around inside his head. That mind-set is the product of countless environmental forces, but research done by Carol S. Dweck, a Stanford psychologist, and others has shown that teachers can have an enormous impact on their students' mind-sets, often without knowing it. Messages that teachers convey-large and small, explicit and implicit-affect the way students feel in the classroom, and thus the way they behave there.

Farrington has distilled this voluminous mind-set research into four key beliefs that, when embraced by students, seem to contribute most significantly to their tendency to persevere in the classroom:

1. I belong in this academic community.

2. My ability and competence grow with my effort.

3. I can succeed at this.

4. This work has value for me.

If students hold these beliefs in mind as they are sitting in math class, Farrington concludes, they are more likely to persevere through the challenges and failures they encounter there. And if they don't, they are more likely to give up at the first sign of trouble.

The problem, of course, is that students who grow up in conditions of adversity are primed, in all sorts of ways, not to believe any of Farrington's four statements when they're sitting in math class. This is in part due to the neurobiological effects of adversity, beginning in early childhood. Remember that one of the signal results of toxic-stress exposure is a hyperactive fight-or-flight mechanism, which does not encourage in students the soothing belief I belong here. Instead, it conveys opposite warnings, at car-alarm volume: I don't belong here. This is enemy territory. Everyone in this school is out to get me. Add to this the fact that many children raised in adversity, by the time they get to middle or high school, are significantly behind their peers academically and disproportionately likely to have a history of confrontations with school administrators. These students, as a result, tend to be the ones placed in remedial classes or subjected to repeated suspensions or both-none of which makes them likely to think I belong here or I can succeed at this.

Most American schools don't do a particularly good job of creating environments that convey to students, especially low-income students, the four beliefs that Farrington identified. What Kirabo Jackson seems to have discovered is that certain educators have been able to create such an environment in their own classroom, regardless of the climate in the school as a whole. Until recently, though, school-wide strategies that encouraged these positive mind-sets in students were rare.

Now, however, some new, more comprehensive approaches are emerging. Many of them draw on the neurobiological research that explains how a childhood full of toxic stress can produce obstacles to school success. They take as their premise that in order to help students overcome those obstacles, it may be necessary to alter some basic practices and assumptions within an entire school. These efforts target students' beliefs in two separate categories, each one echoing items on Farrington's list: first, students' feelings about their place in the school ( I belong in this academic community), and then their feelings about the work they are doing in class ( my ability and competence grow with my effort; I can succeed at this; this work has value for me).

One example of this comprehensive approach is Turnaround for Children, a school-transformation nonprofit that works in high-poverty schools in New York City; Newark, New Jersey; and Washington, D.C. According to research done by the organization, many of the behavior-management challenges that educators in high-poverty schools face are due to the combustible combination, in the classroom, of two cohorts of students. The first is a small group of students who have experienced high levels of toxic stress (and likely have high ace scores) and as a result are angry and rebellious and disruptive. This group, Turnaround estimates, represents between 10 and 15 percent of the student body in most high-poverty schools. Students in the second cohort have also experienced adversity and stress, but not to the same intense degree. These students are less likely to start trouble, but their highly sensitive fight-or-flight mechanisms are easily triggered when trouble arrives.

When Turnaround is contracted to work at a particular school, its intervention team, usually three or four people, begins by addressing the psychological needs of potentially disruptive students, sometimes offering them on-site counseling and mentoring, often referring them and their families to mental-health services. At the same time, the organization's team works to improve the classroom environment as a whole, coaching teachers in behavior-management techniques that dial confrontations down rather than up, and giving them strategies to help create a climate of belonging and engagement in the classroom.

Turnaround then expands its intervention to focus not just on the emotional atmosphere of the classroom but also on the teaching and learning that happens there. Last spring, I visited Middle School 45, in the Bronx, a high-poverty public school where Turnaround had been working for about a year. During my visit, much of the intervention team's focus was on encouraging teachers in what it called cooperative learning, a pedagogical approach that promotes student engagement in the learning process: less lecture time; fewer repetitive worksheets; more time spent working in small groups, solving problems, engaging in discussions, and collaborating on long-term creative projects. It's a style of teaching and classroom organization that is relatively common in independent schools and in wealthy suburbs but quite unusual in inner-city public schools.

For many teachers at MS 45, embracing this part of the Turnaround model was a challenge. Giving students more autonomy in their learning meant giving up control. And like many teachers at other high-poverty schools, those at MS 45 had come to believe that with students as potentially disruptive as theirs, strong, dominant teacher control was the only way to keep the classroom calm and orderly; handing over the reins would mean chaos. But Turnaround's coaches eventually convinced the teachers-or most of them, anyway-that giving students more opportunity to experience autonomy and to engage deeply in their own learning would improve their motivation and mind-set. When the teachers tried these new methods, they discovered, often to their surprise, that they worked.

That process was also in evidence at another school I visited recently: Polaris Charter Academy, on Chicago's West Side. Polaris is affiliated with a national nonprofit called EL Education. (The organization was known as Expeditionary Learning until October, when it changed its name.) The EL Education network is made up of more than 150 schools: urban, suburban, and rural; charter and traditional public; high-poverty and middle-class. Polaris, which enrolls students from kindergarten through eighth grade, has one of the more disadvantaged student bodies in the network: 94 percent of the students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, and the neighborhood where the school is located, West Humboldt Park, has high rates of violent crime, unemployment, and poverty.

Like Turnaround, EL Education uses two parallel strategies to try to develop the most beneficial academic mind-set in its students. The first strategy has to do with belonging and relationships; the second has to do with work and challenges. On the relationship side, the most important institution at EL schools is Crew, an ongoing, multiyear discussion and advisory group for students. Each EL student belongs to a crew, which typically meets every day for half an hour or so to discuss matters important to the students, both academic and personal. In middle school and high school, the groups are relatively intimate-10 or 15 kids-and students generally stay in the same crew for three years or longer, with the same teacher leading the group year after year. Many EL students will tell you that their crew meeting is the place where they most feel a sense of belonging at school; for some of them, it's the place where they most feel a sense of belonging, period.

Crew is the centerpiece of EL's strategy for immersing students in an environment of supportive relationships. But just as significant an element of the EL formula is its pedagogical strategy. Classrooms at EL schools are by design much more engaging and interactive than classrooms in most other American public schools. They are full of student discussions and group activities large and small; teachers guide the conversation, but they spend considerably less time lecturing than most other public-school teachers do. EL students complete a lot of rigorous and demanding long-term projects, often going through extensive and repeated revisions based on critiques from teachers and peers. They frequently work on these projects in collaborative groups, and many projects conclude with students giving a presentation in front of the class, the school, or even a community group. In addition, students are responsible, whenever possible, for assessing themselves; two or three times a year, at report-card time, parents or other family members come to the school for meetings known as student-led conferences, in which students as young as 5 narrate for their parents and teachers their achievements and struggles over the past semester.

The pedagogical guru behind EL's instructional practices and curriculum is Ron Berger, the organization's chief academic officer. Berger, who spent 28 years working as a public-school teacher in rural Massachusetts and an educational consultant before joining EL Education, clearly feels a special connection with those EL schools, like Polaris, that enroll high numbers of students growing up in adversity. When we spoke, he explained that this feeling of connection is rooted in his own childhood: He grew up with four siblings in a chaotic and unstable family. He knows firsthand how stress and trauma at home can unsettle and derail a child's development, and he understands that without the right intervention, the child may never recover from those early setbacks.

EL schools have been shown in independent studies to have a significant positive effect on academic progress. A 2013 study by Mathematica Policy Research revealed that students at five urban EL middle schools advanced ahead of peers at comparison schools by an average of 10 months in math and seven months in reading over the course of three years. The research also shows that an EL education has a greater positive impact on low-income students than it does on other students.

Berger said he is not surprised by that latter fact; he has a clear sense of the barriers that keep some low-income students from learning, and how and why the EL model might be able to help them overcome those barriers. "Some kids get withdrawn and protective," he told me. "Other kids get this kind of shell of being a tough guy, and they're frozen in school. Either way, it restricts them from being able to contribute in class, to be a part of discussions, to raise their hand, to show that they care about their learning. It holds back any kind of passion or interaction. They can't take risks in school, and you can't learn if you're not taking risks." Berger recognizes these behaviors, he said, because they are exactly what he himself did when he was a kid.

Students at EL schools, Berger said, can't hide the way that he did. Crew helps pull them out of their shell, and in class they're compelled daily to interact with their peers and teachers in group discussions and to collaborate on group projects, and before long that kind of interaction begins to feel natural. When I visited another EL school last spring, the Washington Heights Expeditionary Learning School (known as wheels), in Upper Manhattan, almost every classroom I observed was engaged in some kind of elaborate discussion or creative project that demanded involvement from every student. In one seventh-grade social-science class, the students were clustered in groups of four, working together with markers on a big poster. They had been assigned to represent either the Federalist or the Republican Party during the political debates of the 1790s, and they covered their posters with slogans and arguments supporting the case for their vision of government, preparing for a class-wide debate. The teacher glided from table to table, asking questions and offering advice, but for the most part the students managed themselves. I was struck by the unusual fact that these were middle-school students studying U.S. history who seemed genuinely to be having fun.

What's more, these students were among the most disadvantaged in the New York City public-school system. Eighty-eight percent of the student population at wheels has a family income that falls below the federal cutoff for a free lunch, and almost all are Latino or African American. They belong to a demographic, in other words, that in many big-city middle and high schools is seen as a behavioral challenge and an academic liability. In social-science class that day, however, they were learning complex material and behaving perfectly well-and not because they were incentivized with rewards or threatened with punishments, but because school was, for that period at least, actually kind of interesting.

Teachers and administrators at EL schools talk quite a bit about character-their term for noncognitive skills. The central premise of EL schools is that character is built not through lectures or direct instruction from teachers but through the experience of persevering as students confront challenging academic work. This, to me, is the most significant innovation in the work that is going on at EL schools. In general, when schools do try to directly address the impact that a stress-filled childhood might have on disadvantaged students, the first-and often the only-approach they employ has to do with their students' emotional health, with relationships and belonging. And while those students certainly need the sense of connection that comes from feeling embedded within a web of deep and close relationships at school, the crucial insight of EL Education is that belonging isn't enough on its own. For a student to truly feel motivated by and about school, he also has to perceive that he is doing work that is challenging, rigorous, and meaningful.

Approaches like those employed by Turnaround for Children and EL Education are growing in attention and prominence. But they are still quite rare. Most low-income students in the United States today are enrolled in schools where they are frequently disciplined but seldom challenged. That strategy clearly doesn't work very well for those students, and the research that psychologists, economists, and neuroscientists have been amassing in recent years now allows us to understand, more clearly than ever before, exactly why it doesn't work.

What is exciting to me about visiting schools like wheels and Polaris and MS 45 is that you can see the possibility, however embryonic, that a new approach to educating low-income children-one rooted in what we're discovering about brain development, human psychology, and the science of adversity-might now be emerging.

In December, the much-criticized No Child Left Behind Act, which dominated federal education policy for the past decade and a half, was finally euthanized, replaced by a new law that mostly shifts down to the states the accountability for student success that No Child Left Behind centralized in Washington, D.C. For all its flaws, No Child Left Behind had as its guiding principle a noble and important idea: that the academic-achievement gap between low-income children and their better-off peers could and must be closed. The law was spectacularly unsuccessful at accomplishing that goal-the gap in eighth-grade reading and math test scores has barely budged since 2003-but the failure of its methods doesn't diminish the urgency of its central goal.

Here's a hopeful thought: Perhaps with the demise of the law, the education debates that raged so furiously during the No Child Left Behind era-on charter schools and Common Core, teacher contracts and standardized testing-might now give way to more-productive discussions about what low-income children need to succeed. We know a lot more than we did when the law was passed about the powerful environmental forces that are acting on many low-income children, beginning in infancy. And we know a lot more than we used to about what interventions and strategies-both at home and in the classroom-most effectively help these young people thrive in school and beyond. A national conversation that starts from this growing scientific consensus and moves forward into policy might be our best chance to improve the lives of the 51 percent of American public-school students who most need our help.
This article is adapted from Paul Tough's new book, Helping Children Succeed: What Works and Why. This work was funded in part by a grant from the CityBridge Foundation, the education-focused foundation of Katherine and David Bradley, who also own The Atlantic.

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In 2013, for the first time, a majority of public-school students in this country-51 percent, to be precise-fell below the federal government's low-income cutoff, meaning they were eligible for a free or subsidized school lunch. It was a powerful symbolic moment-an inescapable reminder that the challenge of teaching low-income children has become the central issue in American education.

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What is 'adolescence'? This is a question we put to 28 teenagers aged 14-18 this summer.

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(PDF) Teen Views on Adolescence: Findings from...

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Book summary: What is 'adolescence'? This is a question we put to 28 teenagers aged 14-18 this summer. On the 28th of June 2018, a group of teenagers and....

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Stop spending hours transcribing notes after a brainstorm. When you download the free Post-it® App, you can instantly capture and share notes with the team without recaps or delays.

Meet your simple, real-time brainstorm app. With Brainstorm Session, you can simply brainstorm ideas, capture notes from the group and organize on a shared board in real-time. Where you work and how you work.

Whether you're working or learning remotely, the Post-it® App is the perfect way to capture and share ideas, keep track of assignments, or create colorful calendars with your friends.

Share across multiple platforms including Dropbox, Trello®, Miro, PowerPoint®, or synced across your devices.

Post-it® Notes come in all shapes and sizes - not just squares. Now your team can create, capture and collaborate with more than just square notes in the Post-it® App!

During distance learning, Kanban boards can be a useful tool to keep learning on track, share answers with teachers, and keep your assignments in order. Learn how to begin here.

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Stop spending hours transcribing notes after a brainstorm. When you download the free Post-it® App, you can instantly capture and share notes with the team without recaps or delays. Meet your simple, real-time brainstorm app. With Brainstorm Session, you can simply brainstorm ideas, capture notes from the group and organize on a shared board in real-time.

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NPC's four pillar approach

by Anne Kazimirski, David Pritchard

At NPC we believe in impact measurement as a way for charities and funders to increase their effectiveness. We know it helps organisations improve what they do and deliver the best results for their beneficiaries. Here we publish our four pillar approach which provides clear and practical guidance on developing an impact measurement framework.

Building your measurement framework

Building an effective measurement framework depends on a strong foundation. It requires buy-in from senior staff and trustees, the investment of time and money, and a culture that is committed to learning and improving-only then can our four pillar approach be applied. And of course the development and implementation of a measurement framework is not an end in itself: to see the benefits you need to use the findings to review and improve your practices.

While ours is not the only approach, we know through our experience that it works for a variety of sizes and types of charities and funders, and results in an efficient, understandable and useful end product.
Step one: Map your theory of change
A theory of change should be at the heart of your approach because it shows what you want to achieve and how you plan to achieve it, setting out the causal links between your activities and your end goal.
Step two: Prioritise what you measure
Your impact is likely to be diffuse, affecting different people in different ways. Prioritise the most important outcomes in your theory of change and focus on measuring those.
Step three: Choose your level of evidence
Choose an appropriate level of rigour of evidence that suits the needs of your stakeholders. This will depend on a combination of what is desired or needed and what is practical.
Step four: Select your sources and tools
You may be able to use existing data or tools, or you may need to develop your own. It is likely others will be measuring the same outcomes as you, so look at what already exists and assess its suitability.

The work NPC performed on developing a theory of change and measurement tools was hugely useful.

Nick Carey, Shaw Trust

Read more

Download the two-page summary.

Check out the press release.

Use the Twitter hashtag #4pillars to see what people are saying > and tell us what you think too!

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At NPC we believe in impact measurement as a way for charities and funders to increase their effectiveness. We know it helps organisations improve what they do and deliver the best results for their beneficiaries. Here we publish our four pillar approach which provides clear and practical guidance on developing an impact measurement framework.

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Revealing Reality - Relevant Publications

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Revealing Reality - Relevant Publications

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Through the Looking Glass - The research explores in detail how technology is being used, focusing particularly on inequalities and the skills that can help young people lead successful digital lives.

Life in ‘Likes’ - While social media is officially for those aged 13 and above, recent statistics show it is also widely used by 8-12 year olds. Our research for the Children’s Commissioner reveals  the impact this has –  while these children enjoy using social media for fun and to stay in touch, it can also have negative effects on their emotional wellbeing.

Smartphone by Default - By highlighting the direct and indirect detriment caused by smartphone-only internet access, we helped Ofcom understand exactly what this issue is about – and where it sits in relation to the key policy areas of media literacy and digital inclusion.

Scrolling News - research for Ofcom used a combination of in-depth interviews and digital behaviour tracking methods to gain an unprecedented insight into online news use.

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We are a multidisciplinary agency, helping our clients achieve change. This is the future of research.

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Informed Consent for Children and Young People - BBC Guidelines

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Informed Consent for Children and Young People - BBC Guidelines

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Children and young people are very important to the BBC. They contribute and interact with us in many different ways - as contributors, actors, presenters, through our interactive and user generated content, via all our services. We also aim to provide them with challenging, educative, enjoyable and interesting content and to help them make sense of the world in which they live. Ensuring the content children consume is appropriate is considered throughout the Editorial Guidelines and, specifically, in Section 5: Harm and Offence. This section is concerned with how we deal with children and young people who contribute to and interact with our content, whether or not it is aimed at children, or usually includes them as contributors.

We must always safeguard the welfare of the children and young people who contribute to our content, wherever in the world we operate. This includes preserving their right to speak out and to participate, as enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. The Ofcom Broadcasting Code obliges broadcasters to take "Due care ... over the physical and emotional welfare and the dignity of people under eighteen who take part or are otherwise involved in programmes." (Rule 1.28, Ofcom Broadcasting Code.) This obligation is irrespective of any consent that might have been given by a parent or other adult acting in loco parentis. The Code also requires that " People under eighteen must not be caused unnecessary distress or anxiety by their involvement in programmes or by the broadcast of those programmes." (Rule 1.29, Ofcom Broadcasting Code.) We are also subject to the law regarding children.

(See Section 18 The Law: 18.9)

For the purposes of the Editorial Guidelines and unless stated otherwise, a child is someone under the age of 15 years. Young people are those aged 15, 16 and 17. (Note: These definitions reflect the Ofcom Broadcasting Code which clasifies "Children" as "people under the age of fifteen years".) 'Parental consent' is normally required before involving anyone under 16 in our output. However, age may not be the only consideration.

(See Section 9 Children and Young People as Contributors: 9.4.14 - 9.4.19)

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Children and young people are very important to the BBC. They contribute and interact with us in many different ways - as contributors, actors, presenters, through our interactive and user generated content, via all our services. We also aim to provide them with challenging, educative, enjoyable and interesting content and to help them make sense of the world in which they live.

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Google Digital Safety andCitizenship Curriculum

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Google Digital Safety andCitizenship Curriculum

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Telling people what you want and need can be difficult. MOMO apps help you organise your thoughts and make it easier to tell your worker what you think. Your worker will get a better insight into what’s going on, from your point of view.

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The original MOMO app that helps you say what you want, when you want.

MOMO One helps you organise your thoughts in a way that SMS and instant messaging apps just can't.
Use it:
- on your own, or with a worker or carer
- when you need to get something off your chest
- when you have a meeting, instead of paper forms
- when you want to share some good news
- to get a problem sorted or make a complaint

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The original MOMO app that helps you say what you want, when you want. MOMO One helps you organise your thoughts in a way that SMS and instant messaging apps just can't.

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5 TYPES OF DATA FOR ASSESSING YOUR WORK: AN EXPLAINER

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5 TYPES OF DATA FOR ASSESSING YOUR WORK: AN EXPLAINER

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5 types of data for assessing your work: An explainer

by James Noble, Impact Management Lead Measurement & Evaluation

James Noble is a social researcher with 20 years experience across a range of settings.

I've worked with many charities and social enterprises over the years-to help them work out what data they need to understand and improve their work. It can be a confusing question, particularly when people are new to evaluation and research. During our co-design work for the Impact Management Programme we have found that even the word 'data' seems to scare some people off.

But recently I have been struck by a simple but very helpful observation: there are basically five distinct types of data to consider when assessing a service. These are as follows:

Asks: Is your service effective at reaching the intended target group?

Establishes: The characteristics of your service users.

If your service aims to, for example, reduce loneliness you will need to know that you reach people who are actually experiencing loneliness.

The way to approach this is to go back to your theory of change, which should state clearly who you aim to work with and their particular characteristics. This can then be translated directly into the information you collect from people when they first come to the service. You can do this by just asking your users-for example, 'How often do you feel lonely?'-or, if applicable, or by finding out from the organisations that refer people to you.

How often to collect it? Routinely. User data is best collected from all your service users during the sign-up stage or shortly afterwards.

2) Engagement data

Asks: How effective is your service at continuing to engage your target service users?

Establishes: The extent to which people use your service and how they use it.

This is about whether or not you effectively deliver the service to your intended users. Familiar terms like 'activities' and 'outputs' are part of this; but I prefer 'engagement' because that's what actually matters.

Specific questions include:

How often do people come? For how long?

How engaged are they?

What kinds of activities and processes do they engage in?

How often to collect it? Routinely. This information is best collected on an ongoing basis-as and when people use the service-ideally using an electronic case management system with a direct link to user data, so you can look at who engages and who doesn't.

3) Feedback data

Asks: What do people think about the service?

By getting feedback you will really start to test your theory of change; to establish whether your service gets the reaction you want; and whether it is beginning to work in the way intended. Specific questions might include:

Do people enjoy the service? Rate it? Find it useful?

Would they recommend it to someone else?

What aspects do people rate the best/least?

What is the quality of relationship you establish with them?

How could the service be improved?

How often to collect it? Routinely. Keep checking this using both formal methods-such as surveys or simple satisfaction rating systems-and informal methods-like social media, one to one conversations or suggestion boxes. You should aim to collect feedback data from beneficiaries, staff, volunteers-basically anyone involved in the project.

4) Outcomes data

Asks: How have people been influenced or helped by your service in the short-term?

Establishes: The immediate resources, benefits or assets that your users gain from the service.

Key questions might include:

What is different now? Do people make positive changes in their knowledge, attitudes and behaviours?

How, if it all, do they think your service has helped?

Which aspects of the service have helped which types of service users in which circumstances? And which have not?

How often to collect it? Occasionally. Outcome data is best collected by staff or volunteers because they develop the strongest relationships with people. But they should not spend all their time collecting this data, and you may not need to collect it from everyone-you could just collect it from samples of service users or case studies.

5) Impact data

Establishes: The long-term difference achieved for individuals, families, communities.

Asks: Have the outcomes achieved (above) helped people to change their lives for the better?

Your impact is the difference you make. Depending on your service's theory of change, this might be increased educational attainment, improved physical health, reduced crime, stronger communities, increased social mobility and so on.

How often to collect? Exceptional circumstances. This is the hardest data to collect so should by done through higher-quality evaluations, when enough time has passed and ideally using a comparison group. Many services do not need to collect this data at all, as I have argued in a previous blog.

___

Having defined these categories I now use them every time I'm working on a charity's data requirements. I find they help us cover all possible data collection needs in a systematic way, and identify any gaps or challenges. They have also been very well received by the organisations we're working with on the Impact Management Programme-so we wanted to share them more widely.

Do have a go using this in your organisation, and feel free to let me know what you think in the comments.

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5 types of data for assessing your work: An explainer

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NPC has worked with many charities and social enterprises over the years to help them work out what data they need to understand and improve their work. It can be a confusing question, and sometimes even the word 'data' puts people off. Here our head of impact management James Noble introduces the different kinds of...

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Lamplight is an online database system designed to be scaleable and flexible. You set the fields you need. You choose the modules that will suit you best, and you can scale the system up or down as your organisations grows or your needs change.

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The framework is intended to be used by everyone in the UK engaged in supporting adults to enhance their essential digital skills. The benefits of working to a common framework include enabling progression and transferability of skills – as well as facilitating measurement. This is the first update of the Basic Digital Skills Framework since its original publication in 2015.

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Thank you for your interest in the Tech Partnership. Although the organisation has now closed, many of its activities have been taken forward by others, as set out below. Please make contact with them if you are interested in digital skills.
Higher Education (Degrees & Degree Apprenticeships) >>> TechSkills

The collective work of employers and universities continues, with all Higher Education activities - including degrees, degree apprenticeships and Tech Industry Gold accreditation - being taken forward by TechSkills.

If you are interested in industry backed degree apprenticeships or degrees, including IT Management for Business (ITMB) and Software Engineering for Business (SEfB), please register to get updates at www.techskills.org or contact Julia Bateson [email protected] .

Many of the former Tech Partnership's research factsheets and other online resources are freely available in the TechSkills' library.

Apprenticeship levels 2, 3 & 4 >>> BCS, NSAR and Instructus Skills

Whilst work on degree apprenticeships continues through TechSkills, the organisations work on apprenticeships levels 2, 3 and 4 has been transferred to three companies:

BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, is supporting employers in their collective work on apprenticeship standards at levels 2, 3 and 4. The contact is [email protected] , tel 07814 889692.

NSAR, the National Skills Academy for Rail, is supporting employers on the External Quality Assurance of apprenticeships at levels 2, 3 and 4, to ensure parity of end point assessment across different awarding organisations. Contact is via [email protected] , tel 0203 021 0575.

Instructus Skills is responsible for certification for digital apprenticeship frameworks. Contact is via [email protected] , tel 01536 738631.

Schools (TechFuture) >>> City and Guilds

The Tech Partnership's work in schools - the TechFuture portfolio of TechFuture Classroom, TechFuture Girls, TechFuture Badges and TechFuture Ambassadors - is now with City and Guilds. If you would like to know more, please contact [email protected] or Patrick Craven on [email protected] , tel 07718 092113

Essential Digital Skills >>> The Department for Education

The Essential Digital Skills Framework defines the digital skills adults need to safely benefit from, participate in and contribute to the digital world. This has been transferred to the Crown, with contact via [email protected] .

Thank you for your interest. We hope you will get involved with the new organisations to continue to help the UK develop the digital skills it needs for the future.

The Tech Partnership, September 2018

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Thank you for your interest in the Tech Partnership. Although the organisation has now closed, many of its activities have been taken forward by others, as set out below. Please make contact with them if you are interested in digital skills.

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Interact and vote with smartphones during presentations

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Your browser either doesn't support Javascript, or you've turned it off. To use Mentimeter, please make sure to turn Javascript on. How do I enable Javascript?

Our array of features will help you make a more effective and dynamic presentation.

So much more than just fancy slides

More control at your fingertips

Turn your smartphone into a presentation remote.

Collect data, gain insights

Use your data to help you improve, adapt, and become a more confident presenter.

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Free & Interactive Audience Engagement Platform. Check out all the features that can help you to engage your audience.

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Commonly asked questions about how to approach evaluation

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Commonly asked questions about how to approach evaluation of quality improvement in health care

Evaluation is an essential part of quality improvement and when done well it can help solve problems, inform decision making and build knowledge. While evaluation comes in many shapes and sizes, its key purpose is to help us to develop a deeper understanding of how best to improve health care.
Download Evaluation: what to consider.
People involved in quality improvement often ask us about how to approach evaluation. Inspired by the most commonly asked questions, this guide is intended to assist those new to evaluation by suggesting methodological and practical considerations and providing resources to support further learning.

Ten questions covered in the guide

1. Why do an evaluation?

2. What are the different types of evaluation?

3. What are the design considerations for an evaluation?

4. What are we comparing our intervention with?

5. How does evaluation differ from other forms of measurement?

6. What practical issues should we consider?

7. When should we start and finish an evaluation?

8. How do we cope with changes in the intervention when the evaluation is underway?

9. Should we do the evaluation ourselves or commission an external team?

10. How do we communicate evaluation findings?

The guide is not prescriptive or step-by-step as people and organisations will have very diverse evaluation needs. Instead, it aims to stimulate your thinking and support your plans for an evaluation that delivers what you need.

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Commonly asked questions about how to approach evaluation of quality improvement in health care Evaluation is an essential part of quality improvement and when done well it can help solve problems, inform decision making and build knowledge.

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Family information website run by ProMo-Cymru.

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FamilyPoint Cymru - Information for your family in Wales

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FamilyPoint Cymru connects families in Wales with essential services for information, advice and support.

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Youth information website run by ProMo-Cymru.

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TheSprout is Cardiff's online magazine and info site for 11-25's, by 11-25's and organisations that wish to support them. Get submitting now!

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Play the role of a journalist covering a breaking news story in the BBC iReporter game.

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View and remix code on live websites - good for 'fake news' activities

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Mozilla is a global nonprofit dedicated to keeping the Internet a global public resource that is open and accessible to all.

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Digital Literacy / Skills Framework Summary 

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Digital Literacy / Skills Framework Summary 

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A really useful collation of lots of the digital skills frameworks that you may hear referenced. Created by Alicja Pawluczuk.

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apawluczuk | Digital Literacy/Skills Evaluation

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Please note that these the links below have been identified in my literature review and have been mainly used in a variety of settings (projects involving adults, young people or children). There is a variety of resources from academic frameworks to practical guides how to facilitate evaluation process of "digital projects".

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I referred to this study numerous times in my application, and it's a very interesting read

Alexx
MRSN

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The myths of the digital native and the multitasker

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We are a multidisciplinary agency, helping our clients achieve change. This is the future of research.

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Doug Belshaw's Presentation for Workshop 1 - 'What is Digital Literacy?'

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Doug Belshaw's Presentation for Workshop 1 - 'What is Digital Literacy?'

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Carnegie UK Trust - #NotWithoutMe digital skills session (11 July 2018) 

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BAFTA Guru is BAFTA's content hub for career starters packed full of inspirational videos, podcasts and interviews. Whether you've taken your first steps in the industry or are just starting out, you'll find plenty here to motivate and help you along the way.

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The Vlogstar Challenge is powered by the Jack Petchey Foundation and Media Trust in partnership with YouTube and the Evening Standard. It is an exciting vlogging workshop and competition for 16-25 year olds. The Vlogstar Challenge is available to youth organisations and schools in London and Essex.

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The Vlogstar Challenge is offering organisations free vlogging training for 16-25 year olds across London and Essex.

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Simple tool for creating podcasts.

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Get to know Spotify for Podcasters, the free, all-in-one podcast platform for every creator.

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Doug Belshaw - 8 essential elements of digital literacy

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Doug Belshaw - 8 essential elements of digital literacy

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The essential elements of digital literacies: Doug Belshaw at TEDxWarwick

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Part of our work supporting families involves commissioning and undertaking research into areas affecting children and young people in the digital age.Read our papers and reports here.

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With working example apps to remix, a code editor to modify them, instant hosting and deployment - anybody can build a web app on Glitch, for free.

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Glitch: The friendly community where everyone builds the web

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Simple, powerful, free tools to create and use millions of apps.