The Singing Landscape Project uses research by Yvette Staelens and Dr. C.J. Bearman to raise awareness of English folk music, create a sense of common ownership over 'the music of the people', and encourage enquiry into the rich but largely unknown store of music discovered and collected by George Gardiner, Percy Grainger, Cecil Sharp, and Ralph Vaughan Williams, amongst others. It proposes a three-way interactive knowledge transfer between academia, museums, and the general public on an exciting personal journey to a largely ignored heritage.\n\nThe project deals with more than 600 traditional musicians and dancers collected from in the three counties of Gloucestershire, Hampshire, and Somerset. It had been assumed that personal detail about their lives was not recoverable - a few lines in a census entry, no more - but diligent research in national and local archives, plus oral history material, has revealed a wealth of detail about the milieu within which traditional music operated. For example, so little was known about the great Somerset singer Emma Overd (1838-1928) that not even her first name was certain. Sufficient was recovered to give her a deserved place in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and to show that her fellow musicians were among the butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers of the street where she lived.\n\nThe project engages Bournemouth University with the museum and archive services of Hampshire, Gloucestershire and Somerset to produce a series of presentations and exhibitions revealing hidden collections and new knowledge. It also proposes to produce Folk Maps for Gloucestershire and Hampshire to join the existing Map (the first of its kind) compiled by C.J. Bearman and Yvette Staelens and published by Somerset County Council in 2006. 20,000 copies were printed for free distribution as a cultural, educational and tourism resource. Somerset County Council regards the Map as a valuable addition to its cultural output, and reported wide press interest in its release. \n\nInitial research outputs have included 'Somerset Sisters', a musical performance of songs collected from Cecil Sharp's women source singers which was commissioned by the Chard Foundation for Women in Music in 2001. This performance was subsequently promoted by the rural touring scheme 'Take Art' and toured to seven venues in the county. In 2003, a commercial CD of collected Somerset Folk Songs was developed and issued to celebrate the centenary of Cecil Sharp's first collecting journey around Hambridge. Some of this material was broadcast by the BBC 1 in a 'Songs of Praise' programme in the UK and Australia and by Radio 4 as a feature on 'Women's Hour'.The research has also attracted American interest with the research team being invited to share their work via a presentation to the International Folk Alliance Conference in Nashville in 2003.\n\nBack in the UK there is at present an unprecedented interest in family history. Among the project's aims in taking this material back to the public is that of inviting further oral history contributions to be placed in county archives to provide a resource for researchers and family historians. Some of the biographical material on Emma Overd came from her former employer's daughter who remembered Emma taking her out in her pram. This project investigates an undiscovered country, now present only in the mind and soon to be gone for ever.\n\nThe Singing Landscape Project is an exciting collaboration between museums and academia with a distinct focus on public engagement. We want to excite people to discover more about their singing ancestors and to join us in a celebration of the rich folk music heritage of the people of England. \n\n\n

This knowledge exchange project builds on the best science from three areas, firstly flood risk science and management, secondly catchment source control (runoff attenuation, SuDS and other green infrastructure) and thirdly ecosystem services assessment and payment for ecosystem services markets. It will be undertaken by the Centre for Floods, Communities and Resilience and the Centre for Transport & Society at UWE, Bristol in partnership with Network Rail, South Gloucestershire Council and Somerset Council. The primary objective is to assess the potential for catchment source control to reduce flooding impacts to the railway assets and therefore increase the resilience of the network. In order to explore the benefits of this approach an ecosystem services approach will be used to assess these services which will be contextualised in relation to a component of the study which assesses the direct and indirect costs of network disruption. The potential of a payment for ecosystem services market to fund the catchment intervention will be explored.

The aim of the South West Coastal Local Policy Innovation Partnership (SWC LPIP) is to bring cross-sector and cross-boundary partners together to co-design solutions to address the complex and interlinked problems facing coastal communities. There is growing awareness of coastal disadvantage. Evidence presented in the 2021 Chief Medical Officer's annual report shows that coastal areas have some of the worst health outcomes in England. The 2022 Levelling up White Paper similarly notes that seaside towns have among the highest levels of community need and poor opportunities for the people who grow up there. While policy attention is starting to be directed towards the needs of coastal communities, there several barriers to developing effective (and cost-effective) policy solutions. We know, for example, that the decline of traditional industries and strong reliance on hospitality is related to low incomes and seasonal jobs. Economic opportunities are likely to impact on detrimental patterns of in- and out-migration which, in turn, affect educational capital and the skills base. These, in turn may explain the fact that higher productivity sectors such as the digital, creative and blue economies have not emerged in many coastal areas, reinforcing the low wage economy. The lack of such opportunities will also impact on migration patterns, as will unaffordable housing and poor transport links. In other words, all these factors are highly interconnected. This (a) raises questions about the most appropriate 'entry points' for intervention and (b) requires a diverse range of stakeholders - from the public, business and voluntary and community sectors as well as citizens themselves - to work together in understanding problems and co-designing (rather than duplicating) policy solutions. A key focus of the LPIP is to ensure that partners who are spending scarce resources on improving the lives of coastal citizens are making the best use of those resources. Embedding research and evaluation is a key part of effective policy design which should draw on existing evidence of good practice or, as is usually the case with respect to coastal disadvantage, address knowledge gaps where evidence does not exist. Part of this requires a better (and more joined-up) use of existing data, promoting a shift from 'business' to 'strategic' intelligence. It also demands meaningful engagement with citizens to ensure that those responsible for designing and implementing projects are asking the ask the right questions and identifying the right solutions. Any innovations that are designed and implemented should be piloted and evaluated, with a willingness to learn what works - but also what doesn't work, with findings shared with other communities facing coastal challenges. The aim of Phase One of this project is to support the establishment of partnerships of people and organisations in Cornwall, Devon and West Somerset with the aim of building a consensus around what the key economic, community and environmental problems are in this region and how best solutions can be developed. As well as facilitating practice-policy exchange and the design and delivery of new ways of working, the South-West Coastal LPIP will establish an evidence repository so that new coastal datasets (linked and at a greater level of granularity) and evidence of good practice can be shared across the region and to coastal areas beyond.

When social workers work with children who have been or are likely to be abused or neglected, their first duty is to try to ensure the safety of the child. In many situations, such children can remain with their parents or main carers, so long as the necessary support can be provided to prevent further abuse or neglect from occurring. Where this is not possible, the removal of children into the care system is often the only remaining option. Crucial to maintaining a child successfully at home is the engagement of the parents with the necessary services, and the ability of those parents to make changes in their parenting behaviour. Unfortunately, the difficulties of assessing and understanding parents' engagement and capacities to change are significant. Instances are relatively common of social workers being over-optimistic about parents' abilities, or of misinterpreting willingness or friendliness towards professionals for a genuine ability to change their behaviour. Shortcomings of this kind have occurred in significant numbers of cases involving child deaths from abuse or neglect, the well-know case in the UK of 'Baby Peter' being a notable example. The principal investigator of the proposed project (Dr Platt) has extensive experience in both practice and research in relation to engaging parents with services, and working to change and enhance their parenting behaviour. Most recently, he has published a model that seeks to explain what leads to good engagement of parents with the necessary service interventions. This model will be used as the cornerstone for the project, which will involve developing methods and materials to help social workers assess, more accurately, parental engagement and capacity to change. The project will also draw on other relevant work, both at the University of Bristol, and (internationally) in social work and related disciplines. At the centre of this project will be a consultation with partner organisations to develop methods and materials that will be usable in the pressurised context of social work practice. Three organisations have agreed to work with the University of Bristol, all of which are local authority children's services departments in the South West of England. They have agreed to commit staff time to the collaborative development of these materials, working with a small team from the university, comprising the principal investigator, and a research associate who will be a social worker with relevant practice experience. Following an initial design phase, groups of staff in each partner agency will be given training in using the new methods, followed by a period during which consultancy will be provided to support the use of those materials in practice. Towards the end of the project, which has a proposed duration of 12 months, there will be an evaluation of the usefulness, applicability and success of the methods and materials that will have been developed. Following evaluation, the materials will be revised as necessary, and disseminated more widely. Dissemination will be through publication in suitably accessible formats, by offering training on a fee-paid basis to organisations who may request it, and through the usual academic outlets. Further evaluation of the impact of use of the materials on outcomes for children over a longer time frame would be beyond the scope of the project, but, depending on findings, a future funding bid from a suitable funder would be considered.

The proposed Network revolves around three two-day workshops convened to discuss local and global processes of environmental change at specific locations that provide rich practical examples of such changes. The first workshop will be held in the Quantock Hills, Somerset (a mosaic of upland heath, ancient woodland, conifer plantation and small-scale mixed farming, where many essential ingredients of the romantic perspective on nature were developed by Coleridge and Wordsworth, and which became England's first designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty [1956]). The second workshop will take place at Kielder Water and Forest, Northumberland (northern Europe's largest artificial lake and Europe's largest planted forest). The third workshop is at Wicken Fen,Cambridgeshire (Britain's first nature reserve and island of wetland within one of the world's most intensively farmed environments, and with a continuing history as a key site for scientific research since the advent of the ecological sciences). Each site serves as an instructive example of different types of environmental change, anthropogenic and autogenic, long-term and short-term, as well as instances of continuity. At these site-specific workshops, a core team of mainly academic participants will meet with representatives of a local, non-university project partner to critically examine what we mean by 'the environment' and 'environmental change' in both current and past contexts, and on local and international scales. These locations will demand in a concrete and locationally-specific way that we can relate the concepts and histories addressed in the workshops to material processes, and confront us with the direct issue of how material change shapes those histories, along with the opportunity to intensively engage with a wide range of approaches in the humanist tradition - documents, maps, photos, oral history, conversations with managers and ecologists, and art works. Academics and non-academics alike often treat 'environment' as having self-evident meaning. Yet 'environment' is no less socially, culturally and historically constructed than 'nature', 'wilderness' and 'landscape'. The notion of 'environmental change' also requires more critical examination that it has received to date. In addition, workshop participants will address the question of how conflicting narratives (academic and popular) emerge around places - a theme for which workshop locations provide ideal points for exploration - and how narratives of environmental change can engage effectively with current concerns and future scenarios (especially climate change). Many members of the public (and environmentalists) remain wedded to the conceit of a 'balance of nature' and a timeless 'state of nature', especially within protected environments. Yet all ecosystems are inherently dynamic.These workshop settings and agendas will facilitate fruitful and novel interactions and knowlege exchange between those engaged in the study environmental change, past and present, and those who plan for and manage environmental change. \n\nThrough these workshops (supported by a website) and Network outputs (working and summary papers, not least to brief project partners on workshop outcomes, and an edited collection of essays), we will provide a framework for the further development of environmental history in the UK by drawing together specialists from across the country in stimulating 'environments' in which to deepen mutual understandings, common interests, future collaborative activities and research projects, as well as strengthening their capacity to engage publicly and inform public policy. The participants include senior, mid-career scholars, and, perhaps most importantly, early-career scholars and research students. Our ambition is to insert environmental history more firmly into the mainstream of historical studies in the UK and to raise its profile among environmental policy makers and managers.