Every year in England around 8000 children are permanently excluded from school and need to access their education outside of mainstream settings (alternative provision (AP)), most commonly in Pupil Referral Units (PRUs). Children experiencing adversity including special educational needs, mental health difficulties, poverty and abuse are more likely to be excluded and thus are overrepresented in PRUs. There is overwhelming evidence to show that early adversity impacts on health, educational and economic outcomes across the lifespan and so it is not surprising to find that educational and health outcomes are comparatively worse for children attending PRUs: 1 in 20 pupils in AP achieve a pass in their English and maths GCSEs and half are NEET post-16. Importantly, evidence suggests exclusion contribute independently to outcomes, over and above the influence of early life experience. There has been recent policy attention on understanding the inequalities in exclusion rates and improving the quality and outcomes of alternative provision. In relation to the latter, the recently published Timpson Review of School Exclusion called for focus on developing effective interventions and mechanisms for targeting them as well as on improving the physical environments in which alternative provision is delivered.

Each year, state-funded schools in England are provided with roughly £2 billion of additional funding, with the aim of reducing the persistent attainment gap in children (The Pupil Premium, Roberts, 2022). Chaotic and unpredictable home environments, characterised by unexpected fluctuations in noise, erratic caregiving behaviour and a lack of structure in daily activities, have been associated with a range of adverse academic, mental health and behavioural outcomes in children (Marsh, Dobson and Maddison, 2020). However, it is still largely unknown how this type of adverse environment influences brain development, and what the underlying computational mechanisms involved are. Until we understand this, we cannot begin to design interventions to improve learning and mental health outcomes, which are essential to helping protect vulnerable children. Childrens' early home environments can be more or less predictable in a range of different ways (Evans & Wachs, 2010). In this proposal I shall focus on one aspect of predictability, namely caregiver responsiveness. Infancy and toddlerhood has been described as a sensitive period for caregiver inputs (Gee and Cohodes, 2021). These inputs include both the predictability of how a caregiver responds to a child's early affective displays (expressions of positive affect such as smiles (Murray et al., 2016), and negative affect such as cries (Wass et al., 2019)), and how sensitive the caregiver is in supporting their infant's early interactions with the world around them (e.g. how contingently they follow the child's attention patterns) (Mason et al., 2019). Children exposed to unpredictable, fragmented signals from their mothers during their first year of life showed poorer performance on a range of cognitive outcomes during later life, after accounting for covariates (Glynn and Baram, 2019). Caregiver responsivity has specifically been shown to protect against adverse effects of household chaos on long-term outcomes (Vernon-Feagans et al., 2016). This biological embedding of predictability, and the positive effects of predictably-contingent caregiving documented in literature, leads to the inference that caregivers behaving in a predictable manner in response to their child in the first few years of infancy influences the developing brain.

Countries emerging from authoritarian rule and/or violent conflict face myriad challenges. Chief among them are demands for accountability for past abuses, and the need to build a new, stable, democratic state. Scholars and practitioners continue to debate which of these take priority, or whether in fact one is a necessary precondition for the other. While some recent scholarship suggests that certain transitional justice measures are positively correlated with an improvement in the state of democracy and human rights in transitional states, other scholarship suggests that some transitional justice measures are not linked to improved records of democracy and human rights. This project will examine the experiences of eight countries: South Korea, Japan, Brazil, Chile, Sierra Leone, Burundi, Hungary, and Germany, in four regions: Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe. All have experienced different types of violence and repression and undergone different types of transition, in different regional and international geopolotical circumstances. Using qualitative methods including field research, secondary research, and incorporating insights from quantitative research, this comparative project will develop new insights regarding the impact of transitional justice measures specifically on democratic institution-building. As such, it will contribute to the growing scholarship on the effects of transitional justice and provide insights for policymakers at the local, state, and international level regarding the role of various transitional justice measures.

Doctoral Training Partnerships: a range of postgraduate training is funded by the Research Councils. For information on current funding routes, see the common terminology at https://www.ukri.org/apply-for-funding/how-we-fund-studentships/. Training grants may be to one organisation or to a consortia of research organisations. This portal will show the lead organisation only.

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