Research aims and questions Research Aim 1 (lead supervisor's project): To evaluate the impact of The Enduring Principles of Learning in transforming pedagogy for the teaching of pupils with EAL in primary and secondary schools with a shared pupil demographic. RQ 1.1 What are the changes in and understanding of teachers' practice for EAL when trained in use of The Enduring Principles of Learning? RQ 1.2 Are changes consistent a) across staff within each school and b) across schools? Research Aim 2 (studentship project): To analyse the relationship between changes in pedagogy for EAL and the English-related academic outcomes of pupils with EAL in primary and secondary schools with a shared pupil demographic. RQ 2.1 Does training teachers to practice using The Enduring Principles of Learning lead to enhanced English language proficiency (vocabulary, reading comprehension, writing) in pupils with EAL? RQ 2.2 What are the drivers for/barriers to success as perceived by pupils? The lead supervisor, Naomi Flynn, is currently working with one school in Southampton, which is part of a network of schools, called Aspire Community Trust who are the collaborative partners in this studentship. Dr Flynn's work with these schools consists of applied research through which she is working directly with teachers by delivering professional development to improve their pedagogy with a view to improving pupils' attainment. The professional development framework is wedded to a proven-successful approach already developed and trialled in the US called The Enduring Principles of Learning (in publications this is referred to as The Standards, or The Standards for Effective Pedagogy). A rubric related to this approach is appended to this guidance. Dr Flynn has an established researcher partnership with Professor Annela Teemant of Indiana University who is the principle architect of this approach. Both academics have a longer-term goal of empowering schools to adopt and embed the Enduring Principles of Learning in practice independently. This project will generate data to evidence the successes and limitations of this approach to teaching. The studentship project is a mixed methods study with an emphasis on measuring pupil progress through quantitative data collection and analysis. It complements Dr Flynn's qualitative analysis of teachers' changing practice.

It is now widely accepted that the intensification in agriculture we have seen over the last 40-50 years has had a detrimental impact on the environment in the UK, Europe and across the globe. One conspicuous change has been the loss of biodiversity (populations of a range of different animal and plants species). As a result, UK and European Government policies now seek to promote what is termed 'multi-functional agriculture' in which the needs of agricultural production are reconciled with objectives for environmental protection, including the conservation of biodiversity. This is challenging because biodiversity health is often assessed at large spatial scales (e.g. national population trends of particular species) whilst agricultural change is implemented at the field and farm-scales. Linking field-scale changes in agriculture with large-scale risks to biodiversity is essential for assessing the sustainability of such changes with respect to biodiversity conservation. If we could understand the risks agricultural change poses prior to or during its introduction, it would allow us to design measures to reduce the risk, and in so doing make the change more sustainable in terms of biodiversity conservation. In response to these issues, we have recently developed a framework for assessing the biodiversity risk of agricultural change to over 400 species of animals and plants in the UK. Our approach links national population trends to field-scale management changes by assessing the extent to which an agricultural change detrimentally impacts the niche requirements of each species. For example, for bird species niche requirements would include nesting habitats, foraging habitats, and the type of food they eat. Using data from the recent past, we have shown that as the extent of these impacts increase population decline becomes more likely, and have subsequently applied this new system to a range of agricultural change scenarios. Although our previous work is promising, it is fundamentally limited in two main ways. Firstly, it only deals with risk. When agricultural land-use changes it might have both risks and benefits to particular species, and we need to understand the net impact rather than just the risk. Secondly, it relies on simple but crude assumptions about the spatial congruence of agricultural change and species' ranges in order to estimate national population trends. Ideally, the response of biodiversity at multiple scales needs to be understood, so that field- or farm-scale changes in agriculture can be linked to biodiversity responses at similar and at larger (i.e. regional or national) spatial scales. Our proposed project aims to address these limitations by developing a new approach for assessing the risks and benefits of agricultural change to biodiversity over multiple spatial scales. Our project will focus on UK farmland birds, which are a valuable indicator for wider biodiversity, and bird populations are an important component of the UK Government's commitments to biodiversity conservation and sustainable agriculture. We have developed a new idea that we call 'designer niches' that attempts to understand how agricultural land-use designs the niche components for about 45 bird species. This involves translating land-use into the quality of nesting and foraging habitats for birds. We will then use this information to understand how bird abundance and their population trends relate to land-use via niche design, and apply these ideas to help us understand how bird populations might respond to future agricultural changes. This work will then be fed into agri-environment policy, and we hope that this will allow us to plan agricultural change more effectively to conserve biodiversity.

3.4 million Colombians are employed in primary agricultural production in rural areas on typical wages of less than four dollars per day. Common beans are a major source of protein and mineral nutrition in the diets of the rural poor, but climate vulnerabilities and the post-conflict transition from illicit to food crops mean that rapid introduction of climate-resilient bean varieties to new areas and growers are required. This study will focus on heat tolerance, as rising temperatures have been predicted to impact very significantly on the areas of Colombia suitable for bean cultivation. A small number of highly heat tolerant bean genotypes have been identified in previous breeding work, and it is proposed to breed the heat tolerance trait from these primary sources into varieties with all the other characteristics needed for widespread acceptance and uptake. At present, the principal means to combine heat tolerance with other traits is via selection of breeding lines in field sites where stressful heat thresholds are normally reached. This process takes years and heat tolerance can be masked by other environmental factors simultaneously at play in the selection environment. The research proposed here involves detailed assessments of the growth and development of existing heat tolerant and susceptible beans under controlled conditions simulating future climates in target regions of Colombia including elevated carbon dioxide levels. By pinpointing in detail the vulnerabilities of susceptible lines and demonstrating mechanisms of tolerance that avoid yield losses, it will be possible in the future to breed for heat tolerance using better targeted selection criteria that will result in shorter breeding cycles and more rapid delivery of climate-smart bean varieties. As the technologies for breeding new heat-tolerant varieties is developed, the study will also examine the potential economic impact of adoption of beans as a crop in new areas and by new growers, using socio-economic data on current and projected land use, food supply and price in a number of scenarios. It will further appraise the potential economic value of heat-tolerant bean varieties and the rate of return on the underpinning research under a range of adoption scenarios. The alignment of climate and crop science aimed at more effective breeding for future climates with a socio-economic study of the conditions under which climate-resilient bean varieties can reap significant societal return on investment affords opportunities for the research agenda to be refined to maximise its real-world impact.

This MSc provides a thorough understanding of the key principles of Soil Science, which are widely applicable to environmental research and also vocational specialisation in contaminated land assessment, remediation and management and broader areas of environmental assessment, protection and management. This grant supports 5 full studentships for three years.

Stratocumulus clouds are common over S England occurring about 25% of the time. The clouds are rather thin with clear sky above, so if they break up then an overcast day is suddenly transformed into a clear sunny day; alternatively they can rapidly develop and spread over the sky changing a sunny day into a gloomy overcast one. Their formation, persistence and dispersion are surprisingly difficult to forecast. On a global scale they form widespread cloud sheets over the cold ocean water, for example, off the coast of California, Peru and Namibia. These cloud sheets have an important effect on the climate of the earth, as they reflect the sunlight straight back to space rather, and so their presence has an overall cooling effect. It is important to represent any changes in the future extent of these clouds sheets correctly if we are to have accurate predictions of future global warming. The models used for weather forecasting and for predicting future climate change split the atmosphere into large grid boxes which are typically up to 500m deep and tens or hundreds of km across, with only two numbers used to describe the cloud in each box (e.g the amount of cloud and the mass of cloud water). Stratocumulus clouds are difficult to forecast because they are often only 100m deep and can block out the sun, but are not deep enough to fill a model grid box. In a layer about 1km deep close to the surface of the earth the air is being continuously mixed and stirred in the vertical and the stratocumulus clouds form at the top of this mixed 'boundary' layer. The existence of the clouds is governed by a delicate balance between the moisture from the surface of the ground or the ocean which feeds the clouds, and the mixing of dry air above the boundary layer tending to disperse them. Another important mechanism is the formation of drizzle in the clouds which tends to remove the moisture and so disperse the clouds. The cloud droplets themselves are formed on small dust particles, so the properties of the clouds are dependent upon the level of dust or pollution in the air. The purpose of this proposal is to make detailed observations of the vertical structure of stratocumulus clouds over a period of several years with lidars and radars on the ground. A radar sends out short pulses of radio waves; the cloud scatters some of these waves back to the radar, and by timing how long the echo takes to be returned and by measuring its strength we can calculate the height of the cloud and how much water it contains and identify if the cloud is producing drizzle. The vertical velocity of the cloud and drizzle drops can be inferred from 'Doppler shift', the change in radio frequency of the reflected wave. A lidar works on the same principle but uses light; we have lidars that sense the light reflected of dust particles in the air so we see how many of these particles are present, and then sense the vertical movement of the air from the Doppler shift of the lidar echoes. Other lidars can detect how much moisture is in the air and so by combining these observations we can measure the vertical movement of moisture into the clouds, the drizzle falling out of the clouds, the mixing of dry air at cloud top and see how these relate to the evolution of the cloud and its persistence or break up. Once we understand these processes we can try to improve the forecasts. To this end we are collaborating with the Meteorological Office and the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting, so we can test out improved means of representing these stratocumulus clouds in their operational forecast models. The aim is to produce models which provide better weather forecasts of whether a day is to be cloudy or sunny. In addition, a better representation of the extensive regions of stratocumulus over the cold oceans will increase our confidence in the accuracy of the predictions of global warnings.