This project uses social science research from the University of Bradford and Leeds Metropolitan University to develop a new training programme for people delivering public services, such as social workers, nurses, doctors, police officers and teachers. The training is to improve how information about members of the public is shared between the different organisations that provide services. It supplements (rather than replaces) existing training on information sharing and is different because it uses the findings from social science research to help professionals think in new ways about how they share information about members of the public. People working to deliver public services are required to work with the personal information of all of us who use those services. In many cases this is sensitive information, given in confidence, and professionals must take care to protect our data. At the same time, they are being asked to improve services by working more closely with their counterparts in other organisations, passing more information between them. This means there is less chance that members of the public will feel as though they are being passed from one service to another when they need help and also that there will be less likelihood of 'falling through the cracks' between services. Collaboration can lead to more efficient services because some duplication can be avoided. In addition, by working together, professionals are more likely to spot when children and vulnerable adults are at risk of harm because they can see all the different pieces of the jigsaw puzzle rather than just the one piece they would see otherwise. Decisions about whether and when to share information, are not always straightforward. There is legislation and guidance available to help steer public service workers to the right outcome but every situation is different and despite all the existing guidance and training available, professionals can still struggle to know what to do for the best. The training created by this project aims to help professionals share information well, improving the services received by the public in the process. The project researchers will create the training programme and will work with the City of Bradford Metropolitan District Council and an existing national project, called Improving Information Sharing and Management, to test it (probably in Bradford, Manchester and Leicestershire). The training programme and materials will be revised as a result of feedback from the trainees. Once finalised, the documentation will be made freely available and its use will be tracked so evidence on the benefits can be gathered. The programme is expected to consist of two one-day training sessions, three to four weeks apart. This allows course participants to apply what they have learnt in their first session to their daily working lives, knowing that they will be able to bring any queries back to the second session (in which reflections on changes to professional practice will be shared). This structure means that what has been learned is less likely to be forgotten and also that if there are real-life situations the training could not help with, relevant revisions can be made to. The project will create all the materials needed, based on findings from social science research previously undertaken by the project researchers. New ideas will be presented that have never been used in this kind of training before which should help professionals to improve their practice, leading to: - improved, more 'joined up', and more trusted public services - better protected personal and sensitive data - better value for money (through reduced duplication across services and more effective services) In the long term, through contributing to improved service quality and efficiency, the project should have a positive impact on the health and well-being of the nation.

In the past four decades there has been a considerable modal shift from walking to school to going by car for primary school children in England. This has led to increased congestion and air pollution and decreased traffic safety. Meanwhile, many studies have shown the health benefits to children of active travel to school. The UK Government set a target to increase the percentage of children aged 5 to 10 that usually walk to school in England from 49% in 2014 to 55% in 2025. However, despite recent initiatives, such as the national Walk to School Outreach programme, the National Travel Survey in 2019 recorded the lowest ever percentage of primary school children walking to school at 46%. Time constraints are often cited as the main barrier to parents accompanying children in walking to school with concerns about safety deterring parents from allowing children to travel independently. This highlights that if a system of providing adult supervision for walking to school can be set up then there is good scope to increase the numbers of children walking to school. A walking school bus (WSB) involves a group of children walking to school with one or more adults and following a set route. WSBs have increased walking to school in Australia, New Zealand and the United States but the UK has not widely adopted them. Taking up WSBs in significant numbers requires a degree of organisation to establish meeting points, safe routes, adult supervisors and timetables. The proposed research will develop a planning tool to enable schools to maximise the number of children walking to school using safe routes accompanied by adults. At the heart of the tool will be an Optimisation Model that identifies walking routes to school and meeting points, while addressing multiple objectives (travel time, safety and air pollution exposure). We will develop this based on our extensive experience in developing multi-objective problem solutions for public transport scheduling and other transport and healthcare applications. The Optimisation Model will work in conjunction with a Modal Choice Model, which estimates student modal choices as input to the Optimisation Model, and with a Road Network Model, which estimates the consequences of a particular walk-to-school scenario on road network conditions. The Modal Choice Model will include a novel development recognising that decisions by parents on how their children get to school are based not only on individual considerations, such as minimising travel time, but on the opinions and choices made by other parents. This will build on the team's previous work exploring the role of social influence in travel choices. The Road Network Model will allow assessments to be made of traffic management measures that can be combined with WSBs to increase confidence in walking to school. We will design the tool so that it can be used repeatedly as circumstances change. It will be able to be used reactively for re-planning when there have been changes (e.g. children absent, new school years, etc.) or proactively to put in place 'ghost' routes/stops to attract new users where potential is identified (e.g. where there is a clustering of children or where WSBs can have maximum influence on reducing pollution near a school). Our aim is for the tool to support the work of organisations such as our Project Partner Living Streets delivering the Government's Walk to School Outreach programme. A Stakeholder Advisory Group will help steer the project. The academic team will partner with Living Streets to ensure the tool is well-grounded (for example, in terms of how parents perceive walking routes or how parents' willingness for their child to walk to school is affected by physical and social context) and is practically useful for real-world application. We will demonstrate the planning tool in Bradford where the local authority and schools have agreed to work with us in designing and applying our work.

Piped drainage systems form the backbone of urban drainage infrastructure, both in terms of foul and surface water drainage. The piped systems located in the upstream reaches of urban drainage networks include those installed within buildings and those local systems that connect buildings and their curtilages to the main sewer network; examples of local systems range from those serving a single residential property to those draining large retail parks. The purpose of this research is to improve the simulation of flow conditions within such systems, and hence facilitate the development of the integrated design methodologies required to meet the extra demands associated with the future impacts of climate change and water conservation measures.Flow conditions within building and local drainage systems are often complex, partly due to the highly unsteady nature of system inflows and partly due to their relatively complex and compact layouts; in particular, such systems commonly experience mixed flow conditions, characterised by both free surface and full bore flow regions separated by a hydraulic jump. In spite of this complexity, and the underlying importance of such systems to all sections of society, there are currently no numerical models available to accurately simulate the full range of mixed flow conditions that occur within building and local drainage systems. Without the ability to simulate such conditions, the challenges presented by system design to accommodate transitional flows can not be fully understood, and thus performance benefits remain unrealised. Whilst this situation is undesirable under current loading conditions, the consequences of these shortcomings is bound to increase in the future. It is now generally accepted that climate change will increase the frequency and severity of extreme rainfall events, and will hence result in increased surcharging of drainage systems conveying stormwater. Additional demands will also be placed on building and local drainage infrastructure due to changing demographics, increasing urbanisation and decreasing confidence in the long term viability of existing water supplies; these factors will lead to an increased emphasis on water conservation, as already highlighted by imminent changes to UK Building Regulations (which are likely to set minimum standards for water efficiency within buildings). There is clearly a very real need for enhanced tools to enable the wide range of stakeholders to develop the type of integrated designs necessary to meet both current and future performance requirements. The proposed research aims to meet this need by developing improved simulation models. The project will commence with a benchmarking exercise to assess the state of the art of mixed flow modelling. This will include the identification and experimental quantification of the key physical process, as well as a thorough assessment of existing techniques and their suitability to building and local drainage applications. These initial investigations will help drive model development activities, which will concentrate on formulating a novel numerical technique for the simulation of mixed flow conditions within small-medium diameter piped drainage systems (up to approximately 200mm). The developed technique will be incorporated into 1-D finite difference models for the simulation of conditions within building and local drainage systems. Dissemination of project findings will be critical in order to persuade relevant stakeholders of the benefits associated with the developed techniques and models, and to encourage uptake of the project recommendations and tools. In addition to traditional academic dissemination routes (journal and conference papers), project outcomes will also be publicised to a wider audience through presentations and seminars to professional bodies, industry organisations and wider research initiatives.

This project aims to co-create Nature-based Solutions (NBS) knowledge to empower communities, organisations, and individuals to innovate NBS as alternatives for healthcare and societal resilience following the COVID-19 pandemic. It will take a human-centred design approach to enable wider collaboration and to integrate otherwise 'siloed' knowledge and expertise. This project is a joint-effort between the Royal College of Art, the University of Sheffield, Walsall Housing Group, Bradford City Council, Shared Assets, HAS technology, National Association of Voluntary and Community Action, and Intelligent Health. NBS are actions, e.g. ecological restoration, that work with nature to help address societal challenges. In this proposal, it refers to social innovation actions utilising green space, parks and lakes, for the purpose of health and wellbeing. It is based on the evidence that regular contact with nature enhances physical health and mental wellbeing, and creates social benefits. It expands the concept of 'green prescription' to include wider communities and public beyond patients and GPs. The main deliverables of the project are: - An integrated method supported with training webinars enabling people to innovate and improve cost-effective NBS; - An open innovation platform facilitating NBS development using the integrated method, to link available resources and different stakeholders including commissioners, providers, agencies and voluntary community action groups and individuals; - The outcome of the pilots - NBS concepts - will be implemented by Walsall Housing Group and Bradford City Council to create immediate benefit to vulnerable people in these two areas, building upon existing approaches in the creation of service directories; - One journal paper, two conference papers to examine the role of design thinking in NBS innovation.

The proposed joint UK-Ireland research in the digital humanities, will utilise novel digital twin technologies funded through the AHRC Capabilities for Collections scheme (PI: Wilson 2022-3) in order to digitally document two medieval walled towns in the South (Kilmallock) and North (Derry) of Ireland and link with historic records to reveal hidden insights into these settlements for wide-ranging use. The project aims to: 1) bring together cutting-edge digital heritage technologies (incl vehicle- and back-pack mounted mobile mapping and drone-based capture), alongside place-based humanities research to connect historic environment research with geospatially accurate 3D information of buildings and townscape heritage, including specific archaeological context for key buildings through targeted geophysical prospection (e.g. immediate surroundings of the Dominican Priory of Kilmallock that lies outside the historic town walls); and 2) raise the profile of townscape heritage assets for a variety of purposes ranging from conservation and regeneration initiatives in support of designated properties/ sites, through to education, tourism, health and wellbeing. Cutting edge 3D digital mobile mapping technologies enable accurate and rapid survey that offers a transformative step-change in safeguarding unique heritage assets for the future. The approach will also place community-focused records (maps, deeds, oral histories) and specific building interiors in context and will contribute to heritage understanding for residents and visitors alike. The scale and rapid speed of these mobile capture methods offers new potential use-cases for development of 'discovery' resources for interpretation, education, tourism and orientation of newcomers. Their accuracy serves as valuable baseline data for monitoring future change, as well as offering a lens for direct comparison with original 16th century map records for Kilmallock and Derry. The meaning and value of heritage assets are understood through their role in placemaking, and contribution to identity and community cohesion, offering benefits to health and wellbeing as well as generating economic value through tourism and regeneration. Beyond unknown/ unrecovered archaeological evidence, issues of access in a variety of forms, are key limitations for realising the value of heritage for society. The work will build from expertise at Bradford developed in previous projects, including via infrastructure investment through CapCo and knowledge exchange via the AHRC Place Programme, and via relationships established through pilot work conducted during the AHRC/IRC Digital humanities network. The proposed project aligns with aspirations of the Built Heritage Advisory Section of the National Monuments Service and the Irish Walled Towns Network of the Heritage Council to preserve the historic building fabric, with the community and building owners/ occupiers. The utility of digital twin technologies in place-based research will help to monitor and conserve heritage assets and to layer narratives and understanding of each place upon the digital twin, from the Medieval period up to present day and in this project, represents an important initiative that highlights historic, and creates new connections between North and South Ireland and England. Kilmallock and Derry are connected as members of the Irish Walled Towns Network and Bradford and Derry both have an industrial heritage linked to the textile industry. Derry was the first UK City of Culture and Bradford will be the next UK City of Culture. Transfer of knowledge and expertise between key stakeholders, including community groups and across three local authorities, will realise the potential of digital twinning between Kilmallock - Derry - Bradford in order to forge longstanding connections that offer key benefits past, present and future.