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.

Dry-stone walls are formed by carefully stacking blocks of stone rubble, without the use of mortar. Found throughout the world, dry-stone walls form the distinctive character of many areas of the UK, including the Cotswolds, Peak District and Lake District. Dry-stone retaining walls are engineering structures used to support road, railway and canal cuttings and embankments. The walls are commonly about 0.6m thick and are comprised of a bonded masonry face with stacked rubble stone behind. They were mostly built during the 19th and early 20th centuries. There are about 9000 km of these walls along the UK road network alone, having an estimated replacement value in excess of 1 billion. Though the ageing stock of walls is still performing very well, their deteriorating condition and occasional sudden collapse is a major problem for highway maintenance authorities.There is uncertainty about how these walls actually behave under load and what the factors of safety against collapse are. This current lack of understanding of real collapse mechanisms including three-dimensional effects, combined with the factors of safety required by modern design codes and uncertainties over design parameters such as soil properties, wall dimensions, groundwater conditions and loading, leads to the unnecessary replacement of satisfactory walls and the failure to identify walls that are in danger of imminent collapse.Even though dry-stone walls have distinct advantages over more modern earth retention methods (such as the use of local materials combined with a free-draining and flexible structure), the engineering uncertainties are such that new and replacement construction is rarely in dry-stone masonry. The unnecessary replacement of satisfactory walls, often by concrete structures, results in high costs associated with construction, traffic disruption, increased risk of damage to property or life, and potentially adverse environmental impacts. The current lack of understanding of the real mechanisms of dry-stone retaining wall behaviour is perhaps unsurprising given that no significant experimental investigation of dry-stone retaining walls has been carried out since a limited study undertaken over 170 years ago. The resulting lack of direct quantitative data concerning dry-stone retaining wall behaviour is not only a problem in its own right, but has also hampered validation of modern computer-based numerical analyses.Increased use of dry-stone walling for repairs and new construction, and prolonging the service life of the existing stock, can only happen with a proper, validated, theoretically based understanding of how these structures work, and the development of suitable design methods that are applicable in the modern engineering environment. The two main areas of uncertainty currently hindering the efficient and accurate assessment of dry-stone retaining walls are bulging and wall thickness. The objective of the proposed research is to develop a greater understanding of these two key issues by means of an experimental study combined with parametric three-dimensional discrete element analyses, and the further development of limit equilibrium analysis methods for the design and analysis of existing dry-stone retaining walls.

At its core our proposal will explore the role of creativity (film, music, soundscapes, visual arts, craft traditions) inspired by cultural assets (townscape heritage, coastal landscape setting and links to UNESCO World Heritage in mainland Tanzania, Zanzibar and the UK). This enhances and magnifies the impact of our AHRC 'Fragmented Heritage/ Curious Travellers' methodology that combines photographic imagery (crowd-sourced/ web-scraped and new imagery) together with mobile mapping data to digitally document cultural heritage sites in context, as an approach that anticipates change, given diverse challenges that place heritage at risk. The project will draw from Bagamoyo's rich heritage and cultural traditions, given Bagamoyo's strategic coastal location, with trading links across the Indian Ocean, past, present and future - including its boat-building traditions, role with salt production and the spice trade; the slave and ivory trade; its colonial past and linkage both with Christianity and Islam - the entry of Christianity into the interior; and with historical figures including Dr Livingstone whose body was brought to Bagamoyo upon his death in Malawi. Digital heritage researchers and creative researchers at Bradford and St Andrews will co-create artistic works with heritage and creative researchers at the University of Dar-es-Salaam and artists at TaSUBa (Bagamoyo's Arts and Cultural Institute - Taasisi ya Sanaa na Utamaduni Bagamoyo). Training will be given in digital methods and the output will include an entry to the film shorts category at the Zanzibar International Film Festival; and a real-time portal/art installation to be showcased at the vibrant Bagamoyo Arts Festival that will link places within Tanzania (Bagamoyo on Mainland and Zanzibar Stone Towns) and between Tanzania, England and Scotland as an innovative concept and alternate form of digital twinning 'Windows Across the Oceans'. The innovative digital heritage research will enhance inclusive engagement with the creative and cultural economy in Tanzania supporting cultural heritage tourism and cultural resource management. The installations will be used to highlight the universal value of world heritage to a global audience, the importance of conserving cultural heritage settings (townscape heritage, maritime heritage) to both local people and government in Tanzania and the linked understanding and meaning that comes from oral histories, craft traditions and other rich narratives. The project facilitates knowledge exchange and capacity building throughout, crucially involving TZ researchers to spend time in the UK, developing digital heritage skills to work with the Bagamoyo data, with additional financial support/ value-added from Erasmus+ funded activity As a result , with researchers from UDSM we will co-create a digital twin for the Historic City of Bagamoyo (on the UNESCO tentative world heritage list) and as part of this, generate Google StreetView-ready content to raise visibility for townscape heritage and to support local businesses. The digital twin will serve as a framework to unite Bagamoyo's tangible heritage (buildings, port and boat-building tradition, landscapes/ seascapes), and intangible narratives (stories, songs, cultural practices and craft knowledge) to help to document past and present way of life. The new, vibrant digital assets that are created through this project will 1) support local tour guides (helping to increase visibility as a tourism destination; and by creating digital resources that can enhance the tourism experience); 2) promote global citizenship and foster good community relations (helping to educate people, develop place-making and enhance civic pride); 3) develop use of IT through methods that support digital discovery (hidden heritage); 4) improve accessibility (equality, diversity and inclusion); 5) provide methods for long term monitoring of change to sites by heritage guardians.