Background: Children consume a third of their food at school, providing an opportunity to promote healthy diets and reduce levels of obesity. The World Health Organisation and UK government recommend that schools adopt approaches across the whole school day that support children to make healthy food choices, offering consistency in the quality of foods provided, eating culture, education about diet, and use of food to learn. In reality, uptake is poor, partly due to lack of direction on how to use such an approach, but also because schools work in highly complex environments with multiple competing demands, and influences from wider factors like national policy, cultural beliefs, population characteristics, costs and catering requirements. Methods: We will design a practical and acceptable intervention to help primary schools adopt whole school approaches to food. This will be done in partnership with key people (stakeholders) including head teachers, teachers, staff, children, parents, school governors, local businesses, and local and national government, by: 1. Hosting stakeholders workshops in Bradford, Leeds, Newcastle and Belfast to discuss factors influencing what children eat during the school day. We will ask people to consider potential influencing factors at school (e.g. space needed to provide lunch), in the community (e.g. cultural influences on eating practices) and from wider society (e.g. government policies on free-school meals). We will encourage discussion on how these factors relate to each other and use this information to build a picture called a 'systems map', providing a richer understanding of the local and wider influences on children's food choice. The map may also help to identify parts of the system most likely to respond to intervention and whether adding an intervention in one part (e.g. a packed lunch policy) is likely to cause positive or negative adaptations in others (food eaten at home). 2. Inviting stakeholders to take part in designing an intervention. This will involve consideration of the factors identified in our system maps. Based on existing discussion with people who work in schools, we do not expect the intervention to involve excess paperwork or expense for schools. Instead, it might include visual resources (like websites or videos) to support schools to include children in decision making, and to improve the food environment. It could also consider changes to catering decisions or specific activities such as embedding catering staff more across the school, growing food in schools, teaching with food, avoiding using food as reward/or punishment, and consistent food messages. To ensure the intervention supports schools without excessive burden, acceptability and potential barriers will be a key consideration during development. Importantly, we will focus on developing an intervention that has the best chance of supporting those in greatest need. 3. Seeking feedback about our draft intervention ideas from our wider stakeholder group. We will share the draft with stakeholders and ask them to rate its acceptability and how easily they can be used by schools. A form will also be used for stakeholders to consider which parts of the intervention they feel can be applied across all schools and which may be less transferable. We will then make any required improvements before fully developing the intervention and its resources. Impact and dissemination: The intervention has the potential to improve dietary options extending beyond the school day. It is important that it is evaluated so that, if successful, it can become standard practice. We will therefore engage with key decision makers and advocates, including Public Health England, School Food Matters (a national organisation supporting schools) and the Department of Education. We will share our findings widely, including with schools, children and parents, and will develop plans to test its impact on food choice.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an unprecedented challenge for pupils, parents, schools, and policy makers, with many children returning to school in September for the first time after six months at home. Our new project will collect and analyse high quality data on young people (ages 12-19) in England using an existing representative sample to assess the impact of the cancellation of exams, home learning experiences, and returning to school during the COVID-19 pandemic on pupils' learning, motivation, wellbeing, and aspirations. This will be a follow-up of an established stratified random sample, the Science Education Tracker (SET). Data collection will be delivered online by Kantar, who carried out the original fieldwork, with explicit permission from 5,991 respondents for re-contact. These data, which we will link to the National Pupil Database, will provide a unique opportunity to answer the following pressing research questions separately by SES, gender, and ethnic group: 1) Has the cancellation of examinations had differential impacts on wellbeing and motivations? 2) Has this changed pupils' aspirations for further study and future careers? 3) Has home-schooling affected pupils' transitions into further and higher education? 4) What role do young people's experiences of home learning under lockdown and returning to education play in this? Led by Professor Lindsey Macmillan, with Professor Patrick Sturgis, Dr Gill Wyness, and Dr Jake Anders, the team combines world-leading expertise in design and analysis of large-scale survey data with disciplinary expertise in educational inequalities. We will partner with the Department for Education and Wellcome to ensure the co-production of policy-relevant evidence. This will fill an important gap in our understanding of the experiences of young people and the impact on their motivations, wellbeing and aspirations during this unprecedented period.

SES2023 will be the eighth in a series of surveys of workers stretching back over 35 years. The OECD has stated that 'there is a strong policy need for better measures of job quality' to improve workers' well-being, increase productivity and competitiveness, and boost societal welfare. The UK government has gone further by agreeing to 'report annually on the quality of work in the UK economy and hold ourselves to account'. Yet, official data on job quality remains thin on the ground. To help plug this gap, a group set-up by the Carnegie Trust/RSA suggested that 32 new questions be added to the Labour Force Survey. However, in response, only two questions on career progression and employee involvement in decision-making have been added. This provides an inadequate response to the scale of the challenge and makes it difficult to paint a picture of the quality of working life in Britain today. Furthermore, the UK's data infrastructure in this area is particularly weak in comparison with countries where monitoring job quality is better resourced, such as Germany, France, Italy, Finland and the US. The withdrawal of the UK from the EU also means data from European surveys will not be available to plug the gap. Given recent societal and policy changes, the UK faces an increased need to know how the world of work has changed combined with a weakening evidence base on which to do so. There is an urgent need for the SES series to be extended to address this gap, provide data to meet user needs and secure the long-term foundation for research in this area. It will also address ESRC strategic research objectives, such as connecting with the UK policy agenda, and ensuring that data collection is resilient and responsive to change. The 2023 survey will collect data face-to-face from workers aged 20-65 as well as from similar aged workers who take part in an online/telephone version of the same survey. Respondents will be drawn from randomly created samples. Comparisons will be made between the two samples to determine the extent to which the mode of interview influences the responses given. The survey will collect data from around 4,300 workers, 2,835 of whom will be interviewed face-to-face and around 1,500 will take part online or on the phone if they do not have internet access. The proposal has the financial support of the Department for Education, and the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service. It also has the support of 17 stakeholders. These include the Department for Work and Pensions, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the Office for National Statistics, the Trades Union Congress, and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. Furthermore, the Welsh Government and the Northern Ireland Department for the Economy are keen to explore funding boosts for their geographical areas.

Schools are planning to re-open in September and with the recent increased awareness of airborne transmission of Covid-19, there is an urgent need to monitor the situation and to provide guidance on ventilation best practice. This is emphasised by the expected onset of cooler weather when there will be a conflict between maintaining high fresh air ventilation flows and energy consumption and occupant comfort. We will quantify the risk of airborne COVID-19 transmission in schools and evaluate the effectiveness of mitigation measures, by developing techniques to assess the absolute risk of infection in a given indoor space, using field studies in primary and secondary schools, complemented by laboratory experiments and CFD to elucidate the flow patterns responsible for airborne transport. The understanding generated will underpin recent developments in infection modelling to predict the likelihood of airborne transmission within schools. The project will reduce the uncertainties associated with airborne transmission routes and provide evidence to evaluate mitigation measures. The scenarios we will investigate include changes to ventilation, use of screens, classroom lay-out and occupancy profiles. The methodology will facilitate application to offices, restaurants, shops etc. Airborne infection occurs through re-breathed air, the concentration of which can be directly inferred from measurements of CO2. Indoor flow is strongly affected by the locations of windows or vents, the heat rising from occupants/equipment and disturbances caused by people movement. Thus, accurate representations of these processes in the laboratory and CFD are needed to interpret the monitoring data currently collected in schools, which are typically single point measurements.

There are big inequalities in our society, in a range of different things. Regarding health, we know that, in the UK, white people are generally more healthy than non-white people, and rich people are more healthy than poorer people. Beyond health, there are similar inequalities everywhere - in rates of unemployment, in income, in education levels, and so on. What is less well known is how these inequalities vary and interact. For instance, we know there is an ethnicity gap in health, but is that the same for men and women? Is it the same for rich women and poorer women? As we combine characteristics to produce smaller and smaller groups, it becomes clear that the inequalities in our society are complicated. And that complexity matters: it's important that we know who has worse health, so that we can target policies to the right people; it's important that we know who is being failed by our education system, so we can think about how the system could be changed to be more equitable. Fundamentally, in order to improve social justice, we need to first understand who is currently being let down by society. And that needs to be more than just a comparison of broad categories of people. The MAIHDA method is a statistical model that allows us to do this: it lets us to see which combinations of characteristics are associated with advantage, and which are associated with disadvantage. This innovative method has been incrementally developed between 2016 and 2022, and has already informed us about the nature of inequalities in a range of health outcomes. However, the method remains in its infancy, and this grant will refine the method to allow it to be used in situations that it has never been used before. This includes evaluating government policies to see which groups benefit from a particular policy, and which groups benefit less or even are harmed. The project will also allow us to consider how complex inequalities have changed over time, and how they vary from place to place. We will test our methodological refinements using real datasets which will act as exemplars in how these methods could be used going forward, relating to (among other things) obesity, covid-19, and environmental pollutants. We are also keen to expand the use of the method beyond health inequalities. As such, we will collaborate with academics and researchers in academic research centres and non-academic organisations, to implement the MAIHDA methods in other social science subject areas. This will include the analysis of carers, and how being a carer affects different groups of people in different ways. It will include an analysis of water quality in the United States, to see how different groups of people, in different places, are affected by poor-quality, polluted drinking water. And we will consider how educational inequalities vary for different groups of people, to see which groups are being let down by the education sector. Finally, a key part of this grant is training. We want to upskill researchers, in academia and beyond, to be able to use this method and our refinements to it in the future. As such we will produce a wide variety of online training materials, and run both online and in-person training courses, aimed at established academics, PhD students, and non-academic research organisations. These materials will be developed with other stakeholders to ensure that they meet the needs of those organisations and individuals.