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Guardian article on proposed changes to the structure of research councils

guardian-logoKieron Flanagan in The Guardian has written an article on proposed changes to the structure of the Research Councils.

The article focuses on why funding cuts are not the only thing that should worry scientists.  Plans to put all research funding in England into a single body should also be of concern, and will raise eyebrows in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Read the full article here.RCUKlogo

 

THE article on research council success rates

the-times-education-supplementDavid Matthews wrote an article in the THE on the fall in success rates at the research councils.

In 2014-15, there were 7,780 applications to research councils, according to calculations by Times Higher Education, a 12 per cent increase on the year before despite efforts to deter weaker bids.

Success rates fell at five out of six councils, halving in the case of the Economic and Social Research Council to just 12 per cent (the Science and Technology Facilities Council was excluded from the analysis).RCUKlogo

The overall success rate dropped by half a percentage point to just under 28 per cent, and would have fallen much further had it not been for an “abnormally” high level of funding in 2014-15 at the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, where success rates shot up.

Read the whole article here, including a useful table of success rates for each research council.

‘On the Subject of Photographs…’ FMC Lunchtime PGR Research Seminar – Wed, 11 Nov, 1-2pm

Communicating PGR Research:

FMC Lunchtime PGR Seminar Series
All Welcome!

Wednesday 11 November
Weymouth House, Room 431

1-2pm
Speaker: Rutherford

Title: ‘On the Subject of Photographs…’

We are (usually) prepared to acknowledge the influence of the photographer and his/her decisions on the appearance of photographs. Yet the camera – like the microscope and the telescope – is assumed to be both objective and passive when documenting the things in front of the lens. This belief in the objective and passive role of the camera is demonstrated by the prevalence of the phrase that pictures are ‘taken’.

In this talk, I want to consider the possibility that as a result of the ways in which the medium interprets and renders objects, scenes, events and moments as well as the juxtapositions between these, the camera/medium sometimes creates – then records and depicts – scenes, events and ‘moments’ that did not exist until brought into being by the act of photographing them.

 

Rutherford

Previously a commercial photographer in Toronto Canada, Rutherford led a workshop series for graduate students at Toronto’s Ryerson Polytechnic University that explored the significance of the elements intuitively incorporated into our casual photographic snapshots and how these can lead to greater self-awareness and acceptance. Following withdrawal from commercial photographic practice in 1993, Rutherford’s photographic works have been exhibited in solo and group shows in Canada, the United States, France, New Zealand and Japan. Rutherford’s essays on corporate communication, visual design, advertising and their influences on how we make meaning have appeared in several academic journals, newspapers and magazines.

FMC Narrative Research Seminar, Wed, 11th Nov: “She used to get lost in a book”: approaching gendered reading using two archives

Communicating Research
FMC Cross-Departmental Seminar Series 2015-16

Venue: The Screening Room W240, Weymouth House, Talbot Campus,

A BU Narrative Research Group event

Wednesday, 11 November, 4-5pm.

All very welcome as always!

Title: “She used to get lost in a book”: approaching gendered reading using two archives (Memories of Fiction and 100 Families)

Speaker: Dr Shelley Trower and Dr Amy Tooth Murphy (University of Roehampton)

In this talk we will first introduce the Memories of Fiction project, which during 2014-2015 created an oral history archive with members of reading groups who discuss their reading experiences in the context of their life stories. We will then turn to another oral history archive from the 1980s, 100 Families, a very different kind of project which incorporated just a few questions on reading as part of a much broader interest in family life. Using NVivo to analyse the interview transcripts from 100 Families, our collaborative process led us to identify the narration of gendered reading as a key theme, and it is this that our talk will mostly discuss.

Types of reading material (including fiction and newspapers), the ways in which people describe themselves and family members as reading this material, and the value judgements they make, all contribute to a picture of reading within family life as something that often takes place along gendered lines. This gendering of both reading material and the act of reading will be viewed within a historical framework that has consistently constructed reading as highly gendered. Respondents invoke long-standing cultural tropes on the gendered nature of reading, especially involving the historical figure of the female novel-reader, whose reading has tended to be judged as compulsive and escapist, in contrast to the directed, purposeful male reader. 100 Families also helps us to identify a more complex pattern in which family members question the conventional image of the woman reader lost in romance fiction.

About the series
This new seminar series showcases current research across different disciplines and approaches within the Faculty of Media and Communication at BU. The research seminars include invited speakers in the fields of journalism, politics, narrative studies, media, communication and marketing studies. The aim is to celebrate the diversity of research across departments in the faculty and also generate dialogue and discussion between those areas of research.

Contributions include speakers on behalf of
The Centre for Politics and Media
The Centre for the Study of Journalism, Culture and Community
Narrative Research Group
Public Relations Research Group
Advances in Media Management Research Group
Emerging Consumer Cultures Research Group

Upcoming CfE / FM Event: Meet the Entrepreneur – Simon Phelps

Fluvial Logo CaptureTuesday 24 November 2015
2pm arrival for a 2:30pm start
Executive Business Centre, 89 Holdenhurst Road, Bournemouth, BH8 8EB

The Business School and Centre for Entrepreneurship are delighted to invite you to the first in our series of ‘Meet the Entrepreneur’ events.

Simon Phelps founded Fluvial Innovations Ltd alongside BU in 2006 and designed, developed and patented the modular flood barrier, Floodstop.  Floodstop was specifically designed to fill a gap within the market for a functional and rapidly deployable flood barrier.

This is a great opportunity to hear about Simon’s personal journey as an entrepreneur and learn more about his own experiences as a business owner and his approach to founding and growing an innovative business.

Floodstop is used throughout the UK, US and parts of Europe and won the Emergency Planners Society’s Award for Most Innovative Product of The Year 2009 and voted “The Most Innovative Product of 2009” by the Emergency Planning Society.

Simon’s achievements include UK South West Young Entrepreneur of the Year 2007 and HSBC Start-Up Stars Regional Finalist 2008.

THIS IS AN INTERNAL EVENT FOR BU STUDENTS & STAFF ONLY

To book please click here

KTP Academic Development Scheme – Applications Live

Staff are now invited to apply for a place at the Knowledge Transfer Partnerships Academic Development Scheme (KTPADS).

What is KTP?

KTP is part-funded by the government and the aim of this scheme is to encourage collaboration on projects between businesses and academics.  KTP had previously been called the Teaching Company Scheme (TCS), though a rebrand a decade ago saw the TCS become KTP.  KTP is managed by Innovate UK and provides benefits to all parties involved – this scheme offers a fusion of academic and industry collaboration supported by an associate (graduate).

What is to benefit to me?

KTP is an excellent way of bringing in income and developing knowledge exchange with a clear pathway to impact.

Key benefits of KTP are as follows:

  • Facilitates research impact
  • Increases research funding, including supervision time for the Knowledge Base Supervisor (academic) to the Associate (graduate), this time averages at half a day a week
  • Contributes to the University’s REF submission
  • Improve links with industry partners
  • Apply knowledge to innovative business-critical project
  • Raise your profile among colleagues/the Institution

How do I apply?

To apply for a place on the scheme, please compete this application form and send to Rachel Clarke before the application deadline on Sunday 22nd November.  This form will need to be signed by yourself and your Line Manager.  Applications open on Monday 9th November and close at midnight on Sunday 22nd November.

If you would like to discuss this scheme, please contact Rachel Clarke, Knowledge Exchange Adviser (KTP) on 01202 961347 or clarker@bournemouth.ac.uk

KTP@40-block-logo

BRAD: Robust adaptive predictive modelling and data deluge workshop

Data-science-history

To book your place on this workshop- CLICK HERE

We are currently experiencing an incredible, explosive growth in digital content and information. According to IDC [11], there currently exists over 2.7 zetabytes of data. It is estimated that the digital universe in 2020 will be 50 times as big as in 2010 and that from now until 2020 it will double every two years. Research in traditionally qualitative disciplines is fundamentally changing due to the availability of such vast amounts of data. In fact, data-intensive computing has been named as the fourth paradigm of scientific discovery [10] and is expected to be key in unifying the theoretical, experimental and simulation based approaches to science. The commercial world has also been transformed by a focus on BIG DATA with companies competing on analytics [12]. Data has become a commodity and in recent years has been referred to as the ‘new oil’.

There has been a lot of work done on the subject of intelligent data analysis, data mining and predictive modelling over the last 50 years with notable improvements which have been possible with both the advancements of the computing equipment as well as with the improvement of the algorithms [1]. However, even in the case of the static, non-changing over time data there are still many hard challenges to be solved which are related to the massive amounts, high dimensionality, sparseness or inhomogeneous nature of the data to name just a few.

What is also very challenging in today’s applications is the non-stationarity of the data which often change very quickly posing a set of new problems related to the need for robust adaptation and learning over time. In scenarios like these, many of the existing, often very powerful, methods are completely inadequate as they are simply not adaptive and require a lot of maintenance attention from highly skilled experts, in turn reducing their areas of applicability.

In order to address these challenging issues and following various inspirations coming from biology coupled with current engineering practices, we propose a major departure from the standard ways of building adaptive, intelligent predictive systems and moving somewhat away from the engineering maxim of “simple is beautiful” to biological statement of “complexity is not a problem” by utilising the biological metaphors of redundant but complementary pathways, interconnected cyclic processes, models that can be created as well as destroyed in easy way, batteries of sensors in form of pools of complementary approaches, hierarchical organisation of constantly optimised and adaptable components.

In order to achieve such high level of adaptability we have proposed a novel flexible architecture [5-6] which encapsulates many of the principles and strategies observed in adaptable biological systems. The main idea of the proposed architecture revolves around a certain degree of redundancy present at each level of processing represented by the pools of methods, multiple competitive paths (individual predictors), their flexible combinations and meta learning managing general population and ensuring both efficiency and accuracy of delivered solution while maintaining diversity for improved robustness of the overall system.

The results of extensive testing for many different benchmark problems and various snapshots of interesting results covering the last decade of our research will be shown throughout the presentation and a number of challenging real world problems including pollution/toxicity prediction studies [8-9], building adaptable soft sensors in process industry in collaboration with Evonik Industries [6-7] or forecasting demand for airline tickets covering the results of one of our collaborative research projects with Lufthansa Systems [3-4] will be discussed.

Given our experiences in many different areas we see that truly multidisciplinary teams and a new set of robust, adaptive tools are needed to tackle complex problems with intelligent data analysis, predictive modelling and visualisation already indispensible. It is also clear that complex adaptive systems and complexity science supported and driven by huge amounts of multimodal, multisource data will become a major endeavour in the 21st century.

We will hold discussions surrounding:

  • Rapidly expanding digital universe
  • New decade of advanced/predictive analytics
  • General Fuzzy Min-Max (GFMM) Neural Networks as an example of early realisation of flexible predictive system
  • To combine or not to combine? – Multiple classification and prediction systems
  • Water quality monitoring based on biomarker data – can it be done?
  • Revenue management for airlines – can we forecast anything?
  • Adaptive soft sensors for process industry – here’s a real problem!
  • Self-adapting architecture for predictive modelling
  • Complex adaptive systems and complex networks

Professor. Bogdan Gabrys

To book your place on this workshop- CLICK HERE

Researcher Development Framework

Vitae_RDF_logo_2011Vitae is an organisation set up to promote career development in both postgraduate researchers and academic staff. Their Researcher Development Framework is intended to help people monitor their skills and plan their personal development. At BU we will be using this framework to format the training on offer for the postgraduate research students and academic staff.

The Vitae website is an excellent resource and the organisation regularly runs free training events for researchers, PGRs and those involved in research development. Upcoming events include Vitae Connections: Supporting Open Researchers.

The Researcher Development Framework (RDF) is the professional development framework to realise the potential of researchers. The RDF is a tool for planning, promoting and supporting the personal, professional and career development of researchers in higher education. It was designed following interviews with many successful researchers across the sector and articulates the knowledge, behaviours and attributes of a successful researcher.

There is a planner available on the Vitae website to help you assess which stage you are at with your skills and a tutorial providing guidance on how to use the framework.

Top 10 tips from researchers on using the Researcher Development Framework (RDF):

1. You might choose to use the RDF for short term as well as long term development. The RDF can be used in planning for your long term career ambitions but also to make a feasible short term plan. It can be useful to imagine your long term ambitions in order to focus your career path however the reality of progressing through to the higher phases may be more difficult to plan. In the short term, making decisions about how to progress to the next phase or what sub-domains are most important for you will be easier. Try to be realistic when setting these short term goals.

2. Use the RDF to highlight your strengths and areas for development and how these might be used to benefit/influence your personal, professional and career development.

3. Use the RDF to highlight your applicable and transferable skills. This is important for career progression within or outside academia.

4. Prioritise those areas which are most relevant. You don’t have to try to develop in all the areas of the RDF at once. There may be some sub-domains/descriptors where there is less relevance in progressing through the phases for you.

5. Draw on experiences outside of work to evidence your capabilities.

6. Progression to the highest phase in a descriptor will not be applicable to everyone but being aware of the possibilities can aid personal and career development.

7. Talk to others to get their views about your strengths and capabilities. Your supervisor, manager, peers, family and friends are a great source of information to find out more about yourself. Talk to them about how they perceive your capabilities. By understanding how others view you, you will be able to make more informed choices about your future.

8. To move from one phase to the next why not explore attending courses. These courses may be run at a local level (within your University) or may only be run nationally or internationally so awareness of opportunities for training is important. Vitae also run a wide range of courses which address many aspects of personal and career development.

9. Some phases may only be reached through experience and practice however good self-awareness and professional development planning will aid the process.

10. Networking is likely to enable you to reach more experienced phases.

Sociology meets Archaeology – Stonehenge as a site of multiplicities

Sociology students at StonehengeSara Ashencaen Crabtree, Stewart Davidson, Alexandra Jarrett, Georgia Larkins, Ana Paixao Pancada, Charles Scovell-Burfutt, Seval Fleming

Recently FHSS Sociology+ and SciTech students undertaking the final year sociology unit ‘Seekers, Believers & Iconoclasts: Sociology of Thought’, joined up with BSc Archaeology students for a joint Faculty trip to Stonehenge, led by Professor Tim Darvill and Professor Sara Ashencaen Crabtree, Dr Eileen Wilkes and Professor Jonathan Parker. The field trip provided a very important exploration of the overlapping domains of belief, from the prehistoric to the contemporary world, exemplified by Stonehenge, one of the most visited ancient sites in the world.

The day started inauspiciously being dark with rain. After visiting the considerably improved new information site with its excellent exhibits, including an appealingly nostalgic one of historical tourism to Stonehenge, we visited the monument itself. Always impressive and endlessly enigmatic, windswept Stonehenge offers endless variation of vista, where the scale and positioning of the stones appear to change immensely from different viewpoints. From there we followed the processional route in reverse away from Stonehenge negotiating mud and sheep dung on our cheerful march. Tim, charisma totally undampened by the rain, led us on a mobile lecture tour around much of the great prehistoric landscape of Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments studded with a bewildering range of burial barrows, dented with ditched enclosures and crossed by great processional avenues.

It was a privilege to visit Stonehenge with our two BU archaeologists on hand to properly explain the relevance of the landscape that would otherwise have been trodden with little appreciation of the incredible importance of what lay underfoot and what it meant, where Stonehenge sits at the centre of a vast metropolis of monuments.

Later the sociology students reflected on what they had learned. Alex, taking BA Sociology & Anthropology, spoke of the epiphanic moment of drawing essential connections between the generic theoretical and specific social phenomena that lay around her. Georgia on BA Sociology & Social Policy (BASSP) thought about material culture, and how the ancient and modern participant engages in the drama of performance. As sociologists we learned from our archaeological colleagues that Neolithic Britons with great subtlety and vast ingenuity orchestrated this physical pilgrimage over the landscape, drawing ancient pilgrims from huge distances, through the construction of an approach where Stonehenge is dramatically obscured and revealed successively en route – thus channeling both physical approach, perception and therefore experience.

Stewart on BASSP wrote a lengthy analysis: ‘My time throughout BU has given me a much broader perspective on this academic discipline, all too often other social sciences are intertwined. However, when Tim conceptualised this idea of Scienti, the merging of ideas that contributes to a new way of understanding, I challenged my own perception and it’s given me an alternative way to examine things.

I did not hesitate to sign-up for this field trip… I mean it’s not every day one gets an opportunity to have a reconnaissance guide (Tim Darvill) take you around the landscape to expand our understanding of our pre-historic ancestors’ rich history and an opportunity to see it through Stone-age eyes! I have gained transferable skills and drawn comparison to even another unit! My understanding is clearer now on what Bourdieu is suggesting in terms of habitus: we become a structured structure. This even has links with labelling theory and the fluidity/structures flows in everyday practice. This is from observing these momentous structures encountered on the day and the assimilation of these ancient societies.’

To conclude, the success of this trip, where sociology meets archaeology in a synergistic appreciation of the multiplicities of meanings in belief systems, has inspired us as an academic group to explore more opportunities for cross-Faculty engagement, in terms of both research as well as teaching – and where the Stonehenge landscape is now clearly on our sociological map.

 

 

 

BU academic to appear at BBC Free Thinking Festival 7/8th November

BU lecturer Sam Goodman (Journalism, English & Communication) will be appearing at the BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking Festival this weekend. Held in Gateshead over Saturday 7th and Sunday 8th November, the festival features a range of popular and academic talks and workshops designed for a public audience. Sam’s talk is entitled ‘Beer & the British Empire’, and builds on his research into the history and cultural representation of Britain’s colonial presence in India. In his talk, Sam examines the contested history of the use of beer and other alcoholic beverages in medical practice throughout the nineteenth century through to their place within contemporary ideas of well-being. Following the festival, the talk will be broadcast on R3’s The Essay on the 18th November: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06p5999.

HE Policy Update

Monday

Conservative Article

An article on Conservative Home raised speculation around the upcoming Green Paper.  Amongst several assertions, the article claims that HEFCE, QAA and OFFA are likely to be replaced with one teaching, quality and access focussed super-regulator. The accountability and transparency revolution. Coming soon to a University near you – courtesy of Jo Johnson (Conservative Home).

Tuesday

TEF

The Guardian identifies flaws in the measures of student satisfaction that will inform the Teaching Excellence Framework. The article states the TEF is unlikely to encourage discussions around the structure of programmes and modules which is crucial for students. The Teaching Excellence Framework: can higher education up its game? (The Guardian).

HEFCE Figures

A ‘transposition error’ meant that HEFCE wrongly stated that state school leavers were more likely than private peers to get a good degree at university. In fact it is private school students who are more likely to do better at university according to the figures. State schools versus private schools: Hefce sets the record straight (THE).

Wednesday

Student Protests

On Wednesday, a student protest ‘grants not debt’ marched through London. The protest was calling for the abolition of tuition fees and the retention of maintenance grants. Students protest against tuition fees (BBC News).

Thursday

Gender Gap

According to a new analysis of 2013-14 data by the Equality Challenge Unit, some 37,425 male academics are paid at least £50,000, compared with just 17,415 female academics. Similar disparities exist for professional and support staff, with 3.9 per cent of women paid more than £50,000 compared with 7.9 per cent of men. ‘Striking’ inequalities in higher education fuel gender pay gap. (THE).  

Friday

Higher Education Green Paper

The government’s higher education Green Paper was published today, it outlines major proposals which if enacted, will see great changes to the higher education sector. The main points from the paper are below.

  • The Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) will start next year and will consist of different levels (1-4). For the first year, providers will automatically gain a level 1 TEF award if it meets the current quality assurance threshold. Providers will be able to apply for higher levels of the TEF in consequent years, however there will be pre conditions. The government will set a maximum fee cap for institutions successful in the TEF and providers will be entitled to raise their fees in line with inflation.
  • HEFCE and OFFA will merge to create a new Office for Students (OfS). This body will have responsibility for access agreements, teaching funding, the TEF and quality assurance.
  • Similar to that of private providers, institutions will not have to respond to Freedom of Information Requests.
  • The next REF will be held by 2021, however the government proposes to challenge the associated cost and bureaucracy that attracts negative views concerning the REF.

KTP Academic Development Scheme

The next cohort for the KTP Academic Development Scheme (KTPADS) will go live for applications on 9th November.

The aim of this scheme is to equip you with the necessary skills and knowledge needed to engage with business and work towards a collaborative project with a business.  The end result aims to see the business using Bournemouth University as a knowledge base for a KTP.  The scheme will be made up of a series of workshops on business engagement and networking opportunities with local business, it will also include regular support from the Innovate UK regional KTP Adviser and the Knowledge Exchange Adviser (KTP).

Should you be interested in this scheme or require further information, please contact KE Adviser (KTP), Rachel Clarke on 01202 961347 or email KTP@bournemouth.ac.uk 

KTP@40-block-logo

 

BURO intermittently unavailable

BURO, BU’s open access repository for research, is currently experiencing some intermittent Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, which means that occasionally it has been temporarily unavailable to our BURO Editorial Team and external users of open access content.  Please note, this does not seem to have affected the uploading files to BURO from BRIAN or the links to open access works embedded in your Staff Profile Pages.  The company that host BURO have been contacted and we hope all will be resolved shortly.

If you have any concerns please report to IT Services.

The guide Open Access and Depositing your Research will help answer some of your questions about open access.

If you have any further questions about depositing your research open access please contact buro@bournemouth.ac.uk

 

Inge Award 2015 received by Julia Round (CsJCC)

In March 2015 I received QR funding to attend the Popular Culture Association conference in New Orleans with colleagues from the CsJCC. This was a fantastic experience due to the scale and scope of this international conference. It is split into a number of strands and I found many that informed my research (Adaptation, Gothic, Children’s Literature – and, of course, Comics and Sequential Art).

I presented a paper on ‘Revenant Landscapes in The Walking Dead’ as part of the Comics and Sequential Art strand. This argued against the perception that comics can be treated as ‘storyboards’ for adaptations, and offered a deeper analysis of the way space works on the page and screen. I was delighted to hear last month that it was awarded the 2015 Inge Award for Comics Scholarship, given to the best paper in this strand. This award is judged anonymously and has been given to a number of extremely influential scholars in the past (including Jeet Heer, Gene Kannenberg, Jr, Amy Kiste Nyberg and Mel Gibson), so I am extremely happy and grateful for the support I have received from the CsJCC and BU, without which this would not have been possible.

Full paper available at www.academia.edu and via BRIAN

Full paper available at www.academia.edu and via BRIAN

 

International Longevity Centre host blog by HSS PhD student Andy Harding

The following was hosted by the International Longevity Centre:

The Future of Welfare Consumerism: Future challenges and opportunities of welfare consumerism in health and social care

Welfare rights and financial advice_mThe rationale for the creation of the welfare state in the post war period was, in large part, because a market approach to welfare had failed. So how can the market and consumerism now be the solution? Despite this philosophical question, for more than two decades welfare consumerism and markets has been and continues to be at the heart of UK health and social care policy. This presents many challenges and opportunities for practitioners, policymakers and researchers alike – particularly concerning older people. Older people are the largest ‘customer’ of welfare services, thus any welfare policy has major ramifications for us all in later life. But what are the important issues? The important issues are basic, but at the same time complex. There is not one welfare market, and with older people not a homogenous group, there are different types and cohorts of consumers.

The basic issue is simple. It is perhaps not comfortable to label welfare as a commodity. A commodity implies a good or service that we purchase to suit a desire. Yet, rarely does welfare satisfy a desire. On the other hand, we access welfare provision because we have a need. Indeed, it is a commodity and market unlike mainstream markets. Whereas mainstream consumers can use their ‘invisible hand’ to navigate markets and access the type or brand of tea, coffee, tablet or laptop that they like, the need to access welfare is characterised by significant information asymmetries, and often complex, vulnerable and emotional circumstances.

Considering these relative complexities, we know remarkably little about how older people act in welfare markets. Although the welfare consumer might have little in common with the mainstream consumer, nevertheless consumer theory provides a platform to outline the more complex challenges for future research and policy.

Implicit in using markets as a means to allocate resources is that consumers are informed and make good quality choices. This in turn requires us to focus on how older welfare consumers become informed – are they adequately informed? Do they seek impartial and independent information and advice (I&A)? How do they act on and use I&A? How can we ensure that I&A services are funded properly and have adequate coverage? These are just some of the broader future challenges and questions that must be addressed.

These are challenges for both health and social care, where the consumerist landscape created by individual budgets and direct payments, first trail blazed in social care (and mostly lobbied for by younger groups), is now being introduced for increasing numbers of older people with chronic and longer term health conditions. Choices of provider and care package/pathway are now and will increasingly be the norm in health and social care.

In addition, my own on-going doctoral study with FirstStop, a third sector provider of information and advice on housing and care issues in later life, acts to highlight another under looked area – housing. Housing may have a longer association with markets and consumerism, yet it is nevertheless a central pillar of welfare. And for good reason – the appropriateness of housing (e.g. preventing falls and fractures in the home as the stereotypical and archetypal example) in later life can be a key determinant of health and wellbeing. In other words, appropriate housing can reduce the likelihood that an older person needs to access health services and social care.

This final point should also chime with the fiscally minded – informed older welfare consumers, through accessing good quality I&A equates to older people making more informed choices about welfare and enables independence. By implication, this means less dependency on welfare – something which, as consumers who will all grow old one day, should be desirable to us all.