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Young people who are looked after by the state face challenges as they make the transition from care to adulthood, with variation in support available. In the past decade, funding has been directed towards organisations to pilot innovations to support transition, with accompanying evaluations often conducted with a single disciplinary focus, in a context of short timescales and small budgets. Recognising the value and weight of the challenge involved in evaluation of innovations that aim to support the transitions of young people leaving care, this paper aims to provide a review of evaluation approaches and suggestions regarding how these might be developed.

As part of a wider research programme to improve understanding of the innovation process for young people leaving care, the authors conducted a scoping review of grey literature (publications which are not peer reviewed) focusing on evaluation of innovations in the UK over the past 10 years. The authors critiqued the evaluation approaches in each of the 22 reports they identified with an inter-disciplinary perspective, representing social care, public health and organisation science.

The authors identified challenges and opportunities for the development of evaluation approaches in three areas. Firstly, informed by social care, the authors suggest increased priority should be granted to participatory approaches to evaluation, within which involvement of young people leaving care should be central. Secondly, drawing on public health, there is potential for developing a common outcomes’ framework, including methods of data collection, analysis and reporting, which aid comparative analysis. Thirdly, application of theoretical frameworks from organisation science regarding the process of innovation can drive transferable lessons from local innovations to aid its spread.

By adopting the unique perspective of their multiple positions, the authors’ goal is to contribute to the development of evaluation approaches. Further, the authors hope to help identify innovations that work, enhance their spread, leverage resources and influence policy to support care leavers in their transitions to adulthood.

When teaching in or around the subject of care-experienced young people, it is important for information to be presented in a way that not only creates an understanding of the prevalence of care experience but also emphasises the myriad of life challenges associated with experiences of being involved in the care system.

It is known that out of the 12 million children living in England, just under 400,000 (3%) are known to the social care system at any one time and just over 82,000 of these children are ‘looked after’, under the legal guardianship of local authorities in England.

It will not be unusual for students to come to university with little or no exposure to or understanding of children in care, their lives or what it means to be care experienced. Therefore, teaching in this area needs to draw attention to the reasons as to why care experiences result in hardships, this can be done by identifying why care experience is a sensitive subject area. This chapter identifies some (but not all) of the common adversities that care-experienced young people often face inclusive of changes in accommodation and placement instability, insecure relationships, poor mental health, disrupted education, substance misuse, and poverty.

Any topic can be sensitive, and every subject area will have sensitive issues and topics that academics in higher education and further education settings will be expected to negotiate. Your ability to negotiate sensitive topics is important because the ways in which you engage and teach about sensitive topics will affect your ability to provide a positive learning experience and teaching alliance with students. In practice, you will face enormous pressure to ‘deliver’ on teaching, which will only be mirrored by similar freedoms in deciding on how and what needs to be done to get students to where they need to be. Negotiating, identifying, preparing for and delivering teaching on sensitive subjects and topics can be difficult in individual academics. This chapter, seeks to prepare you for developing a deeper understanding of some of the philosophical, theoretical, and practical-based concerns and issues related to teaching sensitive topics and subjects. This chapter begins with providing a rationale for what follows, and it explores some of the key themes, positionality, identity, transformational learning and lived experience, that are explored in greater depth in the collection. This chapter also contains a detailed breakdown of the structure and the content of this edited collection, and it concludes with some reflective comments about the implications of the collection for you as an individual and your career.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the results of Hong Kong’s 2015 District Council elections in order to test the repercussions of the Occupy Central Movement. The paper attempts to identify the political implications of the Movement as reflected by the 2015 election results.

The methodology used for the paper was to collect election data and conduct data analysis to generalize the political implications of the Occupy Central Movement.

The paper found that, first, Hong Kong is still polarized, as most voters were divided into those who supported the Occupy Central Movement and those who opposed it. Second, there is no consensus regarding political reforms, as most voters were split into two antagonistic positions. Third, the activists of the Occupy Central Movement have formed a new political force that attracts voters who demand change. Fourth, the Occupy Central Movement has become a breeding ground that nurtures localism.

The 2015 District Council elections were a continuation of the Occupy Central Movement. The Movement affected the political balance between the pro-establishment and pan-democratic camps in the 2015 elections and it has shaped the democratization process in Hong Kong.

The paper was the product of an original research project that examined the results of the 2015 District Council elections to reflect on the implications of the Occupy Central Movement. The paper concluded that the 2015 elections sent important political messages to key political players in Hong Kong.