TORT Centre

James Arrot Drive

Dundee DD1 9SY

TORT Centre

James Arrot Drive

Dundee DD1 9SY

This research seminar will draw on Charlotte’s team’s evaluation of Transition 5-7, which is a universal, class-based nine-week universal support intervention to develop children’s awareness and ability to cope with the multiple changes experienced over primary-secondary school transition.

The evaluation followed a mixed-methods approach, combining both qualitative process and quantitative outcome intervention evaluation. The outcome evaluation found children in the intervention condition to show a sustained increase in Transition Excitement and decrease in Transition Worries across time, which had a statistically meaningful impact on Emotional Wellbeing. The need for a more systemic approach to primary-secondary school support provision, which is gradual, has a distinct delivery, and follows a skills-based curriculum, was discussed in the process evaluation.

Transition 5-7 makes a unique empirical contribution in demonstrating the need for primary-secondary school transitions provision to take a preventative as opposed to a curative approach and begin early in Year 5, and the viability and success of implementing emotional-centred support intervention in practice. This has direct implications for educational policy and practice. Further conceptual and methodological implications for future research are also discussed. 

The Team

Dr Charlotte Bagnall (the project Principal Investigator), is a Lecturer at the University of Manchester. She is interested in applied psychology of education research, specifically how to support children’s emotional wellbeing over primary-secondary school transition.

Liz Stevenson is a Consortium Partner for Birmingham Education Partnership, a new role within the School Improvement Team working with schools across the borough of Birmingham. Liz previously worked as the Transition Manager for Sandwell Council.

Dr Nick Garnett is a Senior Lecturer at Keele University. He is interested in applied psychology of education research, with a specific interest in intervention science and statistical analysis.

Dr Darel Cookson, is a Lecturer at Nottingham Trent University. Her key research interests are social psychology, specifically our identities and relationships with others. She also has a keen interest in education intervention research.  

The project was also supported by Research Assistant Frederick Jones, a 3rd year student studying on the BSc Educational Psychology programme at the University of Manchester.

A free talk by Naomi Games in the D'Arcy Thompson Lecture Theatre, Tower Building.

Abram Games was one of 20th century Britain’s most innovative and important graphic designers. With a career spanning sixty years he produced some of Britain’s most enduring images, which are now a fascinating record of social history.

During the Second World War, when he designed 100 posters, he was uniquely appointed ‘Official War Poster Artist’. After the war, he created posters for Shell, London Transport, Guinness, the Financial Times, the British Overseas Airways Corporation and British Airways. He designed the first animated ident for BBC television (1953), the covers of Penguin Books and the emblems for the Festival of Britain (1951) and the Queen’s Award for Industry (1965). Games also created postage stamps issued in Britain, Jersey and Israel.

To accompany our graphic design exhibition Got the Message?, Abram's daughter Naomi Games will talk about her father’s personal philosophy of ‘maximum meaning, minimum means’ that gave his works their distinctive conceptual and visual quality. She will relate personal anecdotes, show his designs and progressive sketches, and will explain his working process.

A free talk in the D'Arcy Thompson Lecture Theatre, Tower Building by the acclaimed artist Professor Calum Colvin, Associate Dean at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design.

International Stereoscopy Day marks the anniversary of Charles Wheatstone’s lecture to the Royal Society on 21 June 1838 announcing his invention of the stereoscope. The instrument transformed both science and art. In science, depth perception could be investigated experimentally. In art, the almost synchronous invention of photography ushered in the era of stereoscopic photographs. Eleven years later, David Brewster devised a stereoscope using lenses, the first model of which was made in Dundee by George Lowden.

Brewster wrote a book on Natural Magic and this provides the title for Professor Colvin’s talk. He will show examples of his own stereoscopic art works that play on Wheatstone’s and Brewster’s contributions to the art and science of stereoscopic vision as well as the bitter personal rivalry between them. In addition to subtle stereoscopic portraits of Wheatstone and Brewster, visual references are made to these rivalries. Both visual artists and visual scientists are natural magicians but the rules by which they operate differ. Scientists rarefy and isolate phenomena to control them in the laboratory, whereas artists embrace complexity and manipulate phenomena intuitively. It is less common for artists to harness the instruments invented by scientists and yet this is precisely the approach adopted by Calum Colvin in Natural Magick, thereby bringing art and science into closer harmony.