Deciding on a secondary school for children with autism is notoriously difficult for parents. While current UK legislation emphasises the choice that parents of children with special educational needs should have in educational decision-making, there is a dearth of research in this area, which means that little is known about how parents come to make decisions about secondary school placements and the types of support, if any, they receive from professionals. The present study aimed to determine the factors that immediately influence secondary school choice for young people with autism in one London local authority from the perspectives of multiple informants. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with parents of children with autism (n = 7), young people themselves prior to secondary school entry (n = 6), parent advisors (n = 5) and secondary school professionals (n = 5). Parents emphasised the anxiety and burden of the decision-making process. There was, however, substantial agreement among adult groups on the factors necessary for a successful secondary school placement: a nurturing, flexible and inclusive environment that emphasised both academic and life skills. Few adults, however, mentioned the importance of children's social relationships – a factor that featured prominently in the reports of young people. These findings highlight both the different perceptions of those involved in making decisions about the educational placements of children with autism and the challenges associated with weighing up these potentially conflicting perspectives. More work is needed to ensure both that information is transparent and accessible to all parents and that young people are actively involved in decisions that ultimately affect their lives.
We study the relationship between age, metallicity, and α-enhancement of FGK stars in the Galactic disk. The results are based upon the analysis of high-resolution UVES spectra from the Gaia-ESO large stellar survey. We explore the limitations of the observed dataset, i.e. the accuracy of stellar parameters and the selection effects that are caused by the photometric target preselection. We find that the colour and magnitude cuts in the survey suppress old metal-rich stars and young metal-poor stars. This suppression may be as high as 97% in some regions of the age-metallicity relationship. The dataset consists of 144 stars with a wide range of ages from 0.5 Gyr to 13.5 Gyr, Galactocentric distances from 6 kpcto 9.5 kpc, and vertical distances from the plane 0 9 Gyr is not as small as advocated by some other studies. In agreement with earlier work, we find that radial abundance gradients change as a function of vertical distance from the plane. The [Mg/Fe] gradient steepens and becomes negative. In addition, we show that the inner disk is not only more α-rich compared to the outer disk, but also older, as traced independently by the ages and Mg abundances of stars. ; This work was partly supported by the European Union FP7 programme through ERC grant number 320360. AS is supported by the MICINN grant AYA2011-24704 and by the ESF EUROCORES Programme EuroGENESIS (MICINN grant EUI2009-04170). The results presented here benefited from discussions held during Gaia-ESO workshops and conferences supported by the ESF (European Science Foundation) through the GREAT (Gaia Research ...