This paper presents a new conceptualisation of adults' process of return to formal education, arising from an in-depth qualitative study of 50 Scottish adult returners to various institutional settings. The new way of thinking developed because existing explanations proved ill-equipped to reflect the complex and diverse data gathered in interview about adults' reasons for returning to education. The paper begins by describing the context of the study, the study itself and the questions it raises about participation issues. It goes on to consider three conceptualisations of participation that may be found in the literature, the main barriers to participation and the challenges presented to them by data from the research. The new conceptualisation is then introduced and discussed further with reference to relevant data. The paper closes with some issues prompted by this idea for institutions and policy-makers in adult education.

This paper describes the nature of the joint initiatives taking place between primary and secondary schools in Scotland and community education providers in local authorities and the voluntary sector, as reported on by the schools themselves. It details the characteristics of the relatively few schools which had strong links with their communities in terms of provision, collaboration and participation in decision making. Ten case-study schools and a detailed comparison of practice are used to illustrate the variety of approaches to collaboration found among them. Differences are explained not only in terms of the actors' perceptions of the purposes of the collaboration, the values inherent in such perceptions, the conditions under which collaboration took place and the practices in operation but also in more analytic terms of institutional boundaries and pedagogic purpose. It is suggested that this analysis will help plot various models of collaborative practice and provide a useful way of interrogating the multifaceted strands of social inclusion policy.

This paper describes the nature of the joint initiatives taking place between primary and secondary schools in Scotland and community education providers in local authorities and the voluntary sector, as reported on by the schools themselves. It details the characteristics of the relatively few schools which had strong links with their communities in terms of provision, collaboration and participation in decision making. Ten case-study schools and a detailed comparison of practice are used to illustrate the variety of approaches to collaboration found among them. Differences are explained not only in terms of the actors' perceptions of the purposes of the collaboration, the values inherent in such perceptions, the conditions under which collaboration took place and the practices in operation but also in more analytic terms of institutional boundaries and pedagogic purpose. It is suggested that this analysis will help plot various models of collaborative practice and provide a useful way of interrogating the multifaceted strands of social inclusion policy.

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Objective: Asthma and gastric reflux disease are widespread and often coexisting diseases with complex interactions, leading some to suspect that asthma symptoms of patients with reflux may improve with anti-reflux therapy. The objective of this study was to determine whether pepsin in saliva, indicative of airway reflux, could be detected in patients with asthma of varying severity and test the requirement of citric acid as a pepsin preservative. Methods: Saliva samples were collected in the clinic (with/without citric acid) and upon waking the following morning from 25 asthmatic patients. Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay was performed for pepsin and interleukin-8 (IL-8), an inflammatory cytokine induced by pepsin in other airway epithelia. Pepsin induction of IL-8 was tested in a lung epithelial cell culture model. Results: Pepsin was detected in saliva from 14/25 patients (56%; mean concentration of pepsin in specimens where observed ±SD =80.3±87.5 ng/mL); significant agreement was found between samples collected in the presence/absence of citric acid. No significant associations were found with pepsin and clinical measures of asthma severity. IL-8 was detected in saliva from 22/25 patients (88%; mean IL-8 in all specimens where observed =3.27±3.91 ng/mL). IL-8 was significantly upregulated in human lung epithelial cells exposed to pepsin at pH7 in vitro ( P =0.041). Conclusion: In summary, more than half of the asthma patients in this study were found to have pepsin in their saliva, indicative of airway reflux. These data support the use of salivary pepsin as a noninvasive tool for future investigation of airway reflux in a larger cohort. The data further suggest that collection in citric acid as a sample preservative is not warranted and that pooling of multiple saliva samples collected at various timepoints may improve sensitivity of pepsin detection and reduce costs incurred by multiple sample analysis in future studies.