The trend towards giving British secondary schools a fuller role in initial teacher education (ITE) has been gathering pace for much of the second half of this century. The impetuses driving this development have been partly professional and partly political. However, a recent political initiative (Circular 9/92, Department for Education, 1992) precipitated the development of school‐based ITE beyond what the professional evidence supported. This paper examines teachers’ perceptions of the costs and benefits to schools of involvement in school‐based ITE, as instituted by Circular 9/92, distinguishing between tangible and intangible costs and benefits. It is based on a survey of schools from throughout England and Wales. Four groups of teachers with different levels of involvement and managerial responsibility were sampled. The paper also explores teachers’ perceptions of the relationship between costs and benefits before offering some concluding speculations on the future of school‐based ITE.

A comprehensive radon remediation programme in NHS properties in Northamptonshire, where 11 100 staff are employed working on 83 separate sites, has been in progress since 1992, and has resulted in many locations with raised radon levels being identified and remediated. This paper considers the dose saving achieved and costs of the remediation to derive a value for the cost-effectiveness of the programme. A value of £184 000 per Man-Sievert of annual dose reduction was obtained, which is around half the figure calculated by the NRPB in its recent initiative to reduce patient doses from dental x-rays in the UK, based on cost-benefit analysis. Thus similar comprehensive radon remediation programmes in any workplace in Radon Affected Areas can be justified. The cost of this workplace programme is, however, a factor of about 4 times more expensive than the theoretical estimates for domestic radon mitigation programmes found in the literature, and the reasons for this difference are considered.

In the UK, Action Levels for radon have been established at 400 Bq m(-3) for the workplace and 200 Bq m(-3) for the home. We have estimated the dose received by occupants of rooms with radon levels near or above the Action Level, using hourly radon readings, and a questionnaire to record occupancy. In the workplace, results for 73 staff suggest that doses are lower than expected, partly due to part-time working and partly due to the mobility of staff. The 75% quantile for the series, corrected to a 37 hour week, is 5.2 mSv at 400 Bq m(-3). Compared to the current annual limit for radiation workers, the Action Level could be increased, but the current Action Level is compatible with the recent EEC Directive requiring a lower dose limit. However, when raised radon levels in the workplace were reduced by remediation in the series we studied, the dose reduction to staff was consistently around half of the radon level reduction. Although it would be appropriate to study more locations, this suggests an Action Level for remediated workplaces of 200 Bq m(-3). Finally, in a limited series of dose assessments in domestic properties, we found that doses could considerably exceed 5 mSv at the 200 Bq m(-3) Action Level, primarily because the sample included an example of high occupancy, in our case several Asian wives in purdah, whose occupancy was almost total.