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Background Communication interventions can facilitate communication between people with profound and multiple learning disabilities (PMLD) and familiar partners such as family and educational setting staff, including speech and language therapists. Various communication interventions are routinely used but their clinical and cost-effectiveness are unclear. Intensive Interaction (II) is one intervention that focuses on early interaction abilities. II can be delivered by staff in educational settings and/or at home. Despite many settings already implementing II, staff are sometimes untrained or have not received up to date training, potentially leading to inconsistencies in how the technique is applied and the quality of the interactions. We will provide structured training in II to educational setting staff and parents/carers with coordinated activities developed jointly for each child/young person to be delivered within the educational setting and at home. This study aims to establish whether Intensive Interaction delivered within educational settings improves communication skills of children and young people with PMLD. Methods A multi-site pragmatic cluster randomised controlled trial comparing usual care with Intensive Interaction and usual care. Clusters will be educational settings. This study will recruit 330 participants (aged 3–25 years) with PMLD from 66 educational settings within Great Britain. Each participant will have a corresponding teacher, parent/carer, and interventionist. Potential participants will be screened by their educational setting for eligibility prior to giving informed consent. Data will be collected at baseline, 32 weeks, and 52 weeks post-randomisation and will assess health and educational outcomes including participants’ communication skills, behaviour, wellbeing, and quality of life. The primary outcome is communication skills, measured by the Communication Complexity Scale (CCS) at 32 weeks post-randomisation. Setting staff will video record an interaction with each participating child/young person. Communication will be coded by members of the research team blinded to allocation using the CCS. Discussion This study addresses a much used but currently under-researched intervention and results will inform the support provided to children and young people with PMLD in their educational settings and at home. Trial registration The trial was prospectively registered on the ISRCTN registry on 3rd May 2023 (registration number: ISRCTN81099965, https://www.isrctn.com/ISRCTN81099965 ).

Contrary to expectations based on 1980s west-European research, women's representation in Australian cabinets over the last quarter century has exceeded their proportional strength in parliaments. The paper examines this and canvasses explanations. Consistent with west-European findings, Australian women ministers are overrepresented in social portfolio areas and underrepresented in defining and physical resource mobilisation areas. The paper considers implications and explanations of women's work in cabinet. 'There are only two ways of getting into the Cabinet. One way is to crawl up the staircase of preferment on your belly; the other way is to kick them in the teeth.' Aneurin Bevan quoted in Hennessy (1986, 94)

The convergence of a widening social base in the Parliamentary Conservative Party with an increasingly middle class Parliamentary Labour Party has been a persistent observation of postwar élite studies. Claims are frequently made that the Thatcher and Major years have produced a more 'classless' Conservative élite. On the basis of new research, it is demonstrated that members of the socio-educational élite continue to enjoy vastly disproportionate access to Conservative parliamentary seats; that they enjoy even more disproportionate access to safe seats; and that they continue to enjoy still more disproportionate access to office in Conservative governments. Furthermore, in the last decade long-term trends to social convergence have gone into reverse.

Billed as a psychological thriller, this plumbs the serpentine pasts of three erstwhile school-pals from a Dublin feeder town: John Palmer, sometime bully victim and now successful antiques dealer; Michelle Palmer, a manic depressive delivered from prostitution into a loveless marriage with John; and Alan `Red' Bulger, a former school menace who, after a sojourn in the States, returns to worm his way back into John's life, filch his wife and take on the local protection racket. (Sean) Hughes is a comedian and the manner of his inspired stand-up observations is preserved in the text - whether deriding the false calm of a Dublin park (`the policemen take their fishing very seriously') or pondering the inexplicable intrusion of a certain rotund talk-show host into his sexual fantasies. The real achievement of the book, though, is its treatment of the less farcical obstacles facing its characters. You would think such tensions, and the unbridled violence they precipitate, would be trickier to manipulate than the outright absurdities Hughes usually works in. Yet he fashions them with startling precision and depth.