Local Government Association

This article discusses emerging findings from a large‐scale study undertaken in 12 diverse areas of England focused on reducing health inequalities for refugees, asylum seekers, and migrant populations. Working with multilingual populations has posed both ethical and practical considerations throughout the design and implementation of this co‐produced participatory research project. Despite our deep‐rooted commitment to working collaboratively with communities of interest and a large team of multilingual academic and community partners who have co‐designed the study, the linguistic complexities of operationalising planned activities have highlighted multiple obstacles. We argue that multilingual research presents significant challenges to researchers and has the potential to jeopardise commitments to inclusivity and co‐production, even for those teams well‐versed in working with refugee and migrant groups. Practical considerations around recruitment in diverse languages, appropriate translations of project documentation, and timely booking of sufficient interpreters repeatedly emerged as challenges, as has gaining informed consent, particularly where literacy and understanding of concepts of research are new to participants. The methodological difficulties involved in achieving linguistic inclusivity are outlined, together with the complexities of interpreting and translating set within a context of negotiating different power relationships between institutions, academic researchers, collaborative partners, community co‐researchers, and participants. Whilst community co‐researchers and organisations create a vital bridge to enable all participants to communicate effectively within an ethical and collaborative space, we interrogate the challenges inherent in such empirical research and propose methodological practices to address these concerns.

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework’s 2050 Vision depicts a world living in harmony with nature where “biodiversity is valued, conserved, restored and wisely used, maintaining ecosystem services, sustaining a healthy planet and delivering benefits essential for all people”. To achieve this vision, alternatives to business-as-usual are urgently needed, especially in the highest impacting sectors. Here we demonstrate the use of visioning and target setting to create an actionable roadmap to a ‘nature positive’ future for the UK residential and commercial development sector. During an online workshop, ten expert participants defined a shared vision for the development sector in 2050, and worked collaboratively to identify interim targets required to achieve that vision. The resulting roadmap highlights the need to improve biodiversity monitoring and assessment methods, strengthen Biodiversity Net Gain metrics, increase ecological literacy and conservation funding, and enhance community access to, and connection with, nature.

This article examines whether the so-called ‘London effect’, in which London’s schools outperformed the rest of England on key performance measures between 2003 and 2013, has persisted beyond the global Covid-19 pandemic. The research builds on previous work which demonstrated that the London effect had survived the high levels of change that characterised the school system in England since 2013, which included significant changes to the primary curriculum and the national assessment frameworks in both the primary and secondary phases. The research uses detailed analysis of educational attainment data, with its main focus being on determining whether the educational impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic adversely impacted the London effect or if London continued to remain the highest performing region in England after the pandemic. The analysis is based on the Key Stage 4 General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) examination results in 2023. The article concludes with a reflection on the policy context and how this might influence future developments within the London school system.