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Mature student numbers across England’s Higher Education (HE) sector have been declining since the rise in tuition fees in 2012. Leading up to Brexit, there is a need to upskill the national workforce to provide services and skills currently sourced from the EU. Mature students play a key role in this process, as HE study can add to existing industry experiences, knowledge, and skills. Hence, the HE sector in England is beginning to evaluate and change the way in which universities and colleges can provide support to mature students from recruitment to the completion of their course.

Institutions can encourage a sense of belonging in mature students through the use of mature student mentors and ambassadors at open days, and as points of contact throughout any course. It is important to create a mature student community to provide an appropriate support network, but equally academic staff should encourage the engagement of mature students with their younger peers.

This chapter provides an insight into relevant research literature and uses examples from a case study based in a small HE provider setting to make practical recommendations for academic staff, support staff, and areas of institutional practice.

An analysis of community health, its history, successes and failures, depends on an understanding of its scope, but there is little consensus as to precisely what the discipline entails. Some view it as a strict scientific discipline, others see it as a social movement, and still others conceive of it as a conglomerate of various disciplines. It is useful initially to identify the medical components of community health, and then to approach its interdisciplinary aspects. Community health, strictly defined, includes such fields as disease control, environmental sanitation, maternal and child care, dental health, nutrition, school health, geriatrics, occupational health, and the treatment of drug and alcohol abuse. This limited definition, though accurate, does not differentiate the field from the much older area of public health. Within community health, the disease focus of traditional public health epidemiology, the total health focus of community medicine, and the outcome focus of health services research are interconnected. Community health combines the public health concern for health issues of defined populations with the preventive therapeutic approach of clinical medicine. An emphasis on personal health care is the result of this combination. Robert Kane describes the field accurately and succinctly: “We envision community medicine as a general organizational framework which draws upon a number of disciplines for its tools. In this sense, it is an applied discipline which adopts the knowledge and skills of other areas in its effort to solve community health problems. The tools described here include community diagnosis (which draws upon such diverse fields as sociology, political science, economics, biostatistics, and epidemiology), epidemiology itself, and health services research (the application of epidemiologic techniques on analyzing the effects of medical care on health).”

Two meanings of the word myth informed the origins of this volume and its constituent chapters: myth as an archetypical narrative that societies and cultures use to embody value-laden lessons about both the natural world and human nature (myths to live by); and myth as a nefarious fabrication that imperils those who believe it (myths to die by). Throughout this volume, we use the Greek myth of Cassandra – the heroine of Troy who unsuccessfully forewarned her community of avoidable future disaster – as an archetype for the often heroic efforts of those in our day who seek to forewarn us of altogether foreseeable future disasters associated with both natural forces and human contrivance. We also explore the deadly myths of delusion – those which weave an illusory cocoon of invincibility around those who increasingly inhabit increasingly disaster-prone landscapes. Each chapter in this volume tells stories about what happens when these two meanings of myth collide, and of how better heeding the message of present-day Cassandras might help us to dispel the myths of delusion.

The law of catastrophic wildfire prevention and response in the Mediterranean member states of the European Union stands in stark contrast to that of common law nation states such as Australia and the United States. This is due primarily to the higher levels of reciprocal moral and legal obligations between governments and citizens established in various sources of European law. Focusing on the relationship between the EU, Spain, and the Autonomous Community of Catalonia within Spain, this chapter describes these three legal frameworks as they are nested within each other, followed by some case law examples of these laws in action. We compare and contrast the philosophical assumptions underlying the utilitarian cost–benefit approach to regulatory justification used in the United States with the precautionary principle model emblematic of the European Union, the member state of Spain, and its Autonomous Community of Catalonia. Regardless of approach, protection of the public health, safety, and welfare will only be as robust and effective as the government agencies that have that responsibility, and the degree of cooperation with those agencies of the citizens they serve.

The Cassandra Zone is that time period – and the events that occur within it – from the voicing of the first credible warnings of foreseeable future disaster until society either awakens to the threat and proactively mitigates against it, or chooses to ignore such warnings and subsequently suffers the consequences when the foretold disaster comes to pass. Whether or not that society manages to learn from its own history of disaster and use the power of state to mitigate against foretold future ones is one of the definitive criteria for determining whether, in social theorist Phillip Selznick’s terms, such a society can be deemed to constitute a moral community.

Myth is a story of archetypical personas who behave in ways and with motives that we recognize in ourselves. We use myth as a way of reminding ourselves of the relationship between motives, actions, and consequences. Myths can serve either as inspirational or cautionary tales, and sometimes as both. But “myth” can also mean a fabricated story intended to create a false impression, and to achieve storytellers’ ends when they have decided the truth will not suffice. We apply the myth of Cassandra to the millennium-long recorded history of giant tsunamis in Japan. After each of these catastrophes, survivors sought to warn future generations of their recurrences. But, each time, their progeny eventually lost the memory of these lessons, and lost their lives when the next monster wave overwhelmed them. Only when they kept the lessons as living knowledge in everyday life, could they manage to escape from monster tsunamis. In this chapter, we use the myth of Cassandra in conjunction with the myth of Prometheus, the bringer of fire to humankind, as a metaphor for Japan’s growing reliance on nuclear power. Government and utility companies built powerful but inherently dangerous cauldrons in the nation’s disaster-prone landscapes, assuring the public they could control the fire’s fury and defend it against nature’s. As images of atomic bomb victims were still vivid and widely shared in Japan, they had to overcome the public fear of radioactivity by fabricating a “myth of safety.” The nuclear disaster made the public distrust the government and utility companies, which lingers in the process of reconstruction from the disaster. Myths can either reveal hidden truths or mask hidden lies. The Japanese people must now learn to distinguish one from the other.

IN 1971 there were 1,207 scaffolding accidents, 14 of them fatal. This revelation was made by Mr. Dudley Smith, M.P., Parliamentary Under‐Secretary of State at the Department of Employment, in his recent speech at the Scaffolding Training Centre. In view of his further comments, and the fact that many construction companies operate work study departments, much of what he had to say is worth more publicity than it has so far received.