Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines pre-school childcare provision in Birmingham during the Second World War. As well as providing a local dimension to an understudied area of education, it adds to our understanding of the home front, women’s history and the relationship between theory and practice in childcare provision at this time. It investigates childcare facilities available for working mothers by the outbreak of the hostilities and how these increased to meet wartime demand for work. An innovative project carried out by Canadian child psychologist, Dr William Blatz and his team at Birmingham’s Garrison Lane Nursery Training Centre was an important new childcare facility. The thesis analyses the impact of nursery school education on the experiences of children, staff, families and the local community by interrogating a range of primary sources, including Canadian records not previously utilised by historians, official records such as central and local government reports, Mass Observation reports, newspapers and other printed material. These primary sources are problematic as they were primarily produced by men in positions of authority, so they have been interpreted to uncover the perspectives and experiences of mothers, childcare practitioners and children. The thesis argues that Birmingham became an epicentre of progressive educational practice in childcare during the Second World War, which helped to shape national guidelines at the time and after the war.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".