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Our migration story – The making of Britain

Our migration story – The making of Britain

This website presents the often untold stories of the generations of migrants who came to and shaped the British Isles. While it is primarily designed to support teachers and students studying migration to Britain, its aim is to be a useful resource for anyone interested in Britain’s migration history. This site is organised through stories of individuals and groups. These stories are told through a diverse range of historical source material and are arranged into four time-period categories: AD43-1500; 1500-1750; 1750-1900; 1900-2000s. Across each period, you will find images, quotations, newspaper clippings, Parliamentary reports, videos, poems, extracts from novels, and many other materials that present the successes, challenges, obstacles and surprises faced by Britain’s migrants over more than a thousand…
Dr Neil Thompson
August 18, 2020
Neil Thompson’s Lesson for Living – Take a break

Neil Thompson’s Lesson for Living – Take a break

Most workplaces seem to be very pressurized places these days. One of the dangers of this is that some people respond to pressures in ways that can make the situation worse. For example, it is not uncommon for busy people not to take a break. They seem to think that they are so busy that they just have to press on. But if we don’t give our bodies and our minds the opportunity to recover from the strain we put them under in pressurized circumstances, we risk making ourselves ill through stress. We are also more likely to make mistakes, to be less creative, to fail to learn, to be more anxious and defensive in our practice, to gain less…
Dr Neil Thompson
August 4, 2020
Pay and progression of women of colour

Pay and progression of women of colour

The Fawcett Society are working in partnership with the Runnymede Trust to deliver a project exploring the pay and progression of women of colour.Building on the Government’s Race Disparity Unit’s work and the independent McGregor-Smith Review, we will explore in depth ways to unlock the potential of women of colour at work, by understanding the inequalities and intersecting barriers they experience, and the solutions they think would help to overcome them. The project aims to gather a clear picture of the points at which intersecting gender and ethnicity differences in pay and progression begin to set in, for different groups of women. We will be exploring what intersecting or multiple forms of discrimination and disadvantage, as well as resources, mean…
Dr Neil Thompson
August 4, 2020
Having realistic expectations could make you happier than being over-optimistic

Having realistic expectations could make you happier than being over-optimistic

There are fairly good arguments for optimism and pessimism both. Optimists, who see the best in everything, are likely to have a sunnier disposition; pessimists, on the other hand, would argue that their negative expectations never leave them disappointed when the worst actually happens.But in the end, it might be realists who win out. According to a study published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, being realistic about your life outcomes is likely to make you happier than overestimating them. David de Meza from the London School of Economics and Chris Dawson from the University of Bath examined data from 1,601 individuals who took part in the British Household Panel Survey between 1991 and 2009. This longitudinal survey covers a…
Dr Neil Thompson
August 4, 2020
Neil Thompson’s Lessons for Living – Don’t try to do the impossible

Neil Thompson’s Lessons for Living – Don’t try to do the impossible

The Avenue e-learning course, Successful Time and Workload Management, is based on four rules of time and workload management. One of those rules is: too much work is too much work. That is, if you have too much to do in the time available, then you need to find different ways of doing things rather than just try to do more than is possible and quite feasibly work yourself into a vicious circle in which your work pressures become increasingly unmanageable. A key word here is ‘strategizing’. Don’t try to do the impossible by trying to do two days’ work every day. Use reflective practice to explore strategies for managing the pressures you face so that you are not overwhelmed…
Dr Neil Thompson
July 21, 2020