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Within the United Kingdom, general practitioners (GPs) will manage the care of the majority of patients with life-limiting and terminal disease, including those with complex problems requiring specialist palliative care involvement. The consultation is at the heart of general practice and communication skills, underpining the UK General Practitioner Vocational Training Scheme (GPVTS). To attain membership of the Royal College of General Practitioners, trainees are required to undertake learning methods during their training programme as outlined in the RCGP Curriculum, which include video analysis of consultations, random case analysis of a selection of consultations and patients' feedback on consultations using satisfaction questionnaires or tools. This chapter discusses the Cardiff University Post Graduate Course's specialist palliative care education designed to meet the needs of specialists and of GPs with a developing specialist interest, the Cardiff six-point toolkit (listening, reflection, summarising, question style, comfort, language), the use of role play for developing communication skills, and reflective practice/portfolio learning.

John Edward Christopher Hill (1912–2003), a Fellow of the British Academy, was a great historian. Nearly all his huge output was on the seventeenth-century ‘English Revolution’ and its origins. It was claimed that his Marxism, even when mellowed, led him to ignore evidence that did not support it. In 1936, Hill became an assistant lecturer at Cardiff University. Two years later, he returned to Balliol College at the University of Oxford as fellow and tutor in history. In 1956, he released his first major book, Economic Problems of the Church: from Archbishop Whitgift to the Long Parliament. Hill also found himself at the centre of communist politics in Britain, when the Historians’ Group led the movement to end the Communist Party’s obedience to Moscow. Besides the disputes with historians, Hill’s devotion to poetry had brought him into conflict with literary critics. Hill is cautious in his assessments of John Milton’s relations with radicalism. Hill’s sympathy for the downtrodden and unsuccessful was an unchanging part of his historical and his practical beliefs.

This chapter highlights the Franco-Welsh academic partnership that offers industrial-based mobility placements for student and young employees. This project was conceived at a seminar organised by Welsh Higher Education Brussels (WHEB) in November 2009. The principal organisations involved are the Swansea University, Cardiff University, the South Wales Chamber of Commerce, the Welsh Assembly Government and the Chambre de Commerce et d'Industrie de Versailles Val-d'Oise/Yvelines (CCIV).

This chapter aims to provide a description of the research and explain why it is important to discover more about grandparents' roles in divorced families. It describes this book, which tells about grandparents whose sons or daughters have divorced. It discusses the findings of a two-year interdisciplinary research study at Cardiff University. It notes that the project was supported by a grant from the Nuffield Foundation and the research was completed in May 2001. It sets out to explore family members' perceptions of the impact of divorce on grandparenting. It notes that the study is designed to provide a tri-generational perspective and information is gathered from interviews with parents, children, and maternal and paternal grandparents.

Universities are important, sophisticated institutions but they are not well understood even by academics themselves who are busy researching gravitational waves or the rise of populism. They may, very reasonably, find their discipline much more interesting than their institution. Instead the campus novel, from Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim to Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man, David Lodge’s Brummidge, and Howard Jacobson’s Sefton Goldberg, is the main way people working in universities investigate what they are like and communicate it to the wider world. But they can’t tell the whole story. There are also academics in British universities researching universities but not many of them— most of the books about the university are American. Meanwhile crude conspiracy theories claim to explain what is happening to a complex institution. One such narrative is ‘the university is under attack from managers/ministers/ markets threatening my/your/all disciplines’. Another narrative is ‘Universities are ivory towers: there are too many of them and too many people go.’ That is why I have tried to convey what I have learnt from my university education over the past decade and assembled the evidence to explain why both of those narratives are wrong. Such is my respect for the values of academia that, even if one might suspect this is just a heavily disguised ministerial memoir, it is at least the first example which has been subject to academic peer review. The behaviour of our universities is influenced by their environment and the incentives they face. That environment is very unusual and took its modern form as a result of a series of haphazard decisions taken in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Competitive nationwide entry gives our universities exceptional power to decide who they admit. That in turn has driven an intense educational arms race in our secondary schools which in turn has led to very early subject specialization. The behaviour of schools is shaped by the competition to get into the ‘best’ universities. However, we have seen that there are different types of universities, each well adapted to a distinctive role.