It’s the end of the first semester as a new school and things are beginning to settle into their new shape.

There have been many student successes. Kerry Willis who is graduating from Forensic Science has a position as an intelligence analyst with Derbyshire police; Tayla Pomroy will be moving to a position as a detention officer;

Victrina Cuffie

Victrina Cuffi has been called to the bar while Arpan Bedi has been awarded a BPTC scholarship by Middle Temple. Harriet Rowley was awarded a Temple Pegasus Access and Support Scheme (PASS).

Kayleigh Shepphard

PASS is a scheme in place to assist those from “non-traditional” backgrounds to gaining a career at the Bar; this includes help in attaining mini-pupillages, as well as the opportunity to attend networking and advocacy workshops. Sociology students created an important theatrical intervention event with Dr. Emma Temple-Mault which engaged many offender management teams in the area.

Sociology students after the Intervention workshop.

Many of the Forensic Science students joined with students from Keele at the Potteries Museum  for an outreach event on science, technology and the First World War. And one of our PhD Students, Kayleigh Sheppard had an article featured in Forensic Science International.

There are plans for new ventures in the School including a new Small and Medium Sized Legal Services Hub within the School and tied to the Law Clinic which is expanding. Next year there will be a  cross School major incident simulation, a Law Conference for teachers and an Outreach event for British Science Week. A new degree in Criminology and Offender Management, and an MSci in Chemistry both launch next year at our Autumn Open Day on October 15^th.  The BA In Criminology and Offender Management is a must for anyone interested in work in the probation service or the prison service.

Louis Martin who will lead the BA Criminology and Offender Management

There are plans shaping up for new Policing degrees and HIgher Apprenticeships to support the forthcoming Police Educations Framework, while Rhonda Hammond-Sharlot is working with local businesses to develop the Legal Practice Higher Apprenticeships–we expect to have at least thirty places by January 2018.

Dr. Graham Williams will join us later this summer as Head of Criminal Justice and Forensics, alongside Ruby Hammer who is Head of Law. We are already advertising new posts in Law to join our team.

Ruby Hammer

The Criminal Justice team also welcomes Dr. Jo Turner as Course Leader of Criminology and Professor James Treadwell as a new Professor within the group. Jo Turner is the co-author of Godfrey, B. Cox, D., Johnston, H., Turner, J.  ‘I am afraid she is perfectly responsible for her actions and is simply wicked’: Reconstructing the Criminal Career of Julia Hyland (Bloomsbury Press).

Jo Turner

James Treadwell is the co-author among other things of Riots and Political Protest and Fan Behaviour and Crime: Contemporary Issues.

Professor James Treadwell

Prior to becoming an academic, he worked for the crime reduction charity NACRO, and qualified as a Probation Officer in the West Midlands, working in both adult and youth settings. He was also an academic advisor on the Howard League Commission into Ex-Military Personnel in Prison.

The School has had good research news with a Winston-Churchill travel fellowship for Dr. Laura Walton-Williams, a book contract for Rachel Bolton-King and a joint contract for the key Torts text book for Ruby Hammer and Matt Sadler. Assoc. Professor Keith Puttick is working with the Sri Lankan government on a new maternity leave policy and is engaged with international organisations on a survey of best practice. Dr. Rainer-Elk Anders is working on an anti radicalization project with colleagues in Birmingham and this summer will be in Ukraine working on anti-terrorism initiatives.

In January Juliet Prince (Policing) and Laura Walton-Williams (Forensic Science) are running an  ‘Investigating Sexual Violence’ Conference. Sarah Page has been successful in her CHAD bid for the a sociological investigation of breast feeding and Public Health. This means there will be a chance for two undergraduate researchers to work with her on real life research.

Matt Sadler

Keith Puttick

Rachel Bolton-King

Laura Walton-Williams

Still thinking? Book your place for an Open Day.

Rainer-Elk Anders

Juliet Prince

It can seem that academics have a lot of free time in the summer, but it’s often when we do research work, prepare classes, and organise conferences. I’ll be posting news here from different parts of the School.

Juliet Prince and Laura Wlaton-Williams are spending part of  the summer organising a conference. Farah, myself and Laura are arranging the below and are happy for this to appear on a blog

The Criminal Justice and Forensic Science Department will be holding the inaugural, cross-disciplinary ‘Investigating Sexual Violence’ Conference in January 2018.  The aim of this conference is to explore current challenges and future developments in the entirety of the investigatory process into sexual offences.  The conference will include presentations and workshops from academics and practitioners from within Law, Criminology, Health, Nursing, Psychology, Forensic Science and Policing fields.  This  one day conference is relevant to Police Forces, Criminal Justice Agencies, academics, students and those working for organisations involved in supporting victims of sexual offences.

In addition all the PCI lecturers are spending considerable time over the summer considering the College of Policing proposals regarding apprenticeships and pre-join degrees.

One of the ways we seek to make our Open Days welcoming is through the help of our Student Ambassadors. There are around 200 of these, and they take turns to guide students and family through Open Days and Applicant Days; they go into Schools and Colleges; deliver workshops at Staffs Uni and answer your questions from their direct experience.

This is only the second year we’ve run the awards.

The event was a collaboration between Paul Donnelly and Laura Knight and Jamie Leese

We had canapes and prosecco before going into one of our most up to date lecture theatres for the presentation. 

There were twelve section awards given out for different aspects of the ambassador contribution. Bertha Eke more than demonstrated why she won the prize for Enthusiasm, and as someone who has more than once arrived at events to find a ‘crisis’ in progress, I was tickled by Klaudia Szatkowska’s Make the Best of a Bad Job Award.

Award                                                 Winner

Residential Ambassador Award                Sam Pillow

Post 16 Ambassador Award                     Lucy Beaman & Satty Kaur

Best Newcomer                                     Carly Twigg

Ambassador Enthusiasm Award               Bertha Eke

Open Day Ambassador Award                  Jess Prince

Best Communicator Award                     Marlone Judith

Making the best of a bad job award           Klaudia Szatkowska

UCAS Exhibitions Ambassador               Lauren Welsh

Great Minds Bus Tour Ambassador           Arpan Bedi

Services to Admissions & Enrolment       Gitana Duka & Julie-Anne Slevin

Social Media Award                               Sam Pillow   

Above and Beyond Award                       Elli Sarvari

The final award of the evening, to the Ambassador of the year, went to Jess Prince.

I asked our staff to talk about books that had inspired them.

Neil Lamont , Senior Lecturer in Forensic Chemistry wrote: As a youngster I was an avid angler and this was the catalyst for my continued love of the environment. Visiting the library to research my hobby, I found many well-loved books, from the fifties and sixties, on how to become the complete angler. The authors, themselves conservationist showed great insight with regards to the complexity of the environment, with in-depth observations on the feeding habits of the fish and the life cycles of the insects on which they feed. Their study of the aquatic environment ultimately influenced my choice of Degree and even the subject of my PhD.

Keith Puttick, Associate Professor of Law wrote: 

Erin Pizzey Scream Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974). Inspirational and transformative, Pizzey’s analysis was also matched by action – Chiswick Womens Aid and Refuge http://www.refuge.org.uk  It is reading for the DV section of the Social Welfare Law and Practice Level 6 option (and L7 module). Incredible then as now, it spawned a vast literature on domestic abuse, social housing, and liberation politics. Compare its messages with contemporary priorities. Look at the Womens Aid site https://www.womensaid.org.uk/ Consider, too, today’s challenges. Cuts to services, refuges, and helplines. Forward into the past!

Aidan Flynn, who works on Constitutional Law remembers reading Peter Hennessy’s ‘The Hidden Wiring: Unearthing the British Constitution’ (1995). “It has a name that captures the mystique of an uncodified Constitution.  In 2010, PM Gordon Brown initiated work that led to the Cabinet Manual, published in 2011.  Hennessy co-authored a report:  ‘The Cabinet Manual and the Working of the British Constitution: The Hidden Wiring Emerges.’  The report describes the manual as “the broadest description of the constitutional landscape to be found in any single official document yet published.  But it is not the expression of a fully codified UK constitution.”  Full codification may come before the 21^st century is out.”

for Matt Sadler, who works on Business and Commercial Law, it was when his mother gave him John Rawls’s book A Theory of Justice. 

 “When my mother was completing her BA in Crime, Deviance & Society as a mature student in 2001 at Staffordshire University, she handed me a book and said ‘you’d enjoy this!’.I eventually got around to reading it and was intrigued by the notion that justice ought to be blind and that a ‘veil of ignorance’. Rawls suggests that ‘we must nullify the effects of specific contingencies which put men at odds and tempt them to exploit social and natural circumstances to their own advantage’. In other words justice can only be metered out when the system adopts this filtering of facts so that, as Rawls suggest, the ‘veil of ignorance’ precludes discussions of a person’s place in society, his fortune including natural assets and abilities, his intelligence and strength etc.It was this socio-legal position that first caught my attention and began to foster an interest in fairness, justness and equality in the eyes of the law and that in order for jurisprudent application of legal theory in the real world to be robust and adopt the ‘justice is blind’ position there needs to be a protection against bias and unfair categorization of those who come under the legal system’s scrutiny.It was at this moment that the seeds were planted and I have spent the last 8 years since beginning my legal education entrenching this philosophy within my own research and teaching.

Laura Walton Williams from Forensic Science writes: I have two, the non-fictional book, ‘Maggots, Murder and Men’ was written by Zakaria Erzinçlioglu who was a forensic entomologist.  I read this book before I started studying Forensics, and it was fascinating to find out how biological evidence could be used to aid criminal investigations. Fiction wise, the Sherlock Holmes books by Arthur Conan Doyle captured my imagination and I still enjoy reading these to this day. The concept of deductive reasoning based on observations is very well depicted in these stories.

A great frustration in my previous career as a police officer was the prevalence of unsubstantiated assertions, cavalier approaches to the truth and an emphasis on style over substance. Thinking that these indicated very low intelligence or a deliberate intention to deceive I often sank into despair. Reading Princeton Professor Harry Frankfurt’s essay called “On Bullshit” completely changed my outlook. It was published as a book in 2005 and became a NY Times #1 best seller. He traces the etymology, concepts and the social functions of bullshit. Importantly he explains the difference between lying and bullshit. A hugely influential book, it gives great insight into the communications of politicians, public officials and corporate leaders. As a taster, see Prof Frankfurt’s article in Time magazine in which he analyses Donald Trump’s communications using his theory. – David Simmonds

 Louis Martin wrote: “I found that my experience of teaching in the Law Department led me to a very important book. I was captivated by Rupert Haigh’s Legal English (fourth edition). I think all law students should have a Haigh close to hand during their studies. Haigh explains the importance of learning the legal terms and specialised language of law. Legal English is a very distinct and discrete branch of English and can be very challenging for the modern law student.  Many students need to be familiar with complex legal terms and Haigh really helps with his hints and tips.”

“A life time ago when I was a law student I found a copy of Graveson’s and Crane’s A Century of Family Law in a second hand book shop. It was published in 1957 and covered the period 1857 to 1957. While it had little bearing on my then studies, it was a window into the past that began my fascination with the development of family law and how the law and social conventions influence each other. The most startling revelation was that less than ten percent of the contents covered the law relating to children in 1957, the majority of the contents covered the breakdown of relationships and financial obligation’s between family members. Today that statistic seems absurd as there is far more law relating to children than to adults and their relationships. Graveson and Crane was a seminal work in its time and now highlights how family law has changed, fundamentally for the better recognising the needs and rights of the most vulnerable members of society whose voices were barley heard in 1957”.- Sue Jenkinson

World Book Day – somewhat late! from Forensics team member Julian Partridge.

When siting back and reflecting upon the books that inspired me as a child I suddenly remembered how bare the bookshelves actually were in my parent’s home and how few books I actually possessed at the time, thankfully this is now rectified. However, I did have my father’s illustrated copy of “Treasure Island” by Robert Louis Stevenson published in the 1950s.

A story of adventure, loyalty, daring, betrayal and murder- strangely all of which have had some part to play in my career as a forensic scientist and ex-volunteer serviceman, I just haven’t found the treasure yet!