Welcome to our first newsletter of the new academic year. I hope that you have all had a summer both productive and restful in equal measure in preparation for the new academic year.

In this newsletter, as a step towards helping us all understand what educational activities colleagues are engaged in across the four Teaching Schools, Gwyneth Doherty-Sneddon, Head of School has outlined what is happening in the School of Psychology and we’ve included updates from current projects in SME and BMS. If you have a project in progress that you would like to tell us about we would be very pleased to hear from you.

Our events programme is also getting underway with both the Journal Club and the L&T seminar programme starting once more. We have been very pleased to see the consistently strong attendance at the Journal Club last year and the vigorous discussions about learning and teaching that the presenters and the papers have stimulated. Our first seminar this year was in September when we had a very interesting talk from Concha Martinez from the Dental School in Complutense University, Madrid discussing the development of dental education in Spain. Our next seminar from Lois Neal is on a topic many of you have asked to hear more about which is ethical approval for education projects. I am sure this will stimulate a high level of interest. As previously advertised our seminars later in the term are to be given by Stephen Billett and Hamish Macleod. In Semester 2 we have Pauline Kneale (PVCT Plymouth), David Read (Southampton) and Dave Lewis (Leeds) already lined up but there are still spaces for further speakers so if you have ideas for speakers please let us know. Also this year sees a new round of the EQUATE programme starting at Faculty level with a strong representation from Faculty of Medical Sciences staff. We will have more to say about EQUATE in later editions of the newsletter.

Meanwhile, a second call is out for applications for ERDP development grants. Our successful applications from the first round can be seen in this newsletter and we look forward to receiving more applications from you.

There are many education research resources available on the internet and we would not aspire to provide a comprehensive or even a recommended listing of what is out there. What we can do is to provide a platform for us to share those resources with each other that we have found helpful or useful.

In that spirit I would like to draw your attention to two new resources for medical education research that Jane Stewart is recommending as being particularly good.

• Researching Medical Education  (Cleland, J and Durning SJ eds) is a recently published textbook presented by ASME and AMEE.
• NIHR have produced a brief description of some funding sources available from them which they have illustrated with three case studies including one from Newcastle, Ellen Tullo.

Again I hope you enjoy our newsletter and find it both informative and useful. If you would like to write something for us there is no need to wait to be asked, please just send it in. If there is something that you would like us to include that we are not covering already then tell us.

Professor Stephen McHanwell, Director ERDP