Adoption and permanence planning in Scotland: Impact of the Adoption and Children (Scotland) Act 2007 on key processes and timescales

Adoption and permanence planning has been a key feature of Scotland's policy in relation to children and young people who are “looked after.” Although policy and law has significantly developed in recent years, there has been comparatively little research on permanence processes in Scotland. This paper outlines key findings from the first comprehensive study of permanence planning in Scotland. It examines the process for two cohorts of children where adoption or other types of permanence orders were made. The children were selected under the long standing Adoption (Scotland) Act 1978 and the more recent Adoption and Children (Scotland) Act 2007. In total, 300 cases were examined, analysing data from the children's first contact with services through to the order made by the Scottish Courts. This paper pays particular attention to the timescales found at key stages under the two sets of legislation and asks what difference the change in legislation has made.     

Overcoming barriers: engaging younger students in an online intercultural exchange

This paper reports on a small-scale project involving an online school exchange between two classes of 12-/13-year olds located in the North of England and the Ruhr area of Germany. The overarching aim of the project was to develop intercultural understanding in foreign language learning through communication in an online environment. Analysing data from website posts, lesson observations, student questionnaires and interviews, the paper investigates the extent to which the project realised this goal, and examines emerging practical and pedagogical issues. Comparing the processes and outcomes of this project in secondary education to similar projects in Higher Education (HE), the research found that the young people learnt more than older students about cultural similarities than differences. They were thus less likely to be party to cultural misunderstandings, developing friendly relationships and openness towards a people of a different culture. However, their failure to notice differences may have been due to a lack of in-depth discussion and absence of more demanding student tasks. The paper concludes that in order to develop more sophisticated intercultural learning, expertise derived from telecollaboration in HE needs to be adapted to the lower secondary school context, drawing particularly on auto-ethnography and ethnographic interviewing.     

R package rjmcmc: reversible jump MCMC using post‐processing

The rjmcmc package for R implements the post‐processing reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm of Barker & Link. MCMC output from each of the models is used to estimate posterior model probabilities and Bayes factors. Automatic differentiation is used to simplify implementation. The package is demonstrated on two examples.     

Lone Parents in Northern Ireland: The Effectiveness of Work Incentives

In recent years social policy in relation to lone parents has placed heavy emphasis on increasing the participation of this group in the labour market. If anything, the newly elected Labour government appears to be more committed to this objective than its predecessor. This paper details some of the findings from a focus-groups exercise with lone mothers in Belfast conducted in 1995. The data underline the limitations of many aspects of the measures taken to encourage lone parents to work and raise questions about the appropriateness of current policy.     

Putting the Children Act Independent Person Procedure under the Spotlight

The Children Act 1989 required local authorities to appoint independent people to participate in their complaints procedures. The Department of Health has concentrated largely on monitoring these newly established procedures. In contrast, very little guidance has been given about the role of independent people. Nor has there been much published research in this area. This paper is based on a study of the response of two neighbouring local authorities. The aims were to discover how these authorities had interpreted the imprecise guidance from the Department of Health, and thereby to analyse the application of principles of independence within complaints procedures. The findings showed how a "pool" of independent people had been selected, trained and employed to participate in Children Act complaints procedures. Analysis of this system raises fundamental questions about the potential of this system to provide the kind of objective representation intended to be helpful to complainants. It also contributes to the debate about the most effective ways of safeguarding the welfare of children and young people by providing them with an accessible complaints procedure. The study identifies areas for future research, including the nature of complaints and the "practice wisdom" being acquired by independent people.     

Health and community services for trafficked women: an exploratory study of policy and practice

The trafficking of women has attracted considerable international and national policy attention, particularly since the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (2000), of which the Australian Government has been a signatory since 2005. The provision of health and community services for trafficked women is a central feature of this Protocol, but in Australia service provision is made difficult by how trafficked women are understood and treated in policy and legal terms. This study aimed to explore the provision of health and community services for trafficked women in the Greater Sydney region through a series of interviews with government and non‐government organisations. The findings reveal that services have been inaccessible as a result of sparse, uncoordinated, and poorly funded provision. The major obstacle to adequate and appropriate service provision has been a national policy approach focusing on ‘border protection’ and criminalisation rather than on trafficked women and their human rights. We conclude that further policy development needs to focus on the practical implications of how such rights can be translated into the delivery of health and community services that trafficked women can access and be supported by more effectively.     

Multiple Disadvantages Among Older Citizens: What a Multidimensional Measure of Poverty Can Show

Using the newly created Freedom Poverty Measure, a multidimensional measure of poverty, it can be seen that there were 534,700 individuals who were in freedom poverty, who had either poor health or poor education in addition to having low incomes. This multidimensional disadvantage would not normally be captured by single measures of poverty, such as income poverty measures. Men were significantly less likely to be in freedom poverty than women (OR = 0.63, 95% CI: 0.54–0.74, p < .0001), and the proportion of individuals in freedom poverty increased with age, with those older than 85 being 2.3 times more likely to be in freedom poverty than those aged 65 to 69 years (95% CI: 1.73–3.11, p < .0001). Policy responses to address the marginalization of disadvantaged older people should take a multidisciplinary approach, addressing health inequalities in particular, not just low income.     

Reading Desire: Commentary on Papers by Danielle Knafo,Victoria Pitts-Taylor,and Nikki Sullivan

All 3 papers on body modification share a particular approach to their topic as they are substantially located in discourse analysis and a deconstructive approach to their material, and all are concerned with binaries. All 3 papers also grapple with the matter of interiority. Having explored how these issues play themselves out in the particularity of the practices of tattooing and cosmetic surgery and in the work of Orlan, the author invites further dialogue between Foucauldian analyses and psychoanalytic ones with special reference to the notions of desire and unreason.