The New Deal: jeopardised by the geography of unemployment?

The New Deal is the Labour government's flagship programme to "end the tragic waste of youth and long-term unemployment" by getting people off welfare benefits and into work. This paper argues that the principal weakness of the New Deal is that it seeks to influence the character of labour supply (i.e. the motivation and skills of the unemployed) while neglecting the state of labour demand, which varies greatly between places. The uneven geography of unemployment in the UK is likely to have a crucial bearing on the programme's impact and effectiveness, but this has been largely ignored in its development. The paper outlines some of the practical consequences of this imbalance and suggests how it could be rectified for the programme to be more effective

The challenges of change:Exploring the dynamics of police reform in Scotland

Despite a long tradition of pessimism regarding the scope for meaningful change in police practices, recent structural reforms to police organizations in several European countries suggest that significant change in policing is possible. Drawing on recent research into the establishment and consequences of a national police force in Scotland, this article uses instrumental, cultural and myth perspectives taken from organization theory to examine how change happened and with what effects. It highlights how police reform involves a complex interplay between the strategic aims of government, the cultural norms of police organizations and the importance of alignment with wider views about the nature of the public sector. The article concludes by identifying a set of wider lessons from the experience of organizational change in policing

Educating Britain? Political Literacy and the Construction of National History

Despite the reflexive nature of historical enquiry and the degree of national interconnectness now theorized by historians in the United Kingdom, education debates over history teaching in Britain often yield a comforting defence of Britain's 'island story'. The singular 'island story' is an economical narrative device favoured by politicians and further mediated through newspapers which profit from such national cryogenics. Maintenance of a currency, or crisis, of Britishness can also be contrasted with the relative absence of longitudinal or comparative enquiry into identity and school curricula. In addition, the teaching of states, connections and post-sovereign communities is largely under-theorized, potentially contributing to the sterility of future debates about citizenship, agency and Britain’s wider political reach. It is argued here that the public framing of history as nationhood and the underdevelopment of children’s political literacy are mutually reinforcing conditions by which the state has constructed a stabilizing, yet shifting presence of the ‘national’

Gender equality and girls education: Investigating frameworks, disjunctures and meanings of quality education

The article draws on qualitative educational research across a diversity of low-income countries to examine the gendered inequalities in education as complex, multi-faceted and situated rather than a series of barriers to be overcome through linear input–output processes focused on isolated dimensions of quality. It argues that frameworks for thinking about educational quality often result in analyses of gender inequalities that are fragmented and incomplete. However, by considering education quality more broadly as a terrain of quality it investigates questions of educational transitions, teacher supply and community participation, and develops understandings of how education is experienced by learners and teachers in their gendered lives and their teaching practices. By taking an approach based on theories of human development the article identifies dynamics of power underpinning gender inequalities in the literature and played out in diverse contexts and influenced by social, cultural and historical contexts. The review and discussion indicate that attaining gender equitable quality education requires recognition and understanding of the ways in which inequalities intersect and interrelate in order to seek out multi-faceted strategies that address not only different dimensions of girls’ and women’s lives, but understand gendered relationships and structurally entrenched inequalities between women and men, girls and boys

Revella Hughes at Douglass High School, 1986

This item was digitized as part of the Honors 480 course, Trash or Treasure: An Introduction to Archives during the fall 2021 semester. This item was added by Ryan Davis.https://mds.marshall.edu/kay_wildman/1000/thumbnail.jp

Industrial strategy and the UK regions: Sectorally narrow and spatially blind

The UK government's new Industrial Strategy could have a significant impact on the country's regions and localities. However, this has received little attention to date. The analysis presented here examines the existing location of the sectors targeted by the first phase of the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund and the location of the R&D laboratories likely to be first in line for funding. In focusing on an extremely narrow range of sectors, the Fund is likely to have limited impact on the UK's persistent regional inequalities. The activities eligible for support account for relatively little of manufacturing or the rest of the economy and the basis of this targeting and its potential distributional consequences are spatially blind. As such, it runs the risk of widening regional divides in prosperity