Understanding permanence for looked after children: a review of research for the Care Inquiry

This briefing paper reviews research relevant to understanding permanence for children who are ‘looked after’ under the auspices of the Children Act 1989. It aims to inform the objectives of the Care Inquiry, a collaboration between eight specialist charities which was established in 2012 to investigate how best to provide stable and permanent homes for children in England who cannot live with their birth parents (whether temporarily or permanently)

Short Cuts and Long Shots: Raymond Carver's Stories and Robert Altman's Film

Asked by an interviewer about the starting-point for his stories, Raymond Carver once commented: I never start with an idea. I always see something. I start with an image, a cigarette being put out in a jar of mustard, for instance, or the remains, the wreckage of a dinner left on the table. Pop cans in the fireplace, that sort of thing. And a feeling goes with that. And that feeling seems to transport me back to that particular time and place, and the ambiance of the time. But it is the image, and the emotion that goes with that image – that's what's important. If Carver was interested in moving from the image into narrative, his stories have had a tendency to inspire their readers to translate them back into images. This was initially a critical tendency, as parallels were frequently drawn between Carver's stories and the paintings of Edward Hopper, and the paintings and sculptures of Photo Realists such as Duane Hanson, Richard Estes and Ralph Goings. But it was not only critics who looked to draw connections. In 1989, for example, Jo Ann Callis used a selection of Carver's poems to accompany her photographs in an exhibition catalogue, Objects of Reverie, while Bob Adelman has produced a book of photographs purporting to represent Carver Country

Research governance in children's services: the scope for new advice (Research report DFE-RR072)

"In 2009, following a period of informal consultation with key stakeholders, the former DCSF commissioned the work reported here, with the following overarching aims: to identify and evaluate existing arrangements for research governance and ethics review in children’s services in England; and to make recommendations for the future development of those governance arrangements, with the overall goal of ensuring a more coherent and transparent system, that is proportionate to the governance needs and ethical risks in research with users of children’s services." - Page iii

Evaluation of the Parentline Plus helpline: key findings

This report describes an evaluation of the Parentline helpline, carried out in 2006. It builds on the findings of an earlier evaluation, conducted by the authors between August 2002 and March 2003. The current evalaution focused on callers' perceptions of the helpline service, in order to determine whether the characteristics of callers using the service, and their reported perceptions of using the helpline, differed from callers interviewed in the original evaluation four years ago. More broadly, the evaluation aimed to inform the future development of Parentline services, by gathering detailed information on the extend to which callers' perceived needs were met by the universal helpline service

Minding the MeV Gap: the Indirect Detection of Low Mass Dark Matter

We consider the prospects for the indirect detection of low mass dark matter which couples dominantly to quarks. If the center of mass energy is below about 280 MeV, the kinematically allowed final states will be dominated by photons and neutral pions, producing striking signatures at gamma ray telescopes. In fact, an array of new instruments have been proposed, which would greatly improve sensitivity to photons in this energy range. We find that planned instruments can improve on current sensitivity to dark matter models of this type by up to a few orders of magnitude.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, 1 table, LaTeX. Submitted to the proceedings of CETUP*/PPC 201