The demand for private schooling in England: the impact of price and quality

In this paper we use English school level data from 1993 to 2008 aggregated up to small neighbourhood areas to look at the determinants of the demand for private education in England from the ages of 7 until 15 (the last year of compulsory schooling). We focus on the relative importance of price and quality of schooling. However, there are likely to be unobservable factors that are correlated with private school prices and/or the quality of state schools that also impact on the demand for private schooling which could bias our estimates. Our long regional and local authority panel data allows us to employ a number of strategies to deal with this potential endogeneity. Because of the likely presence of incidental trends in our unobservables, we employ a double difference system GMM approach to remove both fixed effects and incidental trends. We find that the demand for private schooling is inversely related to private school fees as well as the quality of state schooling in the local area at the time families were making key schooling choice decisions at the ages of 7, 11 and 13. We estimate that a one standard deviation increase in the private school day fee when parents/students are making these key decisions reduces the proportion attending private schools by around 0.33 percentage points which equates to an elasticity of around -0.26. This estimate is only significant for choices at age 7 (but the point estimates are very similar at the ages of 11 and 13). At age 11 and age 13, an increase in the quality of local state secondary reduces the probability of attending private schools. At age 11, a one standard deviation increase in state school quality reduces participation in private schools by 0.31 percentage points which equates to an elasticity of -0.21. The effect at age 13 is slightly smaller, but still significant. Demand for private schooling at the ages of 8, 9, 10 and 12, 14 and 15 are almost entirely determined by private school demand in the previous year for the same cohort, and price and quality do not impact significantly on this decision other than through their initial influence on the key participation decisions at the ages of 7, 11 and 13.

Food choice by people with intellectual disabilities at day centres: A qualitative study

People with intellectual disabilities experience a range of health inequalities. It is important to investigate possible contributory factors that may lead to these inequalities. This qualitative study identified some difficulties for healthy eating in day centres. (1) Service users and their family carers were aware of healthy food choices but framed these as diets for weight loss rather than as everyday eating. (2) Paid carers and managers regarded the principle of service user autonomy and choice as paramount, which meant that they felt limited in their capacity to influence food choices, which they attributed to the home environment. (3) Carers used food as a treat, a reward and for social bonding with service users. (4) Service users’ food choices modelled other service users’ and carers’ choices at the time. It is suggested that healthy eating should be made more of a priority in day care, with a view to promoting exemplarily behaviour that might influence food choice at home

Population Health Needs Analysis - UK Asylum Seekers and Refugees

This article will explore the healthcare needs of UK asylum seekers and refugees, seeking to identify not only the size and location of these populations, but the range of their healthcare needs alongside the barriers to healthcare experienced by them.  Significant focus will be on the mental and physical health needs of these populations, as well as the future for these populations within the UK, relating to their access to healthcare

Ostinato My Ass: Finding a Voice in the 21st Century

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College

To Speak of God as Father in a World that is Inhumane: A Critical Analysis of the Christological Anthropology of Gustavo Gutiérrez

This thesis offers a critical analysis of the christological anthropology that is developed by Gustavo Gutiérrez. I will demonstrate how Gutiérrez’s theological project may be read as a response to the challenge of how to speak of God as Father in a world that is inhumane. This question provokes a response whose focus is anthropological and whose framework is Christological. While many engagements with Gutiérrez’s theology centre on such themes as the option for the poor, the role of praxis, or the Kingdom of God, this project will delineate the underlying convictions and commitments within which these concepts cohere. The three parts of this project correspond to the three facets of the challenge to which Gutiérrez addresses his theology: First, there is the historical question posed by a world that is inhuman. Second is the theological question of how to speak of God. Finally, there is the eschatological perspective encountered within the knowledge of God as Father. In each of these three parts I will move from a systematic exposition of these themes to a critical examination of the Christology according to which they take shape. Having made the fundamental structure of his thought evident, I will aim to expose and identify the internal inconsistencies that make this structure unstable. I will explore how Gutiérrez presents the person, work, and presence of Christ and ask whether his Christology is consistent with his own convictions and stable enough to support the weight that his theological project calls for it bear. I seek to develop an analysis that is attentive to the unity and coherence of Gutiérrez’s thought and so resource a critique that is not only distinctive in its pertinence but also in the possibilities that it opens for the development of his project in the future

The importance of including habitat-specific behaviour in models of butterfly movement

Dispersal is a key process affecting population persistence and major factors affecting dispersal rates are the amounts, connectedness and properties of habitats in landscapes. We present new data on the butterfly Maniola jurtina in flower-rich and flower-poor habitats that demonstrates how movement and behaviour differ between sexes and habitat types, and how this effects consequent dispersal rates. Females had higher flight speeds than males but their total time in flight was four times less. The effect of habitat type was strong for both sexes, flight speeds were ~2.5x and ~1.7x faster on resource-poor habitats for males and females respectively, and flights were approximately 50% longer. With few exceptions females oviposited in the mown grass habitat, likely because growing grass offers better food for emerging caterpillars, but they foraged in the resource-rich habitat. It seems that females faced a trade-off between ovipositing without foraging in the mown grass or foraging without ovipositing where flowers were abundant. We show that taking account of habitat-dependent differences in activity, here categorised as flight or non-flight, is crucial to obtaining good fits of an individual-based model to observed movement. An important implication of this finding is that incorporating habitat-specific activity budgets is likely necessary for predicting longer-term dispersal in heterogeneous habitats as habitat-specific behaviour substantially influences the mean (>30% difference) and kurtosis (1.4x difference) of dispersal kernels. The presented IBMs provide a simple method to explicitly incorporate known activity and movement rates when predicting dispersal in changing and heterogeneous landscapes

An Improved Bound for the Linear Arboricity Conjecture

A forest is linear if all its components are paths. The linear arboricity conjecture states that any graph $G$ of maximum degree $\Delta$ can be decomposed into at most $\lceil \Delta/2\rceil$ linear forests. Here, we show that $G$ admits a decomposition into at most $\Delta/2+ 3\sqrt{\Delta} \log^4 \Delta$ linear forests provided $\Delta$ is large enough. This improves a recent result of Ferber, Fox and Jain. Moreover, our result also holds in a more general list setting, where edges have (possibly different) sets of permissible linear forests. The proof is based on a simple tweak of a well-known technique in list edge-colouring, which was introduced by Kahn and refined by Molloy and Reed

Can twitter replace newswire for breaking news?

Twitter is often considered to be a useful source of real-time news, potentially replacing newswire for this purpose. But is this true? In this paper, we examine the extent to which news reporting in newswire and Twitter overlap and whether Twitter often reports news faster than traditional newswire providers. In particular, we analyse 77 days worth of tweet and newswire articles with respect to both manually identified major news events and larger volumes of automatically identified news events. Our results indicate that Twitter reports the same events as newswire providers, in addition to a long tail of minor events ignored by mainstream media. However, contrary to popular belief, neither stream leads the other when dealing with major news events, indicating that the value that Twitter can bring in a news setting comes predominantly from increased event coverage, not timeliness of reporting

A GIS protocol for enhancing the selection of agricultural runoff sampling locations and predicting the locations of potential pollutant transport in the upland environment

This study presents an ArcGIS geoprocessing protocol for quickly processing large amounts of data from publicly available government sources to consider both water quality standards (WQS) and nonpoint pollution source (NPS) control, on a watershed-by-watershed basis to administratively predict locations where nonpoint source pollutants may contribute to the impairment of downstream waters and locations where nonpoint source pollutants are not expected to contribute to the impairment of downstream waters. This dissertation also presents an ArcGIS geoprocessing protocol to calculate the hydrological response time of a watershed and to predict the potential for soil erosion and nonpoint source pollutant movement on a landscape scale. The standardized methodologies employed by the protocol allow for its use in various geographic regions. The methodology has been performed on sites in Linn County and Boone County, Missouri, and produces results consistent with those expected from other widely accepted methods. These protocols were developed studying the movement of atrazine. but may be used for various nonpoint source pollutants that are water soluble, have an affinity to soil binding, and associated with a particular land use. All data and code are available in Mendeley Data (doi: 10.17632/wdjzftxyfd.1).Includes bibliographical references