National Entitlement Research Articles

Analysing metaphorical pebbles in English RE

This paper is a critical analysis of the use of metaphors in English Religious Education (RE). It is grounded in the educational theory of Anna Sfard (a professor of Mathematics) who has written about learning metaphors, before considering some of the metaphoric language used in English education generally and RE specifically. It will examine carefully at how the metaphors implicit within the Commission on RE Report might help us interpret it, considering particularly the National Entitlement and note the changes to these metaphors in the newly adapted national entitlement in the REC Worldviews’ Project Draft Handbook. It will then turn (metaphorically) to the Research Review into RE from Ofsted and examine some aspects of that through metaphorical lenses. It will consider the metaphors inherent in Ofsted’s Deep Dive methodology, the work of Fordham, Counsell and the Early Career Framework and Core Content framework materials. The paper will conclude with some thoughts about RE as a subject discourse, suggesting that RE continues to have an identity crisis, which is not helped by a disciplinary, or a worldview, approach.

A critical reflection on the Commission on Religious Education\u2019s proposed National Entitlement to Religion and Worldviews in England and Wales

This paper responds to the Commission on Religious Education’s proposed National Entitlement to Religion and Worldviews in England and Wales. Qualitative data were collected from nine English primary Religious Education (RE) teachers to establish their responses to the proposed National Entitlement from their perspectives as RE practitioners. Findings show that teachers were supportive of the high ambitions the National Entitlement has for RE, that they saw opportunities for pupils’ social and personal development as well as advancement in substantive knowledge, but that they were concerned about content-heavy curricula and structural barriers to implementing the National Entitlement. In response, the paper examines ‘cumulatively sufficient’ curricular design and ‘pedagogical reduction’ as strategies to activate the National Entitlement, and raises questions about ‘instrumental purposes’ in the conceptualisation of Religion and Worldviews. The paper recommends sharper account of the originality of Religions and Worldviews in order to advance the cause of the National Entitlement.

Prevalence and predictors of psychological distress following injury: findings from a prospective cohort study

BackgroundResearch examining psychological distress in people who have experienced an injury has focused on those with serious injuries or specific injury types, and has not involved long-term follow up. The aims of this investigation were to describe the prevalence of, and factors contributing to, psychological distress in a cohort of people with a broad range of injuries.MethodsThe Prospective Outcomes of Injury Study (POIS) is a longitudinal cohort study of 2856 injured New Zealanders recruited from a national insurance entitlement claims register between 2007 and 2009. Participants were interviewed approximately 3, 12, and 24 months after their injury. The Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (K6) was used to measure psychological distress at each interview.Results25% of participants reported clinically relevant distress (K6 ≥ 8) 3 months post-injury, 15% reported distress at 12 months, and 16% reported distress at 24 months. Being 45 years or older, Māori or Pacific ethnicity, experiencing pre-injury mental health conditions, having inadequate pre-injury income, reporting poor pre-injury health or trouble accessing healthcare, having a severe injury or an injury resulting from assault, and reporting clinically relevant distress 3 months post-injury were independently associated with an increased risk of distress 12 months post-injury. The majority of these associations were also evident with respect to distress 24 months post-injury.ConclusionsDistress is common after injury among people with a broad range of injury types and severities. Screening for distress early after injury is important to identify individuals in need of targeted support.

Sacralisation of contested territory in nationalist discourse: a study of Milošević's and Putin’s public speeches

ABSTRACTDespite their differences in age, professional career and political background, Milošević and Putin share similar views on one of the main consequences of the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the USSR: the involuntary dispersal of Serbs and Russians into different foreign states. This is a study of the segments of Milošević’s and Putin’s speeches referring to Kosovo and to Crimea respectively. The study analyses their rhetorical devices and thematic content, using the analytical framework and instruments for the analysis of nationalist discourses developed by the Vienna School of Critical Discourse Analysis. The speeches, it is argued here, share a topos of sacralisation of the (contested) land based on the ancestors’ holy or glorious deeds which proclaims the land to be sacred to the chosen nation. This creates a ‘national entitlement’ to the land in a depoliticised (‘sacred’) and highly personalised setting.

Political and economic determinants of expenditure on day services for persons with intellectual disabilities or autism

ABSTRACTThis study investigates whether the Swedish national entitlement legislation, which is known to be one of the most developed in Europe for persons with intellectual disabilities or autism, accomplishes its aim to provide equal quality of day services independent of location. We estimated a reduced-form model of demand and supply-side determinants of a latent quality variable for day-service programmes using panel data on expenditure per attendee for the 290 Swedish municipalities 2004–2012. We found that expenditure per attendee is among others affected by changes of the local tax base and outcome in elections to the local assemblies. These results imply that rights of persons with intellectual disabilities with regard to equal quality of day services independent of where they live are not fully honoured in budget allocation decisions made by local governments.

National narcissism: Internal dimensions and international correlates.

In studies conducted in the United States and China, we explored the impact of national narcissism, grandiosity, and entitlement, demonstrating that: (a) national narcissism was distinct from both individual narcissism and collective self-esteem (patriotism); (b) national entitlement and national grandiosity constituted two distinct dimensions of national narcissism; and (c) national narcissism, national grandiosity, and national entitlement, but not individual narcissism, were uniquely predictive of political attitudes, foreign policy preferences, and purchase intentions. Together, these findings provided convergent evidence for the utility of national narcissism and its two internal dimensions, national entitlement and national grandiosity.

The Long Road to Universalism? Recent Developments in the Financing of Long‐term Care in England

AbstractFollowing more than a decade of intense debate, the long‐term care system in England may be on the verge of major change. We argue that the current system can be characterized as a residual system where care is free only to those who cannot afford to pay for themselves, with access heavily targeted to those with the highest levels of needs and with no informal care, and with substantial local variation in access and means‐testing for home care. It is also characterized by a mixed economy of supply of care and a mixed economy of finance. The government Green Paper has proposed a major shift from diverse local systems to a new National Care Service, with a national entitlement to some public support for all those who are assessed as needing it. The government has also recently announced that it will make personal care at home free to those with the highest needs. If implemented, the proposals included in the Green Paper would, at minimum, introduce a ‘quasi‐universal’ system, in which some level of assistance is provided to all those with eligible social care needs.

New England, Nonesuch

In 1652, Roger Williams published a book titled The Hireling Ministry None of Christs in London in which he made a theological argument with political implications for the settlement of the New World. “Nations being meerly and essentially civill,” Williams wrote, “cannot (Christianly) be called Christian States, after the patterne of that holy and typical Land of Canaan.” Nations should not think of themselves as “Christian,” that is to say, as favored by God, because, Williams said, the biblical Israel was “a Non-such and an unparalel’d Figure of the Spirituall State of the Church of Christ Jesus, dispersed, yet gathered to him in all Nations” (3). England and its colonies were no second Israel, no exceptions on earth, and no favored nation of God, because there was no parallel for a state’s protection in the New Testament. Members of a nation who made such a claim—much less acted on it—were, as Williams saw it, asking for trouble. The argument was directed at a London audience; Williams was barred from the Puritan-controlled press in the Massachusetts Bay colony, in part for holding ideas such as this one. London, however, was also a center of power that could override colonial controversies and that badly needed spiritual guidance in a time of social upheaval. Williams’s argument depends on close attention to the material conditions of representation. Like many university-trained Protestants of his day, he considered attentiveness to the Bible and a sense of its early linguistic and material history essential to making scriptural interpretations. Like other colonial subjects, he had to assess the marketplace for political controversy to make an effective argument from tiny, distant Providence Plantations. Because Williams positions it at the nexus of material textual histories and a critique of ideas about national entitlement, the notion of the nonesuch seems historiographically fertile. Its most familiar association for today’s readers might be “The Royal Nonesuch”:

The Motherless Child in Pauline Hopkins's <i>Of One Blood</i>

[T]he desire of the mother is the origin of everything (283). Jacques Lacan, Antigone Between Two Deaths, 1960. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, A long ways from home; A long ways from home. (581) --African American spiritual As quoted in Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature In Pauline Hopkins's final novel, Of One Bloody her protagonist, Reuel Briggs, is a mixed-race man passing for white. When confronted with the racial identity he has inherited from his slave mother, Reuel responds emotionally: [Apparently struggling for words ... [he] ... fell on his knees in a passion of sobs agonizing to witness. 'You know then ... that I am Mira's son?' (593). By acknowledging his racial heritage and family history, Briggs reclaims his biological and national mother. This scene highlights a central theme in Hopkins's work: the restoration of the mother as a means of personal and national redemption. Hopkins anticipates Stuart Hall's delineation of a text's ability to impose imaginary coherence on the experience of dispersal and fragmentation, which is the history of all enforced diasporas. As Hall explains,[B]y representing or 'figuring' Africa as the mother of these different civilizations, texts seek to an imaginary fullness or plentitude, to set against the of our (224-25). In Of One Blood, Hopkins imagines just such a restorative as she casts the African American community as motherless and counters the broken rubric of the African American past and present with a story of proud racial heritage and national entitlement made possible by the restoration of the national mother. We can understand Hopkins's focus on the community's relationship to the mother more fully through the lens of psychoanalytic theory. Treating the post-Reconstruction African American community--the community to which Pauline Hopkins belonged and for whom she primarily wrote--as the subject in Sigmund Freud's Oedipal model clarifies the position occupied by that group. In Hopkins's work, the rejected or absent mother figures as the cause of African Americans' alienation in the post-Reconstruction United States, but also, as we shall see, as a potential source of power. In what follows, I outline the trop of motherlessness as Hopkins appropriated and extended it, exploring its resonance via psychoanalytic models. I then read Of One Blood using these models, examining the motherlessness that signified national alienation and powerlessness and identifying how the mother is able to restore national identity and unity. THE MOTHERLESS CHILD Numerous scholars have detailed the nineteenth-century domestic ideology that placed mothers in an exalted position in both home ad society. (1) The popular domestic novel typically placed the mother at the center of its protagonist's development, often paradoxically highlighting the importance of her presence with her absence. Motherlessness posed a significant obstacle to overcome and constituted a lack that would prompt a powerful emotional response from readers. In Uncle Tom's Cabin, for example, Harriet Beecher Stowe made some of her most poignant appeals to readers through characters such as young Harry, about to be torn from his adoring mother, Topsy, raised by a speculator and thus bereft of motherly guidance and love, and Eva, who learns to care for others despite the selfish neglect of her anti-mother, satirically named Marie. Stowe's strategy was for from idiosyncratic: Susan Warner's Ellen, Maria Susanna Cummins's Gerty, E. D. E. N. Southworth's Capitola, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's Avis, and even Edith Wharton's Lily all experience the effects of motherlessness. If this trope appealed to a white, middle-class readership in the nineteenth-century United States, it may have resonated still more powerfully for African Americans, who had extensive experience with motherlessness. …

Modelling an entitlement to long-term care services for older people in Europe: projections for long-term care expenditure to 2050

As the numbers of older people rise in Europe, the importance of long-term care services in terms of numbers of users and expenditures can be expected to grow. This article examines the implications for expenditure in four countries of a national entitlement to long-tem care services for all older people, based on assessed dependency. It is based on a European Commission-funded cross-national study, which makes projections to 2050 of long-term care expenditure in Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK. The policy option investigated is based on the German long-term care insurance scheme, which embodies the principle of an entitlement on uniform national criteria to long-term care benefits. The research models this key principle of the German system in the other three participating countries, with respect to home care services. The study finds that, if all moderately/severely dependent older people receive an entitlement to formal (in-kind) home care, the impact on expenditure could be considerable, but would vary greatly between countries. The impact on long-term care expenditure is found to be the least in Germany, where there is already an entitlement to benefits; and the greatest in Spain, where reliance on informal care is widespread. This article discusses the policy implications of these results.

Learning for Labour: specialist diplomas and 14-19 education

The 2006 Education Act provided an entitlement for all 14 year-olds to take a specialist diploma from 2013. Despite concerns of many educationalists and politicians, the first diplomas will begin in September 2008. New Labour claims that the diplomas are innovative and challenging; however, this article argues that they exhibit many of the weaknesses and contradictions of existing vocational qualifications, will accentuate divisions and represent a further move away from a comprehensive curriculum. The article also argues, however, that in addition to opposing the introduction of the diplomas, reformers must rethink approaches towards vocational learning in schools. Despite reports of ministers wanting to delay implementation, the Government has given the go-ahead for five new specialist diplomas to begin from September 2008 in a limited number of schools and colleges. The 2006 Education Act gave young people a ‘national entitlement’ to study one of 14 vocational areas outlined in the 2005 14-19 White Paper (Department for Education and Skills [DfES], 2005). According to the White Paper, up to 40% of Key Stage 4 students will be taking one by 2013. A level 2 diploma will equate to General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) grade C, occupying about half of the total timetable space. Level 1 can be used in conjunction with the White Paper’s proposals for a new workplace-based learning route for more ‘disaffected’ students, while post-16 students can follow a two-year level 3 qualification which, like current vocational qualifications, would constitute the majority of their study time. Education and the Economy: a new correspondence? The White Paper emphasises the importance of responding to globalisation and increased international competition by improved educational provision, particularly vocational education. The Government wants the diplomas to ‘put

"Our Jerusalem": Americans in the Holy Land and Protestant Narratives of National Entitlement

The essay tells the story of the "American Colony," a nonconformist commune of evangelical Protestants who settled in Jerusalem in 1881, from the perspective of American Studies. It argues that despite its many idiosyncratic features, this story can help elucidate a crucial aspect of Protestant America's narratives of national identity and of national entitlement in the postbellum era. It captures, that is, the regressive, feminized, eastward-towing theme that subtends these narratives' emphasis on progress, expansion, and a masculine thrust westward. This inherent duality in mainstream US nationalism is investigated in the main sections of the essay through a comparison between the writings of the American-born Colonists and Jerusalem by Selma Lagerlöf, a novel that tells the story of the Colony from the standpoint of Swedish nation formation.

Having it all: national benefit equity and local payment parity in Medicare.

The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) has identified two important problems with the Medicare+Choice (M+C) program: nationwide geographic inequity in government-financed benefits, and unequal government payments for M+C plans versus fee-for-service (FFS) Medicare in the same market area. MedPAC concludes that both problems cannot be solved simultaneously. We argue that both problems could be solved if Congress discontinued its policy of underwriting the cost of FFS Medicare. Instead, Congress should define a national entitlement benefit package and have all health plans submit bids on the package in each market area. The government's premium contribution should be equal to the lowest bid submitted by a qualified health plan in each market area. The contribution could be adjusted for health risk, the special obligations of FFS Medicare, and welfare enhancements associated with FFS Medicare that are valued by both beneficiaries and taxpayers but unrelated to beneficiaries' health status.

Public and private responsibilities: home- and community-based services in the United Kingdom and Germany.

In the late 1980s, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany had roughly the same system of financing and delivering long-term care. In contrast to the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany enacted radical reform. The United Kingdom converted an open-ended, means-tested national entitlement for institutional care to a block grant to local governments, whereas Germany enacted a nationally uniform, non-means-tested social insurance program. This article analyzes the postreform experience of the United Kingdom and Germany with respect to issues of financing, assessment and case management, and the availability of home- and community-based services. Policy implications for the United States are developed.

From service to social control: Implications of welfare reform for professional practice in the United States

In response to the explosive growth and the changing demographic composition of public welfare recipients, this program has undergone four major reforms over the last three decades: the 1962 'Service' amendments, the 1967 Work Incentive program (WIN), the Family Support Act of 1988, and the 1996 program of Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). These reforms have had a profound impact not only on the scope and purpose of public assistance to needy families, but also on the nature of professional social work practice in this area of public social service. An analysis of the major welfare reforms over the last 35 years reveals how the national entitlement to income maintenance and social services has receded, local responsibility and private delivery of service have increased, and emphases on service functions have shifted from rehabilitative social casework/counselling to work-oriented training, job search activities, and local employment. The provision of public assistance has been transformed from a federal entitlement based on needs to a budget-driven-time-limited benefit enveloped by incentives and sanctions, with welfare clients increasingly subject to mandatory participation in work-related activities. This movement from welfare to workfare has infused the professional role of social workers with a steadily expanding function of social control, which is unlikely to encourage professional participation in the public social services.

Metanoia

SUMMARY The author draws on her experience working with individual men who are violent to their partners to think about the problem of international violence. A parallel is drawn between a man's feeling of “entitlement” to forcefully keep his partner “in line” and feelings of national entitlement to engage in violence to force one group's agenda on another. The differences between morals and taboos are discussed underscoring the community value of that which becomes socially and ethically “unthinkable.”