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Electoral bias results in an asymmetrical seat distribution between parties with similar vote shares. Over recent British general elections Labour held an advantage because it efficiently converted votes into seats. Following the 2015 election result this advantage has reduced considerably, principally because Labour's vote distribution saw it accumulate more ineffective votes, particularly where electoral support was not converted into seats. By contrast, the vote distribution of the Conservative party is now superior to that of Labour because it acquired fewer wasted votes although Labour retains a modest advantage overall because it benefits from inequalities in electorate size and differences in voter turnout. Features of the 2015 election, however, raise general methodological challenges for decomposing electoral bias. The analysis, therefore, considers the effect of substituting the Liberal Democrats as the third party with the United Kingdom Independence Party. It also examines the outcome in Scotland separately from that in England and Wales. Following this analysis it becomes clear that the method for decomposing electoral bias requires clearer guidelines for its application in specific settings.

Статья освещает проблемы изучения английской революции ХVII столетия в российской учебной литературе для средних учебных заведений, вузовских лекциях и научно-популярной литературе конца ХIХ начала ХХ веков. Автор раскрывает основные подходы российских историков к таким вопросам как проблемы конфликта в Англии, характеристика отдельных этапов революции, политических сил, личности Кромвеля и другие. В статье также отмечаются особенности развития историографии (в том числе и учебной литературы) в России на рубеже ХIХ ХХ веков. ; The article describes the problems of study of English revolution of ХVII century in Russian pedagogical literature for the secondary pedagogical boards, in university lectures and scientifical-popular literature of the end of ХIХ beginning of ХХ centuries. The author shows main approaches of Russian historians to such questions as problems of conflict in England, characteristics of different periods of revolution, political forces, figure of Cromwell, etc. Also in the article one can see the particularities of the development of historiography (including also the pedagogical literature) in Russia in the end of ХIХ beginning of ХХ centuries

International audience ; The aim of this paper is to provide a historical background to the radical proposals formulated by Thomas Spence concerning property, to the extent that they are reminiscent of the debates that took place at the time of the First English Revolution. I will start with the well-known Army debates of 1647-49 not only because they are well documented, but because, beyond the pressing question of the king's fate, they epitomize the conflicting views about property in revolutionary England and its relation to political rights. I will then briefly examine Gerrard Winstanley's views on property which underlay the communist experiment on St George's Hill of 1649. I will then turn to the republican thinker James Harrington insofar as he shared with the Levellers and the Diggers the belief that imbalances in the distribution of property was key to understand the political transformations that the country experienced in the 1640s. His agrarian law was one the pillars of his ideal republic.

The September 2012 consultation document, Reforming Key Stage 4 Qualifications (DfE, 2012a), set out the government's proposals for changes to the examination system at age 16. The Secretary of State said in the House of Commons that these reforms were radical, and others commented that they composed the biggest change in the examination system in a generation. This warrants an analysis of the research literature relevant to the proposals. We address each of the following issues raised in the consultation document in turn, and present research evidence in each case. - How England competes in international test scores - The claim that there has been grade inflation - The proposals to raise the level of challenge in examinations - Familiarity with examination materials - The desire to increase students' motivation - The plan for students only to be tested at the end of the course, rather than within a modular system - The proposal that the use of controlled assessment should be restricted - The proposal that examinations should not be tiered

After the abolition of student maintenance grants in 2016, higher education bursaries will be the major source of non-repayable aid for poor students in England, with £300 m spent per year. The aims of the bursary system were never explicitly laid out by government, making it challenging to evaluate this unique form of aid. In this paper, I examine the bursary system on the grounds of equity and efficiency, using a unique dataset collected from 22 universities. I show that the bursary system is inequitable; as a direct consequence of the decentralized nature of the system, there are vast inequalities in aid receipt among poor students. Nevertheless, I find that the poorest, most able students tend to receive the most bursary aid, suggesting the system could be seen as efficient. Clearer guidance from government on the purpose of bursaries is required in order to understand whether the system is meeting its aims, and how it could be improved.

Diese konzeptionelle Studie geht der Frage nach, welche grundlegenden Aussagen sich zu einer Theorie religionspädagogischer Elternarbeit am Lernort Schule in einem säkularen Kontext unter systemtheoretischer und ländervergleichender Perspektive treffen lassen. Aus dem systemtheoretischen Fokus ließen sich zunächst drei Paradigmen einer gelungenen Kommunikation ableiten, nämlich eine gleichsinnige und damit anschließbare Kommunikation, eine elementare Interaktion der wechselseitigen Wahrnehmung, sowie eine fortlaufende Kommunikation. Diese wurden in Beziehung gesetzt zu einem Bildungsbegriff der "Subjektwerdung", sowie zu neuesten Erkenntnissen der Pädagogik bezüglich einer schulischen Erziehungs- und Bildungspartnerschaft. Daneben dienten als komparative Koordinaten die Länder Finnland, England und Estland. Diese verdeutlichten als unabdingbare Grundlage einer religionspädagogischen Elternarbeit die Freiwilligkeit im Unterrichten, die legislative Verankerung im Curriculum, sowie ein nicht zu komplexes Design des Religionsunterrichtes. Die daraus gewonnen Erkenntnisse wurden kontextuell auf ein ostdeutsches Bedingungsgefüge appliziert und begründbare Konsequenzen formuliert. Demnach etablieren indirekte Schülerbotschaften eine unvermeidbare indirekte Erziehungs- und Bildungspartnerschaft mit den am Religionsunterricht partizipierenden und den nicht am Religionsunterricht partizipierenden Familien. Sie ziehen die Notwendigkeit der Installation einer direkten religionspädagogischen Erziehungs- und Bildungspartnerschaft mit beiden Adressatenkreisen nach sich. Diese kann aufgrund der Heterogenität der Familien im Rahmen des Religionsunterrichtes nicht anders als fächerübergreifend sowie fächerverbindend gestaltet werden. ; The main aim of this conceptual study was to investigate what kind of basic statements concerning a concept of religious educational school-and-family partnership in a secular context could be found in the perspective of system theory and comparing different countries. Through the approach of ...

Upskilling the adult workforce is a major policy across the OECD, and many governments are grappling with the issue of how to design interventions that can support workforce development for less skilled and/or qualified adult workers. This paper examines and compares the English government's Train to Gain (T2G) programme and the Welsh Assembly Government's Workforce Development Programme (WDP). The paper suggests that these two schemes offer radically different models for adult workforce development. T2G is designed to provide a vehivle whereby a near-universal adult entitlement (to a first level 2 qualification) can be delivered to the entire workforce over time, and has also provided a model for a new funding system for post-19 learning in England. By contrast, the WDP is tied to specific business development/improvement interventions, is only available on a selective basis, and is not solely concerned with funding the achievement of qualifications. The paper offers some thoughts on the relative effectiveness of these two models.

Ensuring adequate and appropriate education and training opportunities for all 16-19 year olds has become a major policy issue over the last thirty years. This priority was, to some extent, forced upon the first Thatcher government by rapidly rising youth unemployment and the spectre of inner city riots. Now encouraging a greater proportion of young people to delay their transition into the labout market has become a central concern of the government education and training policy. Investment in the Learning and Skills Sector in England has increased by 48% since 1997, with much of this money being directed at 16-19 year olds; currently just over half of the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) budget is spent on this age group. Does this investment produce value for money and who is benefiting from it? This issues paper draws on work undertaken as part of the Nuffield 14-19 Review 1 to discuss these questions with a focus on one indicator of system performance, participation rates.

Following historicist and materialist feminist criticisms, material food studies and the cultural attitudes towards food and female speech and hearing in early modern England, I argue that Thomas Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness (1607) dramatises the interrelatedness of oral, aural and sexual appetites. I contend that Anne's oral, aural and sexual openness to Wendoll is a complex form of subversive complicity; she subverts the authority of her husband while obeying him in submitting aurally and sexually to Wendoll whom Frankford invites to use his table and unconsciously his wife. I argue that Heywood perceived appetite as an instrument for revenge, penitence, and redemption. While Anne's aural and oral openness to Wendoll's seductive speech leads to her sexual openness, I explain that her self-imposed punishment of self-starvation is an oral revenge in which she consumes the flesh that has bred her sin. I argue that Anne's starvation is an act of political resistance against a patriarchal society that uses food and eating as forms of control.

Das Buch setzt sich mit der Frage auseinander, wie nicht natürliche Rechtsträger Besitz und Gewahrsam im zivilprozessualen Sinne ausüben. Dabei gilt es die rechtsdogmatischen und praktischen Probleme zu bewältigen, die sich aus dem Zusammenspiel der faktischen Aspekte der Figuren des Besitzes und des Gewahrsams und der abstrakten Natur der Rechtspersönlichkeit nicht natürlicher Rechtsträger ergeben. Die Figuren des Organbesitzes und des Organgewahrsams lassen sich dabei ohne Weiteres in das bestehende dogmatische Gerüst inkorporieren. Auch die Probleme für die Rechtspraxis können anhand einer richterrechtlich aufzustellenden unwiderlegbaren Vermutung bezüglich der Sachgewaltverhältnisse bewältigt werden. Letztlich befasst sich die Studie im Rahmen einer rechtsvergleichenden Analyse mit der geschilderten Problematik in anderen europäischen Rechtsordnungen. Dabei können sowohl Unterschiede als auch Gemeinsamkeiten hinsichtlich der Abhandlung der tatsächlichen Sachherrschaft nicht natürlicher Rechtsträger in den jeweiligen Rechtssystemen festgestellt werden. / »Possession, Custody and Control of Legal Entities« -- This book studies the way in which legal entities, such as companies or partnerships, exercise possession, custody and control on chattels according to German Law. It provides solutions for issues and dogmatic inconsistencies arising from the clash between the factual nature of possession, custody and control and the abstract concept of legal personality within the parameters of the German Civil Law and Civil Procedure. The study concludes with a Comparative Law analysis of the subject matter with regard to the legal systems in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, France and England

AbstractBritain's 1931 suspension of the gold standard remains one of the most shocking policy shifts of the past century. Conventional explanations focus on changing international conditions alongside the rise of social democracy: when Britons refused to shoulder the increasing costs of defending the exchange rate, the Bank of England was "forced" to abandon the gold standard. This article refocuses attention on policy-makers' causal ideas at critical moments. Drawing on numerous primary sources held in several archives, it reveals a cleavage within the Bank over the appropriate response to the flight from sterling. Following the nervous collapse of the Bank's governor, the deputy governor shifted the Bank's strategy from making defensive rate hikes to pursuing fiscal austerity. He then "temporarily" suspended gold convertibility in a gambit to forestall the election he (incorrectly) assumed would unseat the gold standard's supporters in Parliament. When the unintended experiment with a managed float proved successful, Keynes was able to persuade policy-makers to embrace the new exchange rate regime.

This article categorizes and delineates approaches to information sharing and assessment in a demonstration program established by central government in England. Its purpose was to develop and test a set of principles relating to a general assessment framework for adults in demonstrator sites, maximizing the use of information technology where feasible. The method employed comprised the systematic analysis of documents associated with the funding application and a telephone interview with personnel in each site. Data were collected from 17 initiatives, 13 of which provided detailed information on information sharing within the assessment process. A taxonomy of approaches was produced and information sharing in the assessment process reported in terms of setting and personnel; approaches to data collection, storage, and transfer; and changes to the process. A classification of the initiatives within a demonstration program was a useful means of describing them. Measures of intermediate outcomes captured changes in information sharing between agencies. Local initiatives were successful in promoting electronic information sharing between health and social care agencies.

In this article, we explore the ways that contemporary young masculinities are performed and regulated through young people's relationship with celebrity. We address the relative paucity of work on young men's engagements with popular culture. Drawing on qualitative data from group interviews with 148 young people (aged 14-17) in England, we identify 'celebrity talk' as a site in which gender identities are governed, negotiated and resisted. Specifically we argue that celebrity as a space of imagination can bring to the study of masculinities a focus on their affective and collective mobilisation. Unpicking young men's and women's talk about Canadian pop star Justin Bieber and British boyband One Direction, we show how disgust and humour operate as discursive-affective practices which open up and close down certain meanings and identities. We conclude that while there have been shifts in the ways that masculinities are performed and regulated, hierarchies of masculinities anchored through hegemonic masculinity remain significant.

This research, conducted jointly between the UK children's charity Coram and the University of Bristol, aimed to address the absence in the academic literature of adopters' perspectives on their children's life story books. Forty adopters from England and Wales participated in either focus group or telephone interviews. While some of the accounts were of positive experiences, there was a broad consensus that many books were of poor quality, children had been inadequately prepared to explore their histories, adoption professionals and agencies did not seem to prioritise life story books, and that adopters felt poorly prepared in how to use and update them for the benefit of their children. Clear messages for adoption agencies can be elicited regarding the preparation and use of life story books, such as improved training for professionals, monitoring of the quality of books produced and better access to support and guidance for adopters to engage in this crucial work with their children over time.

Purpose– The criminal justice system in England and Wales is being reconstructed on a new operating platform of which Payment by Results (PbR) is the material signifier. This critical historic transformation is occurring during a period of radical economic disruption and political restructuring after 2007-2008. PbR signals the deeper penetration of the core principles of capitalism into the body of the state and its welfare and criminal justice system. Conceptually a Lacanian-Žižekian framework is put to work to theorise these important transformations. The paper aims to discuss these issues.Design/methodology/approach– The design and methodology of this research paper utilises open sources and documentary materials on the development of PbR, in its application primarily to the criminal justice system.Findings– There is evidence that PbR, located within the wider context of capitalist reconstruction, is radically transforming the delivery of criminal justice services.Originality/value– This is the first critical analysis of PbR located within the context of late modern capitalism.