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The education rankings of Australian students continue to slide further down the international scale, yet the dominant discourse in relation to both the cause and solution to this perceived decline remains focused on funding, curriculum and teacher quality whilst failing largely to take account of the broader social contexts in which education takes place. Drawing on findings from recent research in primary schools in regional Australia, this paper raises the question of Australian school students' human right to an education and explores the role that school social workers can play in upholding this right. Discussion draws on international research, including studies that examine the outcomes of employing suitably qualified School Social Workers who can foster links and networks between student, family, school and community. It is argued that these networks create social capital that can serve to enable students to benefit from both the education to which they are entitled, and the connections that may empower them, as they move into adult life. [Author abstract]

Purpose This paper aims to explore the place of disabled guests in the new world of hotel and holiday accommodation shaped by the sharing economy. Design/methodology/approach The paper uses Levitas’s (2013) Utopia as Method as a methodological tool to develop the hypothetical future scenarios, which are used to explore the place of disabled guests in peer-to-peer holiday accommodation. Findings Analysis of the hypothetical scenarios suggests that without state intervention, the place of disabled guests in both traditional hotels and peer-to-peer holiday accommodation is far from secure. Research limitations/implications This is a new area and the authors’ discussion is therefore tentative in its intent. Practical implications Planners and policymakers should consult with, and take account of, the needs of disabled people and other socially excluded groups when regulating shared economy enterprises. It may be helpful to put in place broader legislation for social inclusion rather than regulate peer-to-peer platforms. Any recourse to markets as a means of resolving access issues needs also to acknowledge the limited power of socially excluded groups within both traditional and sharing economy markets. Social implications The hypothetical scenarios discussed within this paper offer planners, policymakers and tourism stakeholders opportunities to think through the access and inclusion needs of disabled guests in the shared economy sector. Originality/value The paper extends discussion of hospitality and disability access to include shared economy approaches and the place of disabled guests in the new world of holiday accommodation shaped by the sharing economy.

Checkpoint kinase 2 (CHK2) is an important serine/threonine kinase in the cellular response to DNA damage. A fragment-based screening campaign using a combination of a high-concentration AlphaScreen™ kinase assay and a biophysical thermal shift assay, followed by X-ray crystallography, identified a number of chemically different ligand-efficient CHK2 hinge-binding scaffolds that have not been exploited in known CHK2 inhibitors. In addition, it showed that the use of these orthogonal techniques allowed efficient discrimination between genuine hit matter and false positives from each individual assay technology. Furthermore, the CHK2 crystal structures with a quinoxaline-based fragment and its follow-up compound highlight a hydrophobic area above the hinge region not previously explored in rational CHK2 inhibitor design, but which might be exploited to enhance both potency and selectivity of CHK2 inhibitors.

A range of national and international actors and networks have claimed to support the interests of people with learning difficulties over the last 30 years. This article examines their influence on UK policy for people with learning difficulties, with a particular focus on the recent policy shift towards individualised support and personalisation. Policy changes and developments within the UK are considered in the context of similar developments internationally and the article questions the extent to which personalisation can be sustained in the face of the scale and economic rationality of global markets. Finally, an alternative, more accountable, model of individualised support is proposed.

This chapter is concerned with the involvement of mental health service users or survivors in social work education and research. Our chapter discusses service user involvement in social work education and research on a small regional campus of Edith Cowan University in Bunbury, Western Australia. In this chapter, we argue that far from being disadvantaged by geographical location, Edith Cowan University's Social Work programme is powerfully connected to a global community of mental health activists and service users. We begin our chapter by discussing the regional university campus where we work and provide background information about our own connections to mental health and ways of understanding mental illness. We then go on to discuss user involvement in Australia and the first author's growing interest in mental health activism, which has been pivotal to our work together. The chapter then discusses our own work in the area of user involvement and some of the challenges we have encountered. Finally, we conclude by arguing for the establishment of place for the experiential knowledges of mental health service users within user involvement in higher education.

This article contributes to the search for suitable approaches to combat social exclusion faced by disabled people in capitalist wage labour markets. Referring to policy and service examples in Hong Kong, it reviews four social exclusion approaches – the Moral Underclass (MUD), Social Integrationist (SID), Redistributive (RED) and Collective Production (COP) approaches. These approaches are explored in relation to three key issues: (1) the diverse preferences of disabled people; (2) the myth of infeasibility regarding unconventional approaches and (3) the defects of the medical model of disability. The article argues that the MUD and SID approaches are more associated with the medical model of disability and emphasise individual changes. The RED and COP approaches contain more features of the social model of disability and are in favour of social and structural changes. The COP approach stresses the diverse preferences of disabled people and supports innovative services to combat social exclusion.

This chapter examines some of the discussions about disability which have been taking place within the disabled people's movement and considers the relevance of these ideas to people identified as having learning difficulties. Within the UK disabled people's movement, ideas of disability are frequently framed in terms of individual and social models of disability. These two diametrically opposed models appear to offer an illuminating universal tool to aid understanding and analysis of disability. Some disabled people have, however, criticised the formulaic simplicity of such an approach and point to its lack of sophistication in accounting for their individual experiences (see, for example, Morris 1991, 1996; Crow 1996; Vernon 1998). Other disabled people have challenged such critiques for fragmenting the coherence offered to the disabled people's movement by a unifying social model of disability (for example, Oliver 1996a; Barnes 1998).

The public service and research arenas are currently experiencing strong pressures to 'involve' service users in social care research, policy, and practice. These pressures came from the policymakers and the providers of services, but also from the users of the services and welfare as well. This consensus on policy involvement defies the complex nature of the relationships and processes of user involvement and the strong feelings that can be aroused. This chapter focuses on these relationships, processes, and feelings that characterise user involvement. Although the chapter includes a discussion on user involvement policy, the chapter's main concern is on user involvement in policy research. This chapter begins by exploring the category of service users and by considering the processes of involvement and participation and the meaning of these for those involved. It then considers the history of service provision and the development of service user involvement in services, research, and policy. In particular, it highlights the tensions between the conventional expectations of researcher 'neutrality', 'professionalism' and 'objectivity' and the ways of working which allow the personal lives and experiences of service users into the methods and processes of research. The chapter ends by contending that service-user involvement requires approaches to research and policy which reduce rather than encourage conventional separations of public/private, researcher/researched, and policy maker/policy subject.

IntroductionPublic service and research arenas are currently witnessing strong pressures to ‘involve’ service users in social care research, policy and practice. These pressures come from policy makers and the providers of services but also, as Peter Beresford (2001) has argued, from the users of welfare themselves; thus the involvement agendas of both the ‘makers’ and the ‘subjects’ of policy appear to coincide. This apparent consensus, however, belies the complex nature of the relationships and processes of user involvement and the strong feelings that can be aroused. It is these relationships, processes and feelings which form the focus of our exploration of user involvement in this chapter. Although we include discussion of user involvement policy – part of the broader UK government agenda to promote more participatory forms of governance – our primary concern here is user involvement in research; albeit research for policy and practice.The different parties to user involvement are frequently presented as discrete groups: ‘service users’ who are the ‘recipients’ or ‘subjects’ of welfare policies and ‘researchers’ and ‘policy makers’ who are the ‘architects’ of those policies. Indeed, the notion of involvement assumes a separation between ‘service users’ and the research and policy-making processes in which, increasingly, their involvement is required. As with other participatory methodologies (see, for example, Reason and Bradbury, 2001), user involvement presents challenges to more traditional approaches to social research in that it is carried out ‘with’ (rather than ‘on’) those who are being researched. The challenges of such involvement extend to the realm of epistemology/ies and positivist assumptions about the separation of ‘knower’ and ‘known’. They also prompt reconsideration of the personal and political dimensions of social research and the extent to which user involvement can be meaningfully conducted without reinforcing the separations on which it is based. Drawing on our own work in this area (Boxall et al, 2004; Warren and Cook, 2005; Chau, 2007), this chapter illustrates some of the complexities of user involvement in research, which become apparent when ‘users’ and ‘university researchers’ work together. Thus, our discussion is concerned with the meanings and politics of user involvement in research as well as the methods and practices of such involvement.Such discussion is particularly relevant to this volume's reconsideration of the processes and practices of policy. As we highlight later, service users are not new actors in the policy process.