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In 1999, a team from England, comprising self‐advocates, family members, leading professionals and policy‐makers, participated in the annual ‘Collaborative Academy’ of the US President's Committee on Mental Retardation. Fundamental to the Academy method is the commitment to work inclusively across different interests and engage directly with experiences. This paper identifies 41 lessons drawn by the team from US experience, including research‐ and practice‐based perspectives relevant to maximising progress in the context of the forthcoming national learning disability strategy in England. Focusing on the four main themes of learning from good stories, strengthening effective leadership, establishing inclusive policies and building better partnerships in policy‐making, action points are identified at local, regional and national levels. The paper also promotes the value of the Academy method itself as a vehicle for promoting strategy implementation, describing an enhanced role for selected universities in supporting informed change.

Governments mediate, through their architecture of machinery and policy, access to rights and, by extension, to services. There is limited but growing recognition in both the UK and other European governments that individuals' power to negotiate this access is limited by the structural inequality of groups in certain named categories of disadvantage (inter alia, people with disabilities), and they are adapting their machinery to provide the support they require to ‘level the playing field’. However, intersectionality (identities which cut across these recognised categories of disadvantage) prevents those affected from using such mechanisms effectively. Those whose disability impairs their mental awareness and understanding face an additional barrier. The paper explores how this limits the rights of those with both learning disabilities and mental illness, and looks at some of the ways in which this problem is being addressed.

This article describes one of the issues that arose from my research into the Longcare abuse scandal: how local authorities place learning‐disabled adults in out‐of‐area settings far from their original homes, and then fail to visit them regularly to check on their welfare. It describes the failings of three local and health authorities in the Longcare case, and then reveals that the problem was not confined to those authorities that placed adults at the Longcare homes. It also suggests that placing vulnerable adults in out‐of‐area homes puts them at a greater risk of abuse. The article concludes that, ten years on from the exposure of the Longcare regime, many local authorities are still placing vulnerable adults in out‐of‐area homes and failing to visit them. It calls for a national audit of out‐of‐area placements and for measures to be introduced to allow learning‐disabled adults to live in placements closer to their families and friends… and care managers.

In 1994, a leaked Buckinghamshire County Council report revealed that, for more than 10 years, former social worker Gordon Rowe had been beating, raping and neglecting the adults with learning difficulties who lived in the residential homes run by his company, Longcare. This paper explains how Rowe's regime was able to continue undetected for so long.

As part of the Journal's series of profiles of UK organisations working in the field of vulnerable adults and adult abuse the work of the Ann Craft Trust (formerly NAPSAC) is outlined by it's Director and Co‐ordinator. As one of the UK's first campaigning and educational organisations for adult protection, the Trust can justifiably claim some credit for the upturn in awareness and policy development over the last decade.

Currently in Great Britain 12.9% of the workforce are unemployed — over three million people. Within this overall total there are considerable variations in the levels of employment in different parts of the country. Even within individual local authorities there will be sizeable differences in the actual size of unemployment from one town to another.

The uncertainty as to whether investments in riskier and less efficient markets allow managers to ‘beat the market’ remains a question to which answers are required. Accordingly, the purpose of this chapter is to offer new insights on portfolios of the US, European and Emerging Market (‘EM’) domiciled equity mutual funds whose objectives are the investment in emerging economies, and specifically analyses two main issues: alpha generation and the influence of the funds’ characteristics on their risk-adjusted performance.

The dataset is made up a survivorship-bias controlled sample of 137 equity funds over the period January 2004 to December 2014, which are then grouped into equally weighted portfolios according to the scheme’s origin. The Jensen’s (1968) Single-Factor model along with the Fama and French’s (1993) and Carhart’s (1997) multifactor models are employed to authenticate results and answer both research questions.

Research analysis reveals that EM exposed fund managers fail to collectively outperform the market. It thereby offers ground to believe that the emerging world is very close to being efficient, proving that the Efficient Market Hypothesis (‘EMH’) ideal exists in this scenario where market inefficiency might only be a perception of market participants as any apparent opportunity to achieve above-average returns is speedily snapped up by very active managers. Overall these managers take a conservative approach to portfolio construction, whereby they are more unperturbed investing in large cap equity funds so as to lessen somewhat the exposure towards risks associated with liquidity, stability and volatility.

Furthermore, the findings show that large-sized equity portfolios have the lead over the medium and small-sized competitors, whilst the high cost and mature collective investment vehicles enjoy an alpha which although is negative is superior to their peers. The riskiest funds generated the lowest alpha, and thereby produced doubts as to whether investors should accept a higher risk for the hope of earning higher returns, at least when aiming to gain an exposure into the emerging world.

Mutual fund performance is not an innovative topic so to speak. Nonetheless, researchers and academia have centred their efforts on appraising the behaviour of fund managers domiciled primarily in developed and more efficient economics, leaving the emerging region highly uncovered in this respect. This study, therefore aims at crafting meaningful contributions to the literature as well as to the practical perspective.