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In 2014, Japan ratified the CRPD, which spurred to the development of domestic laws; however, the education section of the Convention does not clarify how to educate children with disabilities in inclusive education. Thus, while the global inclusive education goal advocated by UNESCO and other bodies concerns education for all, inclusive education in Japan is seen as education for children with disabilities, and the philosophies and practices are very different. Therefore, this chapter introduces the policies and current practices of inclusive education in Japan and discusses the possibilities for school education reform from the perspective of real inclusive education.

The article examines the interplay between welfare state regimes and the distribution of welfare between generations.

Using data from 2017 for 24 European countries on six standard of living dimensions, the authors investigate the intergenerational welfare distribution in a two-stage procedure: (1) the authors compare the intergenerational welfare distribution across welfare state regimes using their existing typologies and find a moderate nexus. Therefore, (2) the authors employ clustering procedure to look for a new classification that would better reflect the cross-country variation in the intergenerational welfare division.

The authors find a complex relationship between the welfare state model and welfare distribution across generations and identify the policy patterns that shape it. Continental and liberal regimes are quite similar in these terms and favour the elderly generation. Social-democratic and CEE regimes seem to be a bit more balanced. COVID-19 pandemic will probably increase the intergenerational imbalance in terms of welfare distribution in favour of the elderly.

In contrast to the majority of previous studies, which employ inputs (social expenditures) or outputs (benefits, incomes), the authors use intergenerational balance indicators reflecting living conditions of a given generation as compared to the reference point defined as an average situation of all generations.

This paper aims to explore the lived experiences of key stakeholders working with homeless people during the implementation of universal credit during the austerity years.

The literature on austerity reveals welfare reforms’ impact on support services staff. Service providers’ perceptions of the impact of austerity-led policies and welfare reform via nine interviews with people working in homelessness organisations in Brighton and Hove in the UK. Service providers see the situation for their service users has gotten worse and that the policies make it more difficult to extricate themselves from their current situation. Three central themes relating to the impact of austerity-led welfare reforms were, namely, Universal Credit: the imposition of a precarious livelihood on welfare claimants; a double-edged sword: “If people are sanctioned: people can’t pay”; and “Hard to maintain my own mental equilibrium”.

More precisely, this paper captures service providers’ perceptions and experiences of the impact of austerity-led policies on their services and how they believe this, in turn, impacts their clients and their own lives.

The dimension cuts across service provision to vulnerable people and is intertwined with health and well-being outcomes. Austerity is detrimental to the health of service users and their clients. It is known that when it comes to the health and well-being of the most vulnerable, who have suffered most from the impacts of austerity policies. However, in times of open austerity, it falls also on those trying to ease their suffering.

The data suggest that policies were developed and accentuated by austerity, which led to the stripping of welfare support from vulnerable people. This process has impacted the people who rely on welfare and service providers.

Welfare reforms introduced conditionality into cash transfers often by diverse welfare-to-work programs achieving its vast legitimization. Meanwhile in-kind poverty alleviation policies maintained their universal character in the forms of national budgeting of municipal services. Utilizing justification work, the authors aim at showing how conditionality of in-kind support is replacing universalism. The authors ask which justification work assist administrators in shaping the relationship between in-kind and cash transfer and the changing meanings of poverty alleviation practices.

The authors conducted 20 semi-structured interviews with senior administrators in Israeli local governments analysing them along principles of critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2010). Further, seeking to elicit the justification work, the authors added some guidelines from the discourse interaction approach.

The findings identified administrators' justification work as taking two major shapes. The first is an emphasis on conditionality in their in-kind support projects, which is limited in time, contingent upon co-operation and sometimes even enhancing choice for those in need. The second is the manifestation of pride anchored in the skilful budget management enabling the achievement of conditional in-kind support projects based on the effort involved.

The authors did not prompt the interviewees for the proportions of specific categories, such as whether they are attending and benefitting of the in-kind support programs. This is a limitation of this study that prevented the authors from contrasting perceived achievements against the actual coverage of their projects.

It is important that government funding is increased for municipal anti-poverty policies engaging municipal administrator in the struggle for full and better coverage so that capability deprivation is combatted by a combination of cash transfer and quality social services that are universal and at the same time secure mentoring and supervision to all households in need.

Future research should present the analysis that associates different budgets of each city with its anti-poverty polices and its different socio-economic ranking. Critical social-policy scholars may apply this study’s findings in future analyses of municipal administrators' power position as reinforced by national level policy makers, particularly when introducing controversial policies.

Anti-poverty policy and the specific combination between conditional cash transfers and in-kind support have been explained at the level of political–economic decision making. The authors conceptualize the need to explain anti-poverty policy by focussing on municipal administrators’ embedded agency, particularly around controversial issues. By building the professional self of municipal welfare administrators, inter alia by ignoring past meanings of in-kind support as depriving recipients of autonomy, conditionality is extended into in-kind services.

This study aims to examine mental health amongst two cohorts of single mothers in Australia before and after major social welfare reforms, which limited single parents’ access to welfare payments to encourage labour market participation.

The study analyses The Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health, which surveyed 9,145 women born in the 1970s in 2003, and 8,346 women born in the 1990s in 2019.

Compared with other women of similar age, single mothers reported a higher prevalence of depression, anxiety, self-harm and suicidal thoughts and lower levels of mental health, although the magnitude varied between age groups and cohorts. This difference disappeared after controlling for socio-demographic characteristics. Mental health of single mothers improved relative to that of other women between cohorts (1970s cohort surveyed in 2003, aged 25–30 versus 1990s cohort surveyed 2019, aged 24–30) and within the same 1970s cohort (surveyed 2003 and 2018), all else equal. Single mothers from the 1970s cohort aged 40–45 years and those in the 1990s cohort aged 24–30 years old were more qualified and held better jobs than the 1970s cohort at aged 25–30. Stress-related to money, ability to manage on available income and experiencing domestic violence were negatively associated with mental health across all cohorts and ages. Social support had a strong positive association with mental health.

The study suggests low welfare payment to encourage greater labour market participation is associated with financial distress linked to poor mental health.

This article analyses a major healthcare and social welfare reform establishing new regional and integrated wellbeing services counties in Finland. The authors approach the reform and service integration as a knowledge management (KM) issue and analyse how KM appears and contributes in the context of integrated care, specifically in the process of integrating social and health care.

The article analyses the case organisation's KM initiatives in light of the integrated care literature and recognises the tasks and requirements for effective KM when building integrated health and social care system. The empirical research material for this qualitative study consisted of the case organisation's strategy documents, the results of an external maturity assessment, KM workshop materials and publicly available documentation of the Finnish health and social care reform.

This study identifies the mechanisms by which KM can support health and social services integration. At the macro level, national coordination and regional co-operation require common information structures. At the meso level, a shared regional strategy with shared objectives guides both organisational decision-making and collaboration between professionals. At the micro level, technology supported and data-driven planning of service chains complements the experiences of professionals and may help remove obstacles to integration.

This study contributes to the literature on integrated care by providing a more comprehensive view of the role and tasks of knowledge and KM when reforming health and social services than approaches focussing solely on health informatics and internal efficiency.

Background: Rising food bank usage in the UK suggests a growing prevalence of food insecurity. However, a formalised, representative measure of food insecurity was not collected in the UK until 2019, over a decade after the initial proliferation of food bank demand. In the absence of a direct measure of food insecurity, this article identifies and summarises longitudinal proxy indicators of UK food insecurity to gain insight into the growth of insecure access to food in the 21st century.

Methods: A rapid evidence synthesis of academic and grey literature (2005–present) identified candidate proxy longitudinal markers of food insecurity. These were assessed to gain insight into the prevalence of, or conditions associated with, food insecurity.

Results: Food bank data clearly demonstrates increased food insecurity. However, this data reflects an unrepresentative, fractional proportion of the food insecure population without accounting for mild/moderate insecurity, or those in need not accessing provision. Economic indicators demonstrate that a period of poor overall UK growth since 2005 has disproportionately impacted the poorest households, likely increasing vulnerability and incidence of food insecurity. This vulnerability has been exacerbated by welfare reform for some households. The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically intensified vulnerabilities and food insecurity. Diet-related health outcomes suggest a reduction in diet quantity/quality. The causes of diet-related disease are complex and diverse; however, evidence of socio-economic inequalities in their incidence suggests poverty, and by extension, food insecurity, as key determinants.

Conclusion: Proxy measures of food insecurity suggest a significant increase since 2005, particularly for severe food insecurity. Proxy measures are inadequate to robustly assess the prevalence of food insecurity in the UK. Failure to collect standardised, representative data at the point at which food bank usage increased significantly impairs attempts to determine the full prevalence of food insecurity, understand the causes, and identify those most at risk.

Policy brief on how to mitigate the negative impacts of Universal Credit on financial insecurity and crime based on the paper d’Este, R. and Harvey, A. (2022), “The unintended consequences of welfare reforms: Universal Credit, financial insecurity, and crime”, The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization.