Andy Jolly

Lumpen: A Journal of Poor and Working Class Writers is open for submissions! The upcoming issue’s theme will be Migration: a topic that is often weaponised, distorted and manipulated by the ruling classes. There is a lack of an honest discussion about migration in the mainstre...

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This is pretty thought provoking for anyone involved in social work education...

This is terrible. Really ashamed of my union. @ucu.org.uk - what are you doing? This is no way to treat your staff.

Oh, and it's free!

Social Work Zine Making Workshop Come and explore the history of social work zines and get creative by designing and making our own collective zine for social work week 2025

Get creative & explore the history of social work zines at our workshop on March 19th in Brum. Design & make our own collective zine for social work week. Don't miss out! #creative #ZineMaking #SocialWorkWeek2025 www.eventbrite.com/e/social-wor...

Girl, two, who drowned in bin in London was failed by council, coroner finds Social workers declined to provide short-term foster care for Mazeedat Adeoye whose mother had overstayed visa

tinyurl.com/4axcvz36 “The social work team accused her of misleading them about her circumstances and said she may not even have been Mazeedat’s real mother.”

This tragedy lays bare how the hostile environment underpinned by a punitive, racist and suspicion-driven ideology, infiltrates social work.

Children and families with no recourse to public funds: Learning from case reviews This paper reviews 26 reports into deaths and serious abuse of children in families who were subject to the No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF) rule. Our analysis illustrates vulnerabilities caused by...

Very similar issues to the 26 other reviews into child deaths where the child had NRPF onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Coroner noted that some social workers were: “obdurate and stubborn”, that family were "treated in a dehumanising way on account of her status in the UK,” and there was “a culture of impunity” in the local authority NRPF team

Girl, two, who drowned in bin in London was failed by council, coroner finds Social workers declined to provide short-term foster care for Mazeedat Adeoye whose mother had overstayed visa

Yet another child death linked to NRPF. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024... #NRPF

@birminghamschool.bsky.social

This is a significant ruling. Home Sec ruled to have breached her duties leaving people destitute without recourse.

Need to abolish NRPF entirely. Leaving people utterly destitute, driving them to exploitation & costing an absolute fortune through its cruel impact.

www.ein.org.uk/news/high-co...

If anyone is interested in applying and wants to have a chat about working at UoB (especially if you're based outside the UK), please drop me a message!

fellowsandchairs.birmingham.ac.uk heads up to any social work academics out there - UoB is recruiting for global 125th Anniversary Chairs and Fellows. Social care is one of their priority areas, so it would be great to get some social work academics on board #academicsky #socialwork

Shop Christmas cards *NEW* card designed by Rawand, an artist and young refugee from Kurdistan. Rawand is also a peer support mentor for BIRCH Network, helping to support other young refugees. Gold pige…

If you are in the UK and are looking for Christmas cards, t-shirts or tote bags, and want to raise money for a small grassroots community organisation for sanctuary seekers in Brum, I have just the place for you: birchnetwork.org/shop/

"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist."

~ Hannah Ahrendt

We do indeed

I love this story! "In one visitor’s video, one of the “pandas” was visibly panting while resting on a rock in a fence, while another clip had a panda with a long tail strolling about." #PanDog #Pandagate

the entire point of chatgpt is that it just spits out the most statistically probable next word in a sentence, which is literally the exact opposite of what good writing is

Cleverly accused of aggravating asylum backlog by ‘dithering’ on key decisions Exclusive: Ministers under last home secretary refused to empower caseworkers to tackle crisis, say sources

The asylum system ground to a halt in the lead up to the asylum system because ministers had failed to make decisions on how the Illegal Migration Act should work. Processing claims is not an “amnesty” - it’s performing the most basic function of an asylum system

www.theguardian.com/politics/art...

The Relationship Between Poverty And NHS Services This analysis explores the link between poverty and the prevalence of ill health, accessing health care services, health outcomes and delayed treatment.

There has been a long link between poverty & healthcare provision
GPs who fill the void are often left looking after 500 more patients than more affluent areas & people who live in poor areas require more care/support
20% cut in GP funding worse in poorer areas

www.kingsfund.org.uk/insight-and-...

This place is going to take a bit of getting used to, but there's conspicuously less hate on here, which can only be a good thing!

Academic journals are a lucrative scam – and we’re determined to change that | Arash Abizadeh Giant publishers are bleeding universities dry, with profit margins that rival Google’s. So we decided to start our own, says academic Arash Abizadeh

If you didn't already know that academic publishing is a racket - this beautifully outlines all the myriad ways in which it routinely extorts everyone involved with it.