Nice Article for Student

You can use a cleaner from a store that is made for coffeemakers or from your coffee maker company. Easier yet, and less expensive, is to use undiluted WHITE household vinegar. If you do choose to us… [Author: Joyce Kaaland - Education - July 28, 2010]

It is believed that the Yemen were the first to drink coffee from beans in the 15th century: others say it was the Turks. It is also believed that the coffee maker was nothing more than a pot. Today,… [Author: Joyce Kaaland - Education - July 28, 2010]

Education secretary tells MPs he had to act fast on academies because of huge gap in attainment

Inequality in Britain is so entrenched that “rich, thick kids” achieve more than their “poor, clever” peers even before they start school, the education secretary said today.

Michael Gove told MPs on the cross-party Commons education committee that a “yawning gap” had formed between the attainment of poor children and their richer peers.

Gove has come under criticism for using parliamentary procedures usually reserved for national emergencies to rush through his academies bill.

The bill, which became law today, will pave the way for hundreds more schools to opt out of local authority control and become academies.

Gove told MPs he had needed to act fast because the attainment gap was “a problem we can’t work on quickly enough”.

“We are falling behind … other countries are moving faster ahead,” he said. “Rich, thick kids do better than poor, clever children before they go to school. Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of our society, the situation is getting worse.”

Gove was later criticised by a teachers’ leader for using the term “thick”. Mick Brookes, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said: “Thick is not a word that is currently in use in schools. It is demeaning to children.”

The academies legislation will allow parents, teachers and charities to set up their own Swedish-style “free schools”.

Gove revealed that Richard Dawkins, an academic and prominent atheist, is interested in setting up an atheist free school. Critics of faith schools have warned that religious fanatics could try to take advantage of the new law and create schools that teach their beliefs. Dawkins has described faith schools as a form of child abuse.

Gove told MPs that he encouraged atheists to start their own schools.

“We want choices for children,” he said. “There are concerns about inappropriate faith groups using this legislation to push their own agenda, but we have been working on the regulations to ensure that we don’t have any extremist groups taking over schools.”

MPs quizzed Gove and his top civil servant over errors in a list of cancelled school rebuilding projects put out after Gove scrapped the £55bn Building Schools for the Future programme. Hundreds of schools celebrated the news that their building plans were still going ahead, only to discover that they had in fact been scrapped. Many teachers and local authorities had spent several years and millions of pounds negotiating the plans. Gove was forced to apologise in the Commons.

David Bell, the permanent secretary of the Department for Education, admitted to MPs that he had ignored advice to check the list, which was found to have 25 errors.

Partnerships for Schools, the quango responsible for BSF, had warned Bell to check his facts with local authorities before telling hundreds of schools whether their buildings would go ahead.

Bell said he had put Gove in an invidious position. “I think it was a mistake not to put to the secretary of state the possibility of checking the list with local authorities and I take responsibility for that.”

Gove said he would continue to invest in new school buildings, despite having axed BSF. Cash would go directly to schools and local authorities, he said.

Review concludes that lack of focus on children’s welfare was partly to blame for seven-year-old’s death by starvation

Ministers must urgently review the law on home education to prevent further tragedies, the independent review into the death of Khyra Ishaq recommended today .

Seven-year-old Khyra starved to death in 2008 at the hands of her mother, Angela Gordon, and Junaid Abuhamza, who were both jailed after admitting manslaughter earlier this year.

The review concluded that flaws in home education laws were partly to blame for the death. The laws’ sole focus on parents’ rights – rather than their children’s – enabled Gordon to ignore social services and made it impossible for them to intervene.

The review calls for changes to the law to ensure that social services speak to children to assess whether home education is in their interests, as well as their parents. The review found Gordon had become increasingly aggressive towards her children’s teachers when she removed Khyra and some of her siblings from school in December 2007.

Gordon wrote to authorities to tell them that she wanted to educate her children at home. Birmingham city council’s education welfare service – known as the Education Otherwise team – visited Gordon with a social worker to assess whether she was fit to home-educate her children.

The serious case review found the welfare worker used a “tick-box” approach for this assessment. The welfare worker did not ask to see examples of the kinds of lessons Khyra would be taught or inquire into how many hours of education Gordon’s children would receive each week. At no point did the welfare worker request to see Khyra or her siblings. Nonetheless, the welfare worker concluded that Gordon was fit to home-educate her children.

Other authorities held “great store” by the welfare worker’s assessment, the review found, and this led to a catalogue of missed opportunities to spot neglect and abuse in the home.

“There is no safeguard to ensure that a satisfactory education is being received by children and that their welfare is being safeguarded,” the review stated. “The current legislation enables parents to move their children from state education with minimal reasons and provides an opportunity to render young people virtually invisible. This is a particular advantage to parents who may wish to conceal abuse.

“On this occasion, the legislative framework contributed to the unintended outcome of isolating some children within a home environment and restricted access to those children by professional agencies, effectively removing any oversight of their welfare or development. Without doubt, the legislative armour … enabled [Gordon] to resist the advances of professional intervention and added to the perceived impotence of professionals to intervene.”

Michael Gove, the education secretary, said “lessons needed to be learned” from Khyra’s death and promised he would “see what changes need to be made to the existing arrangements … in due course”.

Fiona Nicholson, from the national home education charity Education Otherwise – a different organisation to the one mentioned in the independent review – said blaming home education was a “red herring designed to distract attention from Birmingham’s lamentable child protection record”.

In April, a controversial clause to the education bill that would have compelled every parent who home-educates their child to register with their local authority was dropped. It was one of the concessions made by the then-Labour government to push through an education bill before parliament was dissolved ahead of the general election.

Ed Balls, the then education secretary, wanted to force home-educating families to accept annual visits from local authority inspectors, a move that led to home-educators demonstrating to parliament. Balls, now shadow education secretary, said he strongly urged Gove to re-introduce the legislation on home education as “an urgent priority”. “He will have our full support,” he said.

The Independent has asked its long-standing, award-winning education editor Lucy Hodges to leave.

She has refused to accept a redundancy offer and has been backed by the National Union of Journalists’ chapel.

Her situation has caused concern among some staff who believe there was an understanding following the paper’s acquisition by Alexander Lebedev in March that there would not be any mandatory redundancies.

Hodges has been with the Indy for 11 years, having worked for the paper as a freelance for four years before that, specialising in the coverage of higher education.

She was responsible for editing the free-standing education supplement, which has since been absorbed within the main paper.

I understand that she was offered an alternative to redundancy, a post on the foreign desk, which she rejected.

The Independent’s management originally demanded that she leave the paper by tomorrow and conduct her appeal against redundancy while serving her notice out of the office.

An NUJ protest against that decision, with the threat of a chapel meeting later today, led to a change of mind. She will remain on the paper until the matter is resolved.

Some of her Independent colleagues are upset that the paper has just hired two new writers – Julie Burchill and Mary-Ann Sieghart – while casting out the education editor.

One staff member told me: “I can see the logic, because it’s possible that high-profile columnists may attract readers. But it also suggests the paper is being dumbed down.

“Higher education may not be sexy, but the government’s cuts mean it is an important story right now, and Lucy, who is one of the most knowledgeable correspondents in the field, is the best person to cover the subject.”

But a senior Independent executive said: “It’s a simple matter. There was an education supplement and there is no longer, because there was no advertising support for it and we were losing money. So the job of editing it has vanished.

“Let’s say we stopped covering cricket, then the cricket correspondent would be redundant.

“We offered Lucy a good job on the foreign desk and she turned it down, which is a pity. In view of this, we can’t understand why the NUJ is making a fuss.

“What I can say without a doubt is that this is a one-off situation. It is not the thin end of the wedge. It does not presage a wave of redundancies, or any redundancies at all.”