Latest news with #DepartmentForEducation
BBC News
5 days ago
- General
- BBC News
Friesland School's 'net zero' rebuild given green light
A secondary school in Sandiacre is to be "almost completely demolished" to make way for a "net zero" eco-friendly for the new 1,280-pupil facility at the Friesland School site on Nursery Avenue were approved by Erewash Borough Council on 11 "multi-million-pound" project will see all but three of the buildings - the existing science and technology, sixth form and performing arts blocks - be demolished, along with the former Friesland Leisure Centre on the same built, the new school will feature grassy rooftops with solar panels, the meeting was told. The three-storey school - identified as a prime candidate for redevelopment by the Department for Education - will feature 31 classrooms and teaching areas, along with a drama studio, library, dining hall, sports hall and fitness seating, a fenced "recovery garden" quiet space and separate garden for pupils with special educational needs will be added to the existing outdoor vehicle charging points will also be installed in the car park. Councillor Mark Alfrey, the borough council's lead member for environment, said the new school would be "a tremendous boost for the students of Sandiacre".He added: "This exciting project underscores a commitment to fostering an inspiring, sustainable and inclusive learning environment for current and future generations."Five objection letters were submitted by opposing residents, the Local Democracy Reporting Service said, with concerns over construction traffic disruption, removal of trees creating privacy issues, and drainage the sports centre has saved the council £120,000 a year, with the authority saying the facility struggled to remain viable due to its limited access to the council had also said that the Two Counties Trust academy chain, based in Kirkby in Ashfield, "viewed "the presence of sports centre visitors, contractors and others as a safety and safeguarding risk".
Sky News
6 days ago
- Politics
- Sky News
Whitehall officials tried to cover up grooming scandal in 2011, Dominic Cummings says
Whitehall officials tried to convince Michael Gove to go to court to cover up the grooming scandal in 2011, Sky News can reveal. Dominic Cummings, who was working for Lord Gove at the time, has told Sky News that officials in the Department for Education (DfE) wanted to help efforts by Rotherham Council to stop a national newspaper from exposing the scandal. In an interview with Sky News, Mr Cummings said that officials wanted a "total cover-up". The revelation shines a light on the institutional reluctance of some key officials in central government to publicly highlight the grooming gang scandal. In 2011, Rotherham Council approached the Department for Education asking for help following inquiries by The Times. The paper's then chief reporter, the late Andrew Norfolk, was asking about sexual abuse and trafficking of children in Rotherham. The council went to Lord Gove's Department for Education for help. Officials considered the request and then recommended to Lord Gove's office that the minister back a judicial review which might, if successful, stop The Times publishing the story. Lord Gove rejected the request on the advice of Mr Cummings. Sources have independently confirmed Mr Cummings' account. Mr Cummings told Sky News: "Officials came to me in the Department of Education and said: 'There's this Times journalist who wants to write the story about these gangs. The local authority wants to judicially review it and stop The Times publishing the story'. "So I went to Michael Gove and said: 'This council is trying to actually stop this and they're going to use judicial review. You should tell the council that far from siding with the council to stop The Times you will write to the judge and hand over a whole bunch of documents and actually blow up the council's JR (judicial review).' "Some officials wanted a total cover-up and were on the side of the council... "They wanted to help the local council do the cover-up and stop The Times' reporting, but other officials, including in the DfE private office, said this is completely outrageous and we should blow it up. Gove did, the judicial review got blown up, Norfolk stories ran." 3:18 The judicial review wanted by officials would have asked a judge to decide about the lawfulness of The Times' publication plans and the consequences that would flow from this information entering the public domain. A second source told Sky News that the advice from officials was to side with Rotherham Council and its attempts to stop publication of details it did not want in the public domain. One of the motivations cited for stopping publication would be to prevent the identities of abused children entering the public domain. There was also a fear that publication could set back the existing attempts to halt the scandal, although incidents of abuse continued for many years after these cases. Sources suggested that there is also a natural risk aversion amongst officials to publicity of this sort. Mr Cummings, who ran the Vote Leave Brexit campaign and was Boris Johnson's right-hand man in Downing Street, has long pushed for a national inquiry into grooming gangs to expose failures at the heart of government. He said the inquiry, announced today, "will be a total s**tshow for Whitehall because it will reveal how much Whitehall worked to try and cover up the whole thing." He also described Mr Johnson, with whom he has a long-standing animus, as a "moron' for saying that money spent on inquiries into historic child sexual abuse had been "spaffed up the wall". Asked by Sky News political correspondent Liz Bates why he had not pushed for a public inquiry himself when he worked in Number 10 in 2019-20, Mr Cummings said Brexit and then COVID had taken precedence. "There are a million things that I wanted to do but in 2019 we were dealing with the constitutional crisis," he said.
Sky News
7 days ago
- Politics
- Sky News
Whitehall officials tried to convince Michael Gove to go to court to cover up grooming scandal in 2011
Whitehall officials tried to convince Michael Gove to go to court to cover up the grooming scandal in 2011, Sky News can reveal. Dominic Cummings, who was working for Lord Gove at the time, has told Sky News that officials in the Department for Education (DfE) wanted to help efforts by Rotherham Council stop a national newspaper from exposing the scandal. In an interview with Sky News, Mr Cummings said that officials wanted a "total cover-up". The revelation shines a light on the institutional reluctance of some key officials in central government to publicly highlight the grooming gang scandal. In 2011, Rotherham Council approached the Department for Education asking for help following inquiries by The Times. The paper's then chief reporter, the late Andrew Norfolk, was asking about sexual abuse and trafficking of children in Rotherham. The council went to Lord Gove's Department for Education for help. Officials considered the request and then recommended to Lord Gove's office that the minister back a judicial review which might, if successful, stop The Times publishing the story. Lord Gove rejected the request on the advice of Mr Cummings. Sources have independently confirmed Mr Cummings' account. Mr Cummings told Sky News: "Officials came to me in the Department of Education and said: 'There's this Times journalist who wants to write the story about these gangs. The local authority wants to judicially review it and stop The Times publishing the story'. "So I went to Michael Gove and said: 'This council is trying to actually stop this and they're going to use judicial review. You should tell the council that far from siding with the council to stop The Times you will write to the judge and hand over a whole bunch of documents and actually blow up the council's JR (judicial review).' "Some officials wanted a total cover-up and were on the side of the council... "They wanted to help the local council do the cover-up and stop The Times' reporting, but other officials, including in the DfE private office, said this is completely outrageous and we should blow it up. Gove did, the judicial review got blown up, Norfolk stories ran." 3:18 The judicial review wanted by officials would have asked a judge to decide about the lawfulness of The Times' publication plans and the consequences that would flow from this information entering the public domain. A second source told Sky News that the advice from officials was to side with Rotherham Council and its attempts to stop publication of details it did not want in the public domain. One of the motivations cited for stopping publication would be to prevent the identities of abused children entering the public domain. There was also a fear that publication could set back the existing attempts to halt the scandal, although incidents of abuse continued for many years after these cases. Sources suggested that there is also a natural risk aversion amongst officials to publicity of this sort. Mr Cummings, who ran the Vote Leave Brexit campaign and was Boris Johnson's right-hand man in Downing Street, has long pushed for a national inquiry into grooming gangs to expose failures at the heart of government. He said the inquiry, announced today, "will be a total s**tshow for Whitehall because it will reveal how much Whitehall worked to try and cover up the whole thing." He also described Mr Johnson, with whom he has a long-standing animus, as a "moron' for saying that money spent on inquiries into historic child sexual abuse had been "spaffed up the wall". Asked by Sky News political correspondent Liz Bates why he had not pushed for a public inquiry himself when he worked in Number 10 in 2019-20, Mr Cummings said Brexit and then COVID had taken precedence. "There are a million things that I wanted to do but in 2019 we were dealing with the constitutional crisis," he said.
Times
15-06-2025
- Health
- Times
Parent says no, stop the screen rot in schools
Bravo to the education committee for finally saying what we all know to be true: for young children, screens are like — and I'm paraphrasing here, but not by much — crack, in terms of rotting their brains and being ludicrously addictive. In its new report, 'Screen time: impacts on education and wellbeing', the committee concluded, 'The overwhelming weight of evidence submitted to us suggests that the harms of screen time and social media use significantly outweigh the benefits for young children.' In other words, it's not social media that's the problem. It's screens themselves. So, boy oh boy, that education committee will be really angry with whoever just made this decision: from September the national statutory tests for five-year-olds, the 'reception baseline assessment', will require at least two touchscreens — one for the teacher and one for the very young child (adult and child, side by side, both on screens, just as God intended.) Who on earth thought it was a good idea to test five-year-olds on tablets? Oh wait, it's written here in small letters, let me get my glasses …It was the Department for Education. Ah. By now, bodies ranging from the World Health Organisation to the NHS have published guidelines about screen time for young children. But these guidelines are arguably too little and definitely too late: a 2020 Ofcom report found that an astonishing 57 per cent of five- to seven-year-olds in Britain have a tablet. As a result of this large-scale outsourcing of parenting to screens, last week a coalition of schools, nurseries and colleges published a letter saying that children were now starting school with speech and emotional difficulties 'that are likely to have been exaggerated by or are even directly attributable to excessive screen time'. And yet the DfE has decided that those same screen-addicted kids should be tested on screens. And just to prove that too much screen time rots adults' brains too, I'm going to respond to this mess with an internet meme: DfE! Make! It! Make! Sense! • Schools issue parents with screen time limits from birth to age 16 So I emailed the department to ask — politely — what it was thinking. Why was it telling parents to give their kids less screen time while telling schools to give the kids more? Alas, to judge from the computer-says-no response I got, the DfE is now run by AI, which might explain its compulsion to test kids online: 'Digital assessments reduce the administrative burden on teachers, freeing up their time to focus more on teaching and supporting pupils' learning.' So young children will get to interact with teachers more by interacting with them less. Or something. Schools switched to digital learning during lockdown, and many found they enjoyed this easing of the 'administrative burden' so much, they never switched back. No surprise, given how much investment has been lavished on it: the UK-based primary school educational platform Atom Learning raised £19 million in 2021 and is now near ubiquitous. In April I wrote about the rise in primary schools of 'ed tech', aka education technology, aka teaching children via the medium of computer games, whizzy apps, tech portals and emojis. You don't need to be Mr Gradgrind to query the benefits of this gamification of education, teaching children from the age of five to expect lessons to be taught in ten-second bite-sized graphics. And we wonder why today's kids have such decimated attention spans. • Book holidays with bad wi-fi to get teens reading, says Winchester head Since then, I've heard some truly fascinating defences of education technology in primary schools. I was told that screens 'enrich students' learning experience', although when I asked if there was any proof of said enrichment, answer came there none. In fact, studies show that primary school kids experience what neuroscientists in one study describe as 'deeper reading' when learning from a paper text, whereas when they learn from a screen 'shallow reading was observed'. I was told that it's important to teach children how to use these devices for their future employment prospects, as though the devices weren't designed to be entirely intuitive, and addictive. And in any case, they will be utterly obsolete by the time these kids are in the workplace. Some argue that ed tech isn't social media, and that's true. But telling young children to do their school projects online is as ridiculous as telling them to do their homework in front of the TV: distraction is always a click away. And my personal favourite: 'The students really enjoy it.' They'd also enjoy eating sugar all day, so let's provide glucose on tap and see how that pans out. The one decent defence schools have for putting young kids on screens is that this is how they will increasingly be tested. Most GCSEs and A-levels will be online within a decade — so why not start them in primary school, seems to be the thinking. But five-year-olds are not 16-year-olds. One educator said to me breezily that this is simple 'market forces'. But schools — and certainly the DfE — should not be uncritical, passive consumers of tech. Mike Baxter, principal of City of London Academy, said last week, 'Over the past 20 years, schools and families have too often blindly trusted technology to aid and even enhance the education and wellbeing of our young people. However, the reality couldn't be further from this.' I have yet to meet anyone who can explain why it's better for children to write an essay online and upload it to Google Classroom than write one by hand in a notebook. If schools can't say how any of this benefits the pupils, they shouldn't do it. Computers aren't the only thing that can say no.
The Independent
13-06-2025
- Business
- The Independent
Private schools lose High Court battle against Starmer's VAT raid
A group of private schools, pupils and their parents have lost a High Court challenge over Labour's imposition of VAT on fees. It comes after six families last year launched a legal challenge against the government's controversial tax raid, claiming the tax raid is discriminatory against certain pupils. The legal challenge claimed the policy - which imposes 20 per cent VAT on private schools - causes unnecessary harm to certain categories of children, such as those with special needs. The families were therefore seeking a declaration of incompatibility under section 4 of the Human Rights Act, saying the new tax is incompatible with ECHR rights. While the legal challenge would not have been able to halt the VAT policy in its tracks or reverse it even if successful, it would have been a major blow to ministers and piled pressure on them to consider further exemptions. The government has estimated the tax raid will raise £1.7bn per year by 2029-30, money which ministers said would be used to fund 6,500 new teachers for state schools. So far, private school pupil numbers have fallen by more than 11,000 in England following the tax hike, Department for Education data showed. In January 2025, there were around 582,500 pupils at English private schools, down from 593,500 at the same point last year. When the policy was introduced, Treasury impact assessments estimated that private school fees would increase by around 10 per cent as a result of the introduction of VAT, But in May, ISC figures showed that fees have increased by 22.6 per cent in the last year, with parents now paying out more than £22,000 a year on average. On average, the Treasury predicts that 35,000 pupils would move into UK state schools 'in the long-term steady state'. A further 2,000 children would leave private schools, the department estimated, consisting of international pupils who do not move into the UK state system or domestic pupils who move into homeschooling.
