By Clare Jerrom, Nicola Barry and Alex Dobson.
Estelle Morris under attack on three fronts
Estelle Morris came under attack on her handling of three areas in the education system last night.
The education secretary’s intervention in the case of two teenage boys expelled for making death threats to a teacher then reinstated by an appeal panel, was criticised by Surrey council.
Morris stepped into the row on Thursday when two 15-year-olds were ordered back to Glyn School in Epsom, Surrey. She demanded that Surrey council make alternative provision for the boys, who admitted making death threats against teacher Steve Taverner.
Kay Hammond, Surrey’s member with responsibility for education, said Morris had upset "delicate" negotiations with the boys' parents and the school to resolve the issue quietly.
Shadow education secretary Damian Green said Morris had made "yet another blunder".
The education secretary also faced being undermined by universities about her promise to help teenagers robbed of places by the A-level fixing scandal. They said students would have just 10 days to decide if they wanted to switch courses.
Suggestions that primary school teachers would get a day out of the classroom every fortnight to ease their workload, also received criticism that she was caving in to union threats of strike action.
Source:- The Times Saturday 12 October page 1
Gang of six told to behave or face prison
Six youths who have terrorised a London borough for two years were given lengthy anti social behaviour orders yesterday.
The gang was responsible for a series of assaults, violence, vehicle crime and burglary, which had the residents of Bexley, south London, living in fear since December 2000.
The gang face up to five years in jail if the break the orders.
The Metropolitan police said the move should be a strong message to young people who persist in seriously anti-social behaviour.
Source:- The Times Saturday 12 October page 7
Child porn raids
Raids in the south of England as part of an operation against a paedophile ring resulted in six arrests of people aged 23 to 62.
There were also raids in Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Romania, Italy, the US and Canada.
Source:- The Times Saturday 12 October page 15
Widow at care home tied up with dog lead
A care home in Grimsby will face investigation after an 84-year-old widow was found tied in a chair with a dog lead.
Staff said Phyllis Scott was tied with the lead to prevent her from falling off the chair.
A visitor to Clover Lodge Rest Home in Humberston saw Scott and reported the incident to the National Care Standards Commission. An inspector visited the following day and Scott was being restrained again by the leash.
Staff said they could not cope with Scott, and she was transferred from the privately-run home to a local authority run home.
The home, which has 16 residents, is now under investigation to ensure none of the residents are at risk.
Source:- Daily Telegraph Saturday 12 October page 15
Jamaicans win gay asylum right
Applications for asylum by homosexuals from Jamaica are being considered after two gay men from the Caribbean island were granted asylum in Britain because their lives are in danger.
The applications, which are among the first successful claims under a House of Lords ruling that included homosexuals within "particular social groups", were backed by evidence of homosexuals being murdered, attacked by machete or threatened.
Homosexual intercourse is still a criminal offence in Jamaica punishable by up to 10 years hard labour.
A home office spokesperson said that asylum would not be granted purely on the basis of sexual orientation, but if there was evidence that individuals were being persecuted because they were gay, and adequate protection was not available, then it might be a contributing factor in a successful asylum application.
Source:- The Sunday Times Sunday 13 October page 6
Parents will get right to trace adopted child
Hundreds of thousands of parents who gave up their children for adoption are to be given the legal right to contact them in a move to be announced today.
The government measure will give hope to many of the parents of 750,000 babies put up for adoption in the post-war years.
The children, many of them now adults, have the right to refuse contact from their natural parents.
Health minister Jacqui Smith will also announce a multi-million pound funding boost for the adoption support services that will help implement the scheme.
Source:- The Sunday Times 13 October page 12
Teacher vetting backlog rises as checks bungled
The backlog of cases waiting to be vetted at the Criminal Records Bureau has reached a record high.
The number of potential employees that the government agency has failed to process within a three-week target time-scale, now stands at 96,000.
The figure is worse than in the summer when many schools were forced to remain closed at the beginning of the new academic term as new staff had not been vetted.
The home office admission came as an undercover investigation by The Sunday Times revealed that errors have led to 100 people being wrongly accused of having a criminal record, thousands of cases being stuck in the system for up to seven months, nearly 4,000 completed checks have been disputed by applicants, and the CRB is now facing 170 compensation claims.
Source:- The Sunday Times 13 October page 30
Blunkett axes jail terms below six months
Courts will be pushed to abandon prison sentences under six months by the home secretary, in a bid to ease the growing crisis of overcrowding in jails.
Later this year, David Blunkett will announce a major new bill on criminal justice that will say courts should avoid giving short sentences wherever possible because it does not give enough time for rehabilitation programmes to make any difference.
The male prison population would be cut by more than 40,000 from the current 73,000 if no prisoner was serving a sentence of six months or less.
The home office says sentences for serious offences such as rape and assault would be increased at the same time.
Source:- The Observer Sunday 13 October page 2
Child protection policy is a mess
The government is failing to adequately protect children from the dangers of abuse and violent attacks, according to a report by its own child safety watchdogs.
The report, which will be published by the chief inspectors of eight government services responsible for young people, accuses ministers of giving "insufficient priority" to the safeguarding of children.
The monitoring of dangerous individuals such as suspected paedophiles is inadequate, and the government agencies were often "confused" and had "no consistency" particularly in their failure to share information about potential threats.
The report, Safeguarding Children, also says the "severe difficulties" in the recruitment and retention of child protection workers are having a direct impact on children’ s safety.
Source:- The Sunday Telegraph 13 October page 2
Lotto good causes reform "will finish off charities"
Many charities and voluntary projects could face collapse if government proposals to allow lottery players to vote for the type of good cause they choose, goes ahead.
Under the new scheme, expected to be announced next month, players will tick a box on the back of the ticket to indicate which causes they would like their money to support.
The voluntary sector has criticised the plans and said it was a bully-boy tactic to counter recent public anger at the way lottery money is distributed.
Stephen Bubb, head of the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations, said that the move would result in smaller charities suffering as funds are directed towards more popular organisations and social issues.
He added that one likely scenario is that lottery money would beef up the government’s budget for causes such as health and education, which should be funded by taxation.
Source:- The Times Monday 14 October page 6
National offenders register will protect children
The government is to set up a national register of all violent and sex offenders in a bid to help police and probation officers track criminals who pose a risk to children.
More than 45,000 offenders will be listed on the Violent and Sex Offenders Register (Visor) including names, addresses, crimes and the risk they pose to children. The probation service has demanded the move for two years.
The recommendation is disclosed in a report today which claims insufficient priority s given to child protection.
Source:- The Times Monday 14 October page 13
Scheme to boost aspirations of pupils in deprived areas to be expanded
A multi-million pound scheme will be announced by the government today, to tackle underachievement in inner city schools, which ministers believe has helped break "the poverty of aspiration" that has held back generations of youngsters.
School standards minister David Miliband will announce that as well as maintaining its spending of more than £300 million-a-year on the Excellence in Cities scheme, over the next three years, by the end of that period, the government expects to have doubled resources for inner city schools to more than £700 million a year.
The programme, launched in 1999 is to be extended to 13 new areas, identified as pockets of social deprivation.
Source:- The Guardian Monday 14 October page 13
Pupils urged to inform on problem parents
Pupils are being encouraged to disclose sensitive information about their parents to the government to help discover why they might be failing at schools.
Details of problems such as alcohol and drug abuse, depression, eating disorders and frequent domestic rows would be sought by advisers.
The data, gathered without the consent of parents by the Connexions service, could be shared with a number of government departments, the police and health authorities.
Connexions has been ordered by the department for education and skills to compile profiles on the 13 to19-year-old age group to identify problems over academic performance.
Source:- Daily Telegraph Monday 14 October page 1
Career women use adoption to become single mothers
British career women are adopting children to become single mothers, according to research published today.
Married people are no longer the group most likely to consider adopting, the survey for National Adoption Week also found. People who co-habit with a partner of the same or opposite sex, are more likely to consider adopting, as are single people.
Felicity Collier, chief executive of British Association of Adoption and Fostering, said attitudes to adoption are changing. "But one thing does not change – children have a much better chance of a successful life if they are adopted than if they grow up in a local authority home."
Source:- Daily Telegraph Monday 14 October page 13
Teachers suffer from abuse claims
Teachers should be given anonymity to protect them from false accusations of child abuse, a union said yesterday after figures revealed only a small minority of allegations resulted in convictions.
Staff accused of abusing children were often driven to "professional ruin, nervous breakdowns, family break-ups and even suicide", because of the publicity, according to the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers.
The union’s figures show that only 62 of its 1,557 members who had been interviewed by police since 1991 after claims by pupils were convicted.
Source:- The Independent Monday 14 October page 5
Scottish newspapers
Take suicidal inmates out of jail
Suicidal prisoners should be removed from jail and treated for mental health problems in hospital, according to leading psychiatrists who claim the prison service is taking a bureaucratic approach to preventing self-harm.
Source:- Sunday Herald 13 October page 10
Mourners pay last respects to girl, 6, killed with hammer
More than 100 mourners paid their last respects at the funeral of a six-year-old South Lanarkshire girl who was killed with a hammer.
Police arrived at the Union Street home in Stonehouse to find Erin Gilmour dead and her sister, 10-year-old Louise, seriously injured. A woman was detained at the scene.
Source:- Scotland On Sunday 13 October page 5
Scotland is failing disabled travellers
The Scottish tourist industry is losing potential business worth £20billion because it fails disabled travellers, according to a new report.
Researchers for Capability Scotland who posed as disabled holiday seekers, said they were so frustrated with the lack of information on facilities for them they would have given up trying to book a holiday in Scotland.
Source:- The Scotsman October 14 page 5
Welsh newspapers
Children ‘more important than Iraq’
People in Wales believe that ending child abuse killings is a more important issue for the government than committing forces to Iraq, a new NSPCC survey shows.
The poll coincides with a new stage in the charities, Full Stop Campaign, to end cruelty to children. The NSPCC wants to see urgent child protection reforms that would see child killings cut by half over the next 10 years.
The survey also found that over half of the people questioned believed that children in the UK are most likely to be killed by someone outside their family, with only one in nine aware that it is parents who most often kill their children.
NSPCC Cymru/Wales director Greta Thomas said the levels of child abuse killing in this country were a national disgrace.
Source:- Western Mail Monday 14 October page 1
Baby in canal ‘for weeks’
The body of a baby boy found in the Brecon-Monmouthshire canal last week could have been in the water for five weeks, say police.
The body was found by a golfer searching for balls in the canal, near Newbridge and was hidden inside a green holdall. A post-mortem examination at the University Hospital of Wales showed that the baby weighed around 5.5lb, but further tests are to be carried out to determine the cause of death.
A police spokesperson said: "We need to provide help for the mother, who is probably experiencing pain both mentally and physically, and may need medical attention. We are deeply concerned for her safety."
The police have set up an incident room at Llanhilleth police station.
Source:- Western Mail Monday 14 October pages 1and 9
