The Child Minder

Gareth Myatt, 15, died after being restrained by three staff at Rainsbrook Secure Training Centre, near Rugby, in 2004. The inquest verdict returned this week said his death was accidental, but had harsh words for the Youth Justice Board, the Home Office and Rebound ECD, the private company that runs Rainsbrook.

Today is a good day for asylum-seeking children. While they may have been barely mentioned in the Care Matters white paper on looked-after children last week, there was better news today from an unlikely source as the Home Office finally admitted defeat over its much-maligned policy on removing support from failed asylum-seeking families in order to persuade them to go home.

Care Matters, this week's white paper on children in care, the biggest piece of policy for the group over the past decade, promises social workers more freedom to spend time with children so they can get much-needed consistency of care.

The coroner in the recent inquest of 14-year-old Adam Rickwood, the youngest person to die in custody, called for an urgent review into the use of restraint on children held in secure training centres.

When you utter the phrase Section 9 there are few in the social care sector who don't know what you are talking about. The government's twisted policy, under which failed asylum seekers who refuse to return home can have their children taken into care, has become infamous for taking asylum laws to an even lower depth.

A BBC investigation has revealed that more than 150 children placed in care in the south east of England have disappeared over the last three years. Of those, 65 disappeared from Gatwick Airport, 69 from Kent and 27 from Surrey. Depressingly and predictably, it is believed they were trafficked.

Just three days after the Hollywood heiress Paris Hilton started her supposedly 23-day prison sentence for driving on a suspended licence, she was back at home, tucked up in the safety and comfort of her own bed.

Last week's Institute for Public Policy Research report on school admissions articulated what many had long suspected: that many schools which control their own admissions are using this power to select in more affluent, high-performing pupils and keep out those from less advantaged backgrounds.
The result: socially segregated schools and increasing educational inequality, due in part to things called "peer group effects" - the phenomenon by which pupils do better when they have a concentration of high-performing peers in their class.