News round up: Excluded pupils to be offered adventure holidays

Excluded students to be offered adventure holidays, says Government

Children excluded from school for misbehaving are to be offered the chance to go abseiling, quad biking and water skiing at camps in the countryside, the Government announced yesterday.

The week-long “community cohesion” camps aim to teach disadvantaged and troubled pupils about the dangers of gang culture and are being introduced to curb the rise in teenage knife and gun crime.

Beverley Hughes, the Children’s Minister, said that the Government would pay £4.5 million towards the holidays for children from deprived areas, those involved in antisocial behaviour or who have been excluded from school and for those in foster care.

Poorest children being let down by underfunded schools, says study

Children from the poorest homes are being systematically failed in their education because their schools are not receiving the funding needed to properly support them, new research suggests.

Figures obtained by the End Child Poverty campaign reveal that in vast areas of the country fewer than one in eight of children who receive free school meals leaves school with five good GCSEs, including English and maths.

Read more on this story in Society Guardian

Charities set to feel the pinch

The economic downturn will harden people’s hearts as well as hit their pockets, with Britons set to donate 7 per cent less money to charity this year.

People will give £655m less in 2008 as charity donations total £8.8bn, suggests a poll of more than 2,000 individuals.

Gary Glitter’s return prompts tighter sex offender laws

Child sex offenders are to face tighter travel restrictions after it emerged that existing laws would not curb Gary Glitter’s movements after he returns to Britain.

Read more on this story in The Times

Gap between rich and poor ‘has doubled in past 30 years’

The gap between rich and poor in Britain has doubled over the past 30 years and is now the widest of any country in Europe, a report warns.

Immigration soars eight-fold through Labour’s ‘open-door’ policy

Immigration under Labour has soared eight-fold compared with the last decade of Tory rule, it emerged last night.

The astonishing impact of the Government’s controversial ‘open door’ policy is revealed for the first time in a study by the independent House of Commons Library.

Read more on this story in The Daily Mail

Brown has failed to do enough to tackle poverty, Tories claim

The battle lines of an autumn contest between the main political parties are drawn today when the Tories deliver a blunt assessment that Gordon Brown’s main instrument for tackling poverty – the redistribution of wealth – has failed.

Read more on this story in The Guardian

Out with the old: road sign ‘insults pensioners’

Pensioners’ groups called for the road sign depicting old people to be scrapped because it is insulting.

Age Concern and Help the Aged said that the hunched figure with a walking stick should be replaced with a new image.