Government
- There has been a sharp rise in the number of pupils excluded from secondary schools, taking the annual total to more than a third of a million. But teachers' leaders are angry that more than 100 pupils successfully appealed against their exclusion and were allowed back into their classrooms. Headteachers said this was undermining their attempts to instil discipline in schools. There were 343,840 exclusions last year, a 4 per cent rise on the previous year and the equivalent of one in every 10 pupils, national statistics pubished yesterday showed. The number of permanent exclusions for serious disruptive behaviour or assault fell by 3 per cent to 9,440. Jim Knight, the Schools minister, said the increase showed headteachers were cracking down on persistent low-level disruption in the classroom - identified by Ofsted, the education standards watchdog, as one of the biggest threats to order in the classroom. http://education.independent.co.uk/news/article2714187.ece
- People may no longer receive post on a Saturday, the head of Royal Mail's regulator has admitted. Householders could also have to pay a premium to receive post six days a week, said Sarah Chambers, the chief executive of regulator Postcomm. Her suggestion came as Postcomm conducts a review into the future of the postal system amid concern that the service is in decline. Moving from six-days-a-week delivery to five-days would mark a further reduction of the service by Royal Mail, which has already been allowed to end twice-daily deliveries in an effort to restore profitability. However, this year it was told that it had to scrap its policy of picking up its final collections from post boxes at 9am or earlier after many villagers in rural areas complained that they were being left out in the cold. Miss Chambers said that insisting on the continuation of a Saturday postal delivery could lead to higher prices for other Royal Mail services. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/06/27/npost127.xml
- The government will outline today how the national lottery will be repaid the £675m that is to be siphoned off to pay for the rising costs of the 2012 Olympics. A memorandum of understanding between Tessa Jowell, the Olympics minister, and Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, will explain how the money is to be clawed back from land sales from the Olympic Park at Stratford, east London. The deal, which has taken three months, is an attempt by the government to show that lottery good causes will not lose out as a result of the larger than anticipated £9.3bn bill for the games. http://www.guardian.co.uk/lottery/story/0,,2112275,00.html
- An inquiry has found that more than 400 people are dying needlessly every year because of inadequate epilepsy treatment. Nearly 70,000 patients are condemned to repeated seizures because they do not get the drugs they need, the All Party Parliamentary Group on Epilepsy said. In a searing indictment of the medical care of Britain's 382,000 epileptics, published yesterday, the group demanded clear targets for care and called for more staff and resources. It said the situation was a "national scandal". At least 74,000 patients were taking drugs they did not need and the cost of misdiagnosis was £189m a year. Epilepsy is the most common neurological disorder, affecting one in 131 people in Britain. Sufferers experience seizures when nerve cells in the brain become overactive, creating an electrical storm. http://news.independent.co.uk/health/article2714177.ece
- She is the minister called Supernanny for her ceaseless struggles to promote sensible drinking, ban smoking and cut teenage pregnancies. For her efforts, however, Caroline Flint has endured some of the most vicious personal abuse thrown at any politician since Margaret Thatcher. "Self-righteous," Claire Fox wrote in The Times. "Goody two-shoes," (Virginia Blackburn, Daily Express). "(Barely) human football rattle" (Rowan Pelling, Independent on Sunday). Why does the Public Health Minister care so zealously about saving the British from their own excesses, fearless of the hostility she breeds? A glimpse into her past may explain. On alcohol, Ms Flint has roused fierce reactions. She has gone farther than any previous minister to champion the cause of sensible drinking. She insists on better labelling so that drinkers can judge the strength of wines and beers by counting their units. But her support for labels that tell pregnant women and those trying to conceive to avoid alcohol altogether provoked a backlash. Even the Royal College of Midwives was moved to say there was nothing wrong with the odd drink in pregnancy. And her proposal that middle-class wine drinkers should moderate their intake was, for many, the final straw. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article1991398.ece