Education

As education secretary unveils £49m for school-based support and calls for ‘grit’, charity says many children have significant treatment needsMinisters’ efforts to promote “grit” among children are no substitute for better funded mental health support in England’s schools, according to school leaders and experts.Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, and Wes Streeting, the health secretary, claimed in an article for the Daily Telegraph that more mental health support teams (MHSTs) for schools would “not only halt the spiral towards crisis but cultivate much-needed grit among the next generation – essential for academic success and life beyond school, with all its ups a..

Increased mental health support for young people will give them resilience, say education and health secretariesSchoolchildren will be helped to develop “much-needed grit” for life beyond school with increased mental health support, the education and health secretaries have said.Writing in the Telegraph, Bridget Phillipson and Wes Streeting said they would expand mental health support in schools to nearly 1 million extra children in England. Continue reading...

PM on trip to announce increased cooperation against people smugglers alongside Albania’s prime minister, Edi Rama. This live blog is closedAll Commons Speakers, at least for the past 30 years, have complained about the government making major announcements to the media first, and not to parliament first. But rarely have any of them sounded quite as furious about this as Lindsay Hoyle, who this morning delivered an extended reprimand to the government about this at the start of an urgent question.The UQ was about plans to limit the use of prison recall – something announced by the justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, at a press conference yesterday, while the Commons was still sitting. Af..

Study paints picture of universities increasingly willing to penalize students over expression of their viewsParker Hovis was four courses away from getting his computer science degree from the University of Florida when he was arrested along with several other students at a pro-Palestinian protest on campus last spring. While the charges against him were dismissed and a school conduct committee recommended only minor punishment – a form of probation – the university administration suspended him for three years. He’ll be required to reapply if he wants to come back after that.Hovis, who has since left Florida and is working to pay off his student loans despite never graduating, is one ..

Kseniia Petrova, Harvard researcher arrested in February, faces deportation as lawyer calls case ‘meritless’A Harvard scientist who has been held in US immigration detention for months was charged on Wednesday with smuggling frog embryos into the United States, and likely faces deportation.Kseniia Petrova, a Russian scientist and research associate working at Harvard University, was originally detained by immigration officials in February after attempting to enter the United States at Boston Logan international airport. Continue reading...

Sutton Trust ‘opportunity index’ measured factors such as children on free school meals passing key GCSEsThe top 20 constituencies with the best social mobility in England are all in London, according to research from a leading education charity that underscores the stark regional divide in children’s life chances.In a report published on Thursday, the Sutton Trust has put together an “opportunity index” by analysing six measures of mobility. These include the share of children on free school meals who achieve passes in GCSE maths and English; who complete a degree by age 22; and who make it into the top 20% of earners by age 28. Continue reading...

George Holmes and two other staff members suspended over allegations of financial irregularitiesThe vice-chancellor of the University of Greater Manchester and two other members of staff have been suspended as police confirmed an investigation was under way into “allegations of financial irregularities”.The university, which was known until recently as the University of Bolton, confirmed that Prof George Holmes, who has been its vice-chancellor for 20 years, the provost and a third senior member of academic staff had been suspended. Continue reading...

The latest cuts follow a $2.2bn freeze, bringing total federal penalties against Harvard to $2.65bnUS politics live – latest updatesEight federal agencies will terminate a further $450m in grants to Harvard University, the Trump administration announced on Tuesday, escalating its antagonization of the elite institution over what officials frame as inadequate responses to antisemitism on campus.The latest funding cuts come after the administration cancelled $2.2bn in federal funding to the university, bringing the total financial penalty to approximately $2.65bn. Continue reading...

With the labour market declining and AI a threat to entry-level jobs, graduates have been sold a lie. It’s no wonder they’re angryIt’s boomerang season again. Or to put it another way, the time of year when adult children you imagined might be flying the nest come home instead to roost, a ritual that seems to happen earlier every year.Though the university year isn’t formally finished yet, so many institutions are dumping written exams in favour of dissertations or online assessments (cheaper to run, apparently) that third years have started cutting their losses and their food bills by heading home not long after Easter. In a worrying number of cases, they’re leaving with no job to..

The answers to today’s puzzlesEarlier today I set these two puzzles. Here they are again with solutions.1. Go compare! Continue reading...

Social care, hospitality, health, universities and construction sectors raise questions over impact of planKeir Starmer’s blueprint for curbing immigration could exacerbate skills shortages in sectors that would “fall over” without immigrant labour, the prime minister has been told.Starmer said that businesses in particular had become “almost addicted to importing cheap labour” rather than investing in UK talent. Continue reading...

Pressure to create more childcare places to meet funded expansion plans threatens to undermine qualityUK politics live – latest updatesPlans to change space requirements for nurseries in England to enable them to offer more childcare places are being considered by the government, prompting warnings about overcrowding.The Department for Education has launched a consultation on whether early years settings should be allowed to include “free-flow” outdoor areas within the required floor space for children aged two years and above. Continue reading...

Don’t run out of rope!UPDATE: Read the solutions hereTwo very different puzzles today. In the first, you have to identify two numbers. In the second, you have to escape off a roof.1. Go compare! Continue reading...

As universities begin to push back on Trump’s policies, those in Republican-led states face multiple threatsDays after the University of Michigan president, Santa Ono, announced that he was leaving his post to lead the University of Florida, his name was quietly removed on Wednesday from a letter signed by more than 600 university presidents denouncing the Trump administration’s “unprecedented government overreach and political interference” with academic institutions.As Ono is set to become the highest-paid public university president in the country, in a state that has often been at the forefront of the rightwing battle against higher education, the reversal, first reported on by T..

Copenhagen’s Rhythmic Music Conservatory finds common ground between Ella Fitzgerald and Charli xcx – and its free-thinking alumni are thriving. We go on a tour to see what’s in the water there (aside from shipwrecks)Before she was getting DMs from Dua Lipa and minting K-pop hits, and long before yesterday’s surprise release of her sumptuous fourth album, Erika de Casier was a nervous student in her 20s debating what to wear on her first day.It was 2019, her debut album Essentials had come out that year and received critical acclaim. But at Copenhagen’s Rhythmic Music Conservatory (RMC), that was by the by. “In Denmark, it’s incorporated in our way of being: everybody is so hum..

Office for Students says declining international student numbers will lead to more cuts on campusUniversities in England have experienced a fall in income for the third year in a row, according to the higher education regulator, as it warned that declining international student numbers would translate into more cuts on campuses.The Office for Students’ (OfS) annual financial health check found that many universities were trying to repair budget deficits by slashing building and maintenance spending as well as cutting courses and staff, with the sector expected to sell off more than £400m worth of land and property this year. Continue reading...

Companies like Gaggle, GoGuardian, Securly, and Navigate360 spy on US children’s private texts, emails and social media posts When it premiered last month, the Amazon docuseries Spy High reminded Americans how, in 2009, Pennsylvania’s Lower Merion school district remotely activated its school-issued laptop webcams to capture 56,000 pictures of students outside of school, including in their bedrooms. There are few places where the use of student surveillance technology feels more threatening than in the room where children undress, sleep and engage in other private conduct, and that is why the intrusions featured in Spy High are so disturbing.Fortunately, in the 16 years since Lower Merio..

An app could never replace the emotion of opening that envelope at your school and the support that staff can offer if things don’t go to planEvery GCSE results day, school halls buzz with the entire spectrum of human emotion. There’s pride and regret, utter elation and total despair. Relief that all that hard work has finally paid off, and usually a bit of bemusement when five years of doodling at the back of class has, somehow, culminated in a decent grade. For us teachers, it’s a chance to congratulate, to say goodbye, to commiserate or celebrate.But in Manchester and the West Midlands this year, things will look very different. The government is trialling a new app, giving students..

At its most basic level, Head Start provides free childcare – but it also creates jobs and can even have generational benefitsTanya Stanton felt a sense of relief when she heard last week that the Trump administration seems to have reversed course on eliminating the Head Start early education program. She directs early learning programs at You Thrive, a Florida non-profit that provides Head Start services to approximately 1,100 children in the central part of the state.On Friday, the Trump administration released an updated “skinny budget”, which lays out the executive office’s discretionary spending priorities. It doesn’t contain a proposal to shut down Head Start, as mentioned in..

The former Baltimore Ravens guard had a lucrative career in professional football. But he chose to concentrate on his first love in academiaJohn Urschel lifts the blinds in his second-floor office in the mathematics department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Outside is Cambridge in all of its springtime splendor on a mid-April afternoon. Everything about his office says “college professor” – the computer on one side of the desk, the stack of papers on the other, the books on the shelves behind him.He grins through his beard and his eyes sparkle behind his glasses when he describes his research in linear algebra. When he gestures enthusiastically, you can imagine those hug..

Exam pressures on both kids and parents are at an all-time high, but I’m glad that at least parents are more engaged these daysWhen I was doing GCSEs and my sister was doing A-levels, we were on our way to school for my physics and her maths exams when we had a huge fight at the bus stop. I can’t remember what it was about, but she definitely started it. I took a different route and was 20 minutes late for my exam while she took the original bus and spent the first quarter of her paper getting asked by teachers if she knew where I was. The beauty of this story is that I got an A and she got a B, but the relevant bit is that our mum didn’t know any of this – didn’t know we’d fough..

It’s a year since teachers in St Albans asked parents not to give younger children smartphones. How successful have they been? What do the kids think about it? And has it made the adults think about their own ‘addiction’?At 3.12pm on a sunny spring afternoon in St Albans, Yasser Afghen reaches for the iPhone in his jeans pocket, hoping to use the three minutes before his son emerges from his year 1 primary class to scroll through his emails. As he lifts the phone to his face, Matthew Tavender, the head teacher of Cunningham Hill school, strides across the playground towards him. Afghen smiles apologetically, puts his phone away, and spends the remaining waiting time listening to the bi..

This blog has now closed. Read our latest story hereA group of US senators wants Congress’ watchdog agency to investigate whether controls on humanitarian aid deliveries by Israel and other foreign governments violate US law, according to a letter seen by Reuters.The six senators – Chris Van Hollen, Dick Durbin, Jeff Merkley, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Peter Welch – wrote to Gene Dodaro, the comptroller general, asking him to launch an investigation by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office into the US government’s implementation of laws regarding the delivery of humanitarian assistance. Continue reading...

Vivienne Stern says universities face ‘critical moment’ amid reports students from abroad could be targeted for restrictionsNew proposals to crack down on student visa applications in order to reduce asylum claims will make the financial crisis facing beleaguered UK universities “considerably worse”, the government has been told.Ahead of the publication of an immigration white paper, there have been reports that student visa applications from nationalities considered likely to overstay and claim asylum in the UK could be targeted as part of a new government crackdown. Continue reading...

For centuries, the academy was exclusive to the Christian elite. When that began to change, an onslaught beganIn 2021, JD Vance, then a candidate for Ohio senate, gave a provocative keynote address at the National Conservatism Conference. Vance’s lecture was an indictment of American higher education: a “hostile institution” that “gives credibility to some of the most ridiculous ideas that exist in this country”. The aspiring politician did not mince words before his receptive rightwing audience: “If any of us wants to do the things we want to do … We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities.” The title of Vance’s keynote was inspired by a quote from Richar..

Applicants will be targeted by Home Office due to suspicions they are most likely to overstay and claim asylumUK politics live – latest updatesNigerians, Pakistanis and Sri Lankans applying to work or study in the UK face Home Office restrictions over suspicions that they are most likely to overstay and claim asylum, Whitehall officials have claimed.The government is working with the National Crime Agency to build models to profile applicants from these countries who are likely to go on to claim asylum. Continue reading...

This blog has now closed. Read our latestDonald Trump’s bombshell announcement that “Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands” will be subject to a 100% tariff has certainly caught the attention of Hollywood, as well as the international film industries it seems to be aimed at – principally Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand, as well as European countries such as Hungary and Italy that have often acted as bases for US film production.Vague and grandstanding at it is, the chaotic rollout of previous Trump tariffs has triggered feverish speculation, as well as defiance, in the film industry in exactly how this might play out. Continue reading...

Macron and von der Leyen expected to announce protections for researchers seeking to relocate amid Trump’s crackdownFrance and the EU are to step up their efforts to attract US-based scientists hit by Donald Trump’s crackdown on academia, as they prepare announcements on incentives for researchers to settle in Europe.The French president, Emmanuel Macron, alongside the European commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, will make speeches on Monday morning at Sorbonne University in Paris, flanked by European university leaders and researchers, in which they are expected to announce potential incentives and protections for researchers seeking to relocate to Europe. Continue reading...

Niamdh Braid, 16, demanded her right to full education – and now hopes her success will inspire more deaf children to aim highThe slogan on Niamdh Braid’s powder-blue sweatshirt puts it plainly enough: “I define my own deaf identity.”“We’re in a world that’s built for hearing people,” says the 16-year-old from Glenrothes in Fife, “and we have to navigate through it to find what works best for us.” Continue reading...

State becomes 16th to allow public funds to be used for private schools, which opponents say will benefit mostly wealthier childrenThe Texas governor Greg Abbott on Saturday signed a law making more than 5 million students eligible to use state funds for private schools, a watershed moment in the conservative campaign to remake public education in the US.Texas is allocating $1bn for the first two years of the program to offer parents vouchers to pay for school. It is the 16th state to make all students eligible to receive public funds for private education. Continue reading...