Professor John Cleland, cardiologist at Hull University, explains research that suggests calcium supplements may cause an increased risk of heart disease

A combination pill of two drugs used to treat addiction may help people lose weight, say US researchers.

The right of women to choose whether they have home births is being questioned by a leading medical journal.

Calcium supplements taken by many older people could be increasing their risk of a heart attack, research shows.

Only 153 schools apply to become academies – despite education secretary's claims that more than 1,000 had done so

Michael Gove, the education secretary, faced renewed attacks today when it emerged that only 153 schools had applied to become academies – despite his claims that more than 1,000 had done so.

Gove had said that the scale of demand from schools to escape town hall control required the government to rush legislation through parliament before this week's summer recess.

It now seems likely that no new academies will be formed in time for the autumn term as a result of the scheme.

The shadow education secretary, Ed Balls, accused Gove of "railroading" the legislation through parliament, and demanded that he explain why he "misleadingly claimed that more than 1,000 schools had applied". Balls, a contender for the Labour leadership, added: "It seems to me that the real reason for the rush was to avoid proper scrutiny for a deeply flawed piece of legislation."

Gove is already under attack from MPs, teachers and councils for a bungled announcement over whether hundreds of schools' plans for new buildings would go ahead.

He was forced to apologise in the Commons earlier this month after his office ignored advice to check an error-strewn list of cancelled building projects before it was published. The list suggested that many school building programmes would go ahead that had in fact been cancelled.

In relation to the academies, the department issued a press release on 2 June quoting Gove as saying: "The response has been overwhelming. In just one week, over 1,100 schools have applied." He added: "Of these, 626 are outstanding schools, including over 250 primary schools, nearly 300 secondary schools (over half of all the outstanding secondary schools in the country) and over 50 special schools."

Outstanding schools are to be fast-tracked to academy status.

A fortnight ago, the Department for Education revealed a second list of 1,907 primary, secondary and special schools that had registered an interest in turning into academies. Gove has written to every school inviting them to apply.

The new, far lower, number of schools that have applied may largely stem from the fact that Gove misdescribed expressions of general interest in the scheme as an actual application.

The lower-than-expected demand also questions why he needed to use emergency parliamentary procedures to rush through legislation this week. The academies bill, which became law on Tuesday, allows hundreds more schools to opt out of local authority control and turn into academies. The bill was pushed through the Commons in less than three days.

Balls said the emergency procedures were unnecessary given that only 153 schools had applied. He said Gove "railroaded" the bill through "because he said hundreds of schools wanted to become academies ... and many wanted to open [as such] in September. Now barely 10% of that number have even applied for academy status and none of them will convert in September."

It may be too early to say whether the level of demand to become academy schools is truly much lower than Gove had envisaged, but it would be a serious blow to the government's whole public service reform programme if it emerges that his revolution does not have the support in schools that he claimed.

Supporters of the scheme argue that school governing bodies are going to need time to weigh up the advantages of academy status, as well as see how some of the new schools perform. But the preliminary figures suggest that Gove's reforms have not sparked an instant nationwide revolution.

During the parliamentary passage of his legislation, Gove agreed to allow greater local consultation than planned before a school could take academy status.

The list of 153 schools includes about 45 primary schools, at least 12 faith schools and more than 20 grammar schools.

Gove has said he hopes – and expects – that academies will be the norm among secondary schools by the end of a first term in government. He told the Today programme earlier this month that "hundreds of schools are anxious to take advantage of these proposals".

Teachers' leaders condemned the government tonight for acting too hastily over academies.

"Our education system is too important to be subject to acting in haste, but repenting at leisure," said Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers.

"We remain concerned that many of the schools which have applied won't have carried out any form of consultation. Democracy will not be well served if children, parents and staff first learn of their school's plans to become an academy from the media."

She added that it would be "interesting to see if the list of schools applying to become an academy is as accurate, or not" as the error-ridden list that informed schools whether their building projects were to be scrapped.

Academies, unlike other state schools, have total freedom over their budgets, the curriculum and the length of the school day and term. They can also decide teachers' pay. Their expansion is thought to be the biggest change to school structures since grammar and secondary moderns were encouraged to become comprehensives in the 1960s.

Under Labour, only failing schools were turned into academies. But the new government has said that schools rated outstanding will be allowed to quickly switch to academy status and have their applications pre-approved.

• Academies
• Michael Gove
• Schools
• Education policy

Patrick WintourJessica Shepherd
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Department for Education research shows August-born children do consistently worse than older classmates

At least 10,000 teenagers fail to achieve five good GCSEs each year simply because they were born too late in the school year, research has revealed.

A study from the Department for Education shows August-born children, who are the youngest in their peer group, consistently perform worse than their older classmates.

At the age of five, pupils born in September are almost twice as likely to achieve a good level of development as those born in August, the researchers found. There is a substantial – but smaller – gap at the age of 11 in English and maths tests and at age 16 when, as teenagers, they take GCSEs.

About half of all pupils gain five good GCSE passes, including in English and maths, across the country. But summer-born children are six percentage points less likely to achieve this than their older peers, the academics found.

Summer-born pupils are also less likely to take academic A-levels or go to university and are more likely to be bullied, have special educational needs and be unhappy at school. But they were at a lower risk of playing truant and misbehaving than their older peers, the researchers found.

Some 10,000 summer-born children fail each year to achieve five GCSEs at grades A* to C, including in English and maths, "purely because they are the youngest pupils sitting the exams", the researchers said. In their study, 90,000 summer-born pupils got five good GCSE passes, compared with 100,000 of those born in the autumn. The research concludes that while high-performing schools can reduce the attainment gap, nothing can be done to entirely close it.

In May, the government-commissioned Rose review recommended that summer-born children should be allowed to start school four months earlier than their peers. This was accepted by the Labour government and from September 2011, all local authorities will be required to offer children a place in reception classes from the September following a child's fourth birthday. The government has said parents will continue to have a choice on whether to send their child to school at this point, or defer entry until later in the year.

However, academics have cautioned against children starting school at four and argue that starting at six or seven would allow them more time to develop intellectually.

Previous studies have also shown that summer-born babies fare worse than their older peers. The Higher Education Funding Council for England found summer-born teenagers are 20% less likely to go directly to university. The Institute for Fiscal Studies found 61% of September-born girls achieve five good GCSEs, while only 55% of summer-born girls do. The difference was smaller for A-level results.

The Department for Education said ministers were considering future policy in this area.

• GCSEs
• Schools

Jessica Shepherd
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A father persuades the NHS to give his sick daughter a "miracle" drug he found on the internet.

The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall have visited Birmingham to take a look around the city's new "super-hospital".

The education secretary had claimed the response was 'overwhelming' for legislation pushed through parliament

Only 153 schools have applied to become academies despite a government fanfare claiming the number was more than a thousand, official figures revealed today.

The education secretary, Michael Gove, said last month that teachers' response to a major drive to encourage them to opt out of local authority control and turn their schools into academies had been "overwhelming". He said that some 1,114 schools across England had applied to become academies after being invited to register an interest in late May.

A fortnight ago, the Department for Education revealed a list of 1,907 primary, secondary and special schools that had registered an interest in turning into academies. Gove has written to every school inviting them to apply.

But a list, published on the department's website today, reveals that just 153 schools have actually done so. It includes about 45 primary schools, at least 12 faith schools and more than 20 grammar schools.

MPs attacked Gove, including some from the Conservative party, for using parliamentary procedures usually reserved for an emergency to rush through his academies bill, which was passed this week. The bill allows hundreds more schools to become academies.

Ed Balls, the shadow education secretary, said emergency procedures were unnecessary given the small number of schools that had actually applied to become academies.

Balls said: "Michael Gove railroaded the academies bill through parliament in a way that's only normally done for emergencies like anti-terrorism legislation. He said this was because hundreds of schools wanted to become academies, over a thousand schools had applied and many of them wanted to open in September.

"Now barely 10% of that number ... have even applied for academy status and noneI saw of them will convert in September. Michael Gove must explain why he rushed this bill and misleadingly claimed that more than one thousand schools had applied. It seems to me that the real reason for the rush was to avoid proper scrutiny for a deeply flawed piece of legislation."

Gove told BBC Radio 4's Today programme earlier this month that "hundreds of schools are anxious to take advantage of these proposals". He has said he hopes and expects academies to be the norm among secondary schools by the end of a first-term government.

The Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) teaching union said schools' interest in becoming academies "seemed to be rather a damp squib".

"Our education system is too important to be subject to acting in haste, but repenting at leisure," ATL's general secretary, Mary Bousted, said. "It would have been far better to have given adequate time for the academies bill to be properly debated, to ensure the legislation was right so that schools knew what they were applying for."

Academies have total freedom over their budgets, the curriculum and the length of the school day and term. They can also decide teachers' pay. Gove has said that academies improve results faster than other schools.

The expansion of academies is thought to be the biggest change to school structures since grammar and secondary moderns were encouraged to become comprehensives in the 1960s.

• Academies
• Primary schools
• Schools
• School funding
• Michael Gove
• Liberal-Conservative coalition
• Conservatives

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A partial set of false teeth made for Sir Winston Churchill are sold at auction in Norfolk for £15,200.

We want to find exactly out what kind of beliefs students bring to science lessons, and how teachers can deal with them

Alom Shaha recently raised the issue of how science teachers should respond to being asked questions about God that arise in science lessons. Shaha draws attention to an increasingly sensitive issue for teachers already challenged by the ever-shifting demands of curriculum, assessment and other expectations. This became clear two years ago when the education director of the Royal Society, Professor Michael Reiss, a highly respected biologist and science educator, resigned after pointing out that science teachers need to take into account student worldviews in teaching about evolution. Yet one of the central principles of teaching science is that pupils' existing beliefs and understandings will influence their learning, and there is much research to show that teaching which ignores this is seldom effective.

Sadly, Shaha is right. Some young people will come into the school science laboratory assuming that science and religion are necessarily in conflict. This may derive from views at home: but in recent years there have been a number of high-profile television programmes claiming that science has ousted religious superstition with its rational approach. Students from religious communities who have accepted this view are indeed likely to find science an uncomfortable school subject, and so to later avoid further study and employment in science.

As there are many religious scientists, and diverse views about whether science should be seen as in conflict, harmony or dialogue with, or even as totally irrelevant to, religion, it is clearly unfortunate if some children are disengaging with school science because of a popular conception that science and religion are opposed. The arguments for how a supernatural God might relate to a natural world ordered through regular laws are often nuanced, and are seldom encountered by school-age students. This links to understanding about the nature of science itself (its limits, the status of its laws etc), which has recently become a more central theme of the school science curriculum – although this has traditionally been an area of relative weakness in science teaching and learning.

It was concerns such as these which led to the setting up of the Learning about Science and Religion (Lasar) research project, which is a collaboration between researchers at the universities of Cambridge and Reading. The project sets out to explore how secondary age pupils actually do perceive the relationship between science and religion, and how this impacts on their thinking about the science they are taught. The researchers are based in university education departments that are heavily involved in teacher education, and it is hoped that investigating student thinking in this area will enable us to find ways to better support teachers in Shaha's position, whatever their own personal views about the matter.

The researcher leading the project from Reading, Dr Berry Billingsley of the Institute of Education, has previously undertaken research in Australia, where she found that university students generally reported showing limited sophistication in dealing with the issue during their own earlier schooling. Indeed a common response had been to avoid considering a potential conflict by switching into science mode in science lessons, but then to switch away from that way of thinking in other classes. This may be a good coping strategy, but it is not good education. Science teachers desperately want their teaching to influence students beyond the laboratory or examination room. As Shaha points out: scientific ways of thinking are important life skills.

The Lasar research, funded through the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion at St Edmund's College Cambridge, is now underway, using both survey methods and detailed interviewing of a sample of secondary age pupils in various parts of England. Our early impressions are that considerable numbers of students do consider science and religion to be in conflict, and that few have developed sophisticated ways of thinking about possible alternatives. A surprising number of Christian students – not just those from more fundamentalist churches – consider that their religion is committed to a six-day creation of the world, including special acts of creation to produce Adam and Eve as progenitors of the human race. That is something I would not have realised when I was a school science teacher, knowing that mainstream churches have no problems with scientific theories of origins. Science teachers currently have little preparation to deal with student questions on the issue. That is something our project intends to address by better informing science teachers about where students' thinking is at, and by making them aware of the full range of positions that different scientists adopt on the issue. Science teachers should neither tell students what to think about God, nor what to think about how science relates to religion. However, they should introduce students to the range of views available. Shaha wants science teachers to equip young people to arrive at their own decisions, and our research is aimed at supporting teachers in this important task.

• Religion

Keith S Taber
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Living with the effects of the Oxford heart surgery deaths.

Children's heart surgery should remain suspended at Oxford's John Radcliffe Hospital where four babies died, a report says.

Compulsory retirement at 65 to be phased out, more on the Khyra Ishaq case; and an argument for timely intervention

Today's top Society Guardian news and comment

Inquiry calls for closure of children's heart surgery unit

Compulsory retirement at 65 to be phased out

Tell people they are fat, not obese, says minister

Unions condemn interim NHS trust chief's contract

Home secretary kills off asbos

Datablog: Asbos - who issued them, and how many

Dorothy Rowe: the mental health diagnostic manual is a mythology

All today's Society Guardian stories

More on the Khyra Ishaq case

Deborah Orr: Khyra's father has lessons to learn too

Comment is free: home education is precious, not dangerous

All Society Guardian child protection stories

Other news

•There is little evidence that public services commissioned from voluntary sector organisations are better for service users, says a research study reported in Third Sector.

• Local authority pensions may be unaffordable in the long term and councils should consider whether benefits should be cut, and employee contributions raised, says an Audit Commission paper.

Timely intervention

How do we refocus policy and resources on supporting severely disadvantaged children in their crucial early years, rather than intervening later to pick up the pieces once their lives have gone off the rails?

It's to be welcomed that Labour MP Graham Allen MP is to chair a government inquiry into just that. Allen, who will head the independent commission into early intervention has long been a champion of this cause and for some time has operated an informal alliance with the work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith on the issue.

High on the commission's agenda is the identification of successful early early intervention models. This is the easier bit: Labour, which introduced Sure Start, made various attempts to develop the idea. Evidence already exists about useful projects, from Nurse Family Partnerships to The Incredible Years.

The harder part is to find ways of funding these interventions. The Treasury never liked "investing to save" even when it had money to spare, while the recent axing of local authority grants has impacted harshly on early intervention projects already up and running. A further complication is the way the post-Baby P crisis has forced local authority children's services to divert cash earmarked for early intervention family projects into over-stretched child protection services.

The funding aspect of the commission will not report until May 2011. That's well beyond the critical autumn public spending review, and some time after local authorities have agreed their (much reduced) 2011-12 budgets. Spare public money for long term investments will be, one suspects, non-existent. So it is instructive that Allen's brief is to consider the scope for developing private funding streams.

Allen published an article making the case for private social investment in the Financial Times this week (co-authored, interestingly, with Jim O'Neill, Goldman Sachs' chief economist). They acknowledge that this sort of funding has already started to emerge, in a marginal way, in the form of Social Impact Bonds. If this pot is to expand, they argue, new financial instruments need to be developed and strict Treasury rules on financial risk need to be relaxed. They write:

"If this is possible, the prize is great: bringing government guidance, private funding and third-sector drive together to reduce demand for state services in the future."

Allen is right to warn of the need for political consensus: for all that it has the potential to act as trigger for social innovation there will be intense suspicion that social investment is a ruse to further privatise the welfare state and make profits out of the misery of the least well off. Nor is it clear whether there is much appetite for it among private or corporate investors. But this is welfare in the age of austerity: by this time next year City cash may well be the only game in town.

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• Children
• Early years education

Patrick Butler
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Dramatic drop in school exclusions prompts claims that problems students are being passed from school to school

The proportion of pupils expelled or suspended from school fell dramatically last year, government statistics revealed today, prompting claims of a "merry-go-round" system in which problem students are being passed from one school to another.

The number of permanent exclusions in English primary, secondary and special schools dropped by more than 19% last year compared with the year before, the figures from the Department for Education show.

Some 6,550 pupils were excluded in 2008-09, compared with 8,130 in 2007-08.

Roughly half as many children were excluded last year than was the case in 1997-98, when 12,300 were expelled.

The number of pupils temporarily suspended from primary, secondary and special schools fell by just over 5% to 363,280. Of these, 39,510 were at primary school and 307,840 were at secondary school.

Labour ministers had put pressure on schools to cut the number of permanent expulsions. The Asssociation of Teachers and Lecturers claimed this resulted in a "merry-go-round" of repeat suspensions.

Thousands of children aged 10 or younger were still being suspended from school last year, the figures show, though fewer were permanently expelled. Almost 22,000 pupils aged 10 or younger received at least one suspension from school, compared to almost 24,000 the year before. Some 760 pupils aged 10 or under were expelled, compared to 1,030 the year before.

A higher proportion of pupils were expelled for sexual misconduct, drugs and alcohol offences, and physically assaulting their classmates than the year before. The proportion of expulsions for sexual misconduct rose to 2% from 1.5% the year before, while drugs and alcohol offences made up 5.5%, compared to 5% the year before.

Most expulsions were for physically assaulting another pupil – 16.8% – or physically assaulting an adult at school – 11.1%.

The proportion of pupils temporarily suspended for sexual misconduct, drugs and alcohol offences and theft has also risen. More than a fifth of all suspensions were for verbally abusing, or threatening, adults at school. Almost a fifth were for physically assaulting another pupil.

The average length of a suspension was 2.6 days – around the same as last year. Most suspensions were for a week or less.

Almost a fifth of those who were suspended were told to leave school twice in the year, while 9% were told to do so three times.

Boys were three and a half times more likely to be suspended than girls and represented 78% of all exclusions, the figures show. Boys were three times more likely to be expelled than girls.

Pupils with special needs were eight times more likely to be expelled than the rest of the school population, while the poorest children, those who receive free school meals, were three times more likely to be suspended or expelled than their more affluent classmates.

The number of parents appealing against an expulsion dropped by 17% to 640. A quarter of the appeals that were heard found in favour of parents.

The leftwing thinktank Demos said the government should abolish school expulsions altogether because they punish vulnerable children.

"The current exclusion rules, which hand difficult pupils over to local authorities, are used too often and usually affect children with special educational needs who need extra support," Sonia Sodha, head of the public finance programme at the thinktank said.

"Exclusion wastes money because it doesn't solve the problem – it just moves it out of sight and out of mind. Resorting to exclusion punishes children for the failure of the school system.

"Headteachers should intervene before it gets to the point of no return, rather than wash their hands of troubled children. Once a child has been permanently excluded, they drop off the system: they are no longer the responsibility of their school and no one is accountable for their success or failure."

The schools minister, Nick Gibb, said poor behaviour remained a "significant problem".

"We trust teachers, and that's why we have already announced a series of measures to put headteachers and teachers back in control of the classroom – including ending the rule requiring schools to give 24 hours written notice for detentions and increased search powers," he said.

"We will introduce further measures to strengthen teacher authority and support schools in maintaining good behaviour."

• Pupil behaviour
• Schools
• Primary schools
• Secondary schools
• Special educational needs
• The gender gap
• Children

Jessica Shepherd
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But why do others question the decision?

Doctors need to be more direct when they are dealing with overweight patients, according to the government's health minister.

A special holiday break is helping UK children cope with the loss of loved ones killed in conflict

I have been taken to task for a posting I put up here eight days ago on an article by Cardiff University's Andy Williams about the state of the newspapers run by Media Wales, a division of Trinity Mirror.

David Higgerson argues that journalism bloggers (well, two of us - me and Press Gazette editor Dominic Ponsford) are letting the side down because we posted on the Williams critique without seeking a prior response from Trinity Mirror.

Higgerson, by the way, is head of multimedia for Trinity Mirror's regional titles, but he stresses that he is writing "in a personal capacity."

Anyway, to the substantive point. This blog is a mixture of aggregation, commentary, analysis, diary items and news reporting. It represents a developing form of journalism as we come to terms with the digital revolution.

This platform is very different from print, not least in the way it allows for swift, almost instantaneous, rebuttal and comment from users. It is a forum for the rapid exchange of ideas and views. That is a great advantage, and an advance, over printed newspapers.

In content terms, a blog is not a screen replica of a print newspaper. It is journalism in the raw, a live conversation between people interested and involved in a specific topic (in this case, journalism).

It does not mean, as Higgerson argues, that we bloggers ignore basic journalistic principles. If a news story is acutely sensitive (witness yesterday's separate items here on the News of the World and The Independent) then it may be necessary to ensure the posting reflects opposing points of view (or fact).

That said, I would even be prepared to make out a case for running stories on this blog without contacting "the other side" in the knowledge that this platform enables people to respond.

I often carry lengthy pieces in which someone takes issue with an original posting. And that's exactly what happened in the Williams' case.

A lengthy piece of academic research is not a news story. And I didn't doubt for a moment that Trinity Mirror would take issue with his study, as it did.

This blog therefore became just what it should be - a forum hosting a debate between each side, between Williams and Trinity Mirror. It allowed for a full, fair and balanced exposition of each side's point of view.

But I would not wish to claim that this blog is neutral or objective. I do have views (some might call them prejudices) and they undoubtedly affect how I post and what I post. Newspapers rarely admit to that bias.

So, in the case of Trinity Mirror's stewardship of its papers, I concede that I was predisposed to believe that Williams had put his finger on a genuine problem (notwithstanding that there were glaring errors in his assertions about TM's disposal programme, pensions and levels of debt).

No-one is more aware than I that newspapers are facing an unprecedented crisis, but it does not blind me to the fact that their owners have imperilled journalism with injudicious cost-cutting.

That takes me to me final beef with Higgerson. He suggests in a previous posting about the Williams study that it constitutes an attack on the reporters who work for Media Wales.

If my email inbox is anything to go by, I don't think all the staff see it like that. Unlike their bosses, they do not feel able to speak out in public about their belief that the Williams report is spot on.

Oh yes, and a final, final, point: Higgerson's chronology was wrong. Dominic posted his blog comment more than three hours after my posting.

• Blogging
• Trinity Mirror
• Regional & local newspapers
• Wales
• Newspapers & magazines
• Media business
• Media downturn
• Cardiff University

Roy Greenslade
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Referring patients to a specialist private clinic cheaper than NHS