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

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

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

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

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

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•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.

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

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

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

The case of Khyra Ishaq was tragic. But to blame home education would be naive and destructive

The idea that child abuse can be thwarted by tightening laws about home education has been around for some time. The tragic case of Khyra Ishaq prompted Ed Balls to commission a review of home education in 2009 that was undertaken by Graham Badman. He reached the same conclusions as this week's serious case review – that the law be changed to ensure that social services speak to children to assess if home education is in their interests. It seems that Khyra's last hope was that the local authority's home education support team might intervene once her mother had withdrawn her from school.

The principle seems straightforward – through registration, all home-educated children would become visible to the authorities, who could then protect them – and ensure that the education being received is adequate.

But Khyra was known to be at risk by the agencies whose job it was to protect her both before and after her withdrawal from school. The unpleasant fact is that parents who want to abuse children have ample opportunity wherever their children's education is taking place. The belief that children in school or being monitored out of school cannot be suffering abuse is sadly naive.

From the home educators' point of view, however, the conflating of welfare issues with education is a dangerous step. It not only threatens educational freedom but also places a presumption of guilt on loving families who must prove themselves innocent to suspicious officialdom. And, most insidious of all, if the law were changed, social workers and education professionals would presumably be expected to monitor the quality of education provided.

It is here that home educators have their strongest reservations. Education at home is nothing like education at school. Research by ourselves at the University of London's Institute of Education has shown how diverse individual learners are, and therefore the diversity of ways in which their needs can best be met. Home education can range from the highly structured, based on set curriculums and lessons, to the completely informal. Styles of education can change between children and over time, bringing a flexibility and dynamism that would be impossible in a formal setting. While officials talk the language of individualism and chances for everybody, home educators are in a position to deliver precisely that kind of tailor-made education. That school should be the benchmark against which all education is measured is resented by many home educators.

Evidence including our own suggests strongly that this kind of education prepares children to enter further and higher education, or the workforce – and offers them the freedom to learn in the ways that suit them best. Yet there is a consistent failure on the part of local authorities and government reviews to grasp even the basis of the ideas that can underlie a different kind of education. Even the language of the serious case review demonstrates this failure of understanding. Small wonder that home-educating parents are afraid of conferring power on people who do not know what it is that they are judging.

This is particularly so for families who have taken children out of school; they would be in the insidious position of being answerable to a system that they believe has already failed them. The idea that you can protect children simply by increasing government involvement ignores the difficulties the education system itself imposes on the lives of many families. And if the answer to that is "Maybe, but those children are still alive", then consider this: an estimated 16 children per year commit suicide because of problems at school.

• Home schooling
• Child protection
• Children
• Education policy
• Schools

Everybody's favourite Wall Street bank, Goldman Sachs, has suffered a sharp sense of humour failure about a worker in its graphics department leading tourists on credit crunch-themed walks around Manhattan's financial district.

For a Guardian story on financial crisis tourism back in May, I reported on a tour led by Tom Comerford, who offered visitors an anecdote-heavy wander around Wall Street hotspots such as AIG's building, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Deutsche Bank and Standard & Poor's.

Comerford was working in Goldman's document production division by evening, while running tours for a firm called The Wall Street Experience during the daytime. But he's since quit the bank after being told to choose between Goldman and his tours.

Comerford tells me that after The Guardian's coverage of his tours, he was summoned by Goldman's compliance department. The bank initially demanded whether he was using confidential material - zeroing in on an CDO document that he brandished to tourists as an example of a real, life toxic asset.

"They thought I was taking documents from the office which, to me, is ridiculous - I could go to jail for that," says Comerford, who says the document in question was actually a Deutsche Bank derivatives that had long been in the public domain.

Although he was able to satisfy Goldman that he wasn't stealing anything, Comerford was then told to choose between his job at the bank or his tour guiding activities - an ultimatum that he feels was "very unfair". After ten years, he quit his job.

"I looked at it as an acting gig - and I'd done acting gigs before while working at Goldman, without any problem. But they were very concerned at the tone of it," says Comerford. "They thought that if anybody could possibly, in any way, shape or form, interpret the tour negatively, I couldn't do it."

It's worth pointing out that Comerford's tour wasn't particularly harsh or judgemental on Wall Street - it was a whistlestop guide to how, and where, the credit crunch began. The Wall Street Experience is run by Andrew Luan, a former Deutsche Bank trader who has a relatively sympathetic view towards the "entrepreneurial" stories of successful financial institutions.

Goldman's chief spokesman, Lucas van Praag, points out that Comerford didn't work directly for the bank, but was employed through a contractor. Nevertheless, the bank confirms that it told him to choose between tour guiding or working at Goldman.

"He was told that given the nature of the tours he was giving, we'd like him not to do it," says Van Praag. "Being very deprecating about the industry while claiming to be an employee of one of the organisations within it seemed to be inconsistent."

Goldman apparently took exception to Comerford's description, which I reported, of subprime mortgage securities as "crap". Van Praag said: "Here he is, advertising himself as a Goldman employee and talking about producing subprime mortgage securities as 'crap'."

Strangely enough, though, we've heard similar sentiments expressed before at Goldman - by a young banker named Fabrice Tourre, who described his own CDOs as "monstrosities" and compared them to creations of Frankenstein. Tourre, who is at the centre of Goldman's recently settled brush with regulators for fraud, remains employed by the bank on fully paid leave.

• Goldman Sachs
• Financial crisis
• Tourism, transport and travel
• New York
• AIG
• Deutsche Bank

Subsidies, sometimes costing as much as £30,000 a year in school fees, being paid by Foreign Office even when diplomats have returned to UK

The taxpayer is spending more than £15m a year to send the children of British diplomats and military officers to private schools such as Fettes, Winchester, Roedean and Marlborough.

The subsidies – costing as much as £30,000 a year in school fees – are being paid by the Foreign Office even when the diplomats have returned to the UK and then stay on for years.

The extraordinary hidden privilege has been unearthed by Gloria de Piero, a new Labour MP, in written questions. In a co-ordinated response, the Foreign Office and the Department for International Development said the perk was necessary to "recruit, motivate and retain staff who are skilled and equipped to meet the department's objectives".

It is understood the same privilege is provided to senior members of the military, but no figures have been divulged by the Ministry of Defence.

The Foreign Office refused to disclose the identity of the private schools, but the DfID agreed to do so. It disclosed that, in 2009-10, 339 officers received "continuity of education allowance" for 521 children – representing around 6% of staff employed at the Foreign Office.

FCO staff serving in the UK were paid £7,487,435 to cover school fees, with staff serving at posts overseas receiving £5,843,415. Under FCO rules staff based in the UK for between two and four years can have their children's school fees paid but after four years must meet the cost themselves or switch to state education.

DfID reported that, in the financial year 2009-10, 48 members of its staff on overseas postings received an education allowance at a total cost of £1,318,810.

The Foreign Office minister, Alistair Burt, defended the practice, saying the department "helps staff meet their potentially conflicting obligations by providing financial support for their children's education in the UK where staff choose this, or are obliged to do so given local conditions in the country to which they are posted".

He added: "In some countries, we do not permit staff to take their children either for health or security reasons. In others, local schools of an acceptable standard are not available."

Andrew Mitchell, the international development secretary, said: "Those with children have a legal obligation as parents to ensure that their children receive a full-time education from the age of five, and they pay UK tax wherever they work.

"Most parents prefer to take their children with them, but in some countries they are not permitted to do so, either for health or security reasons."

He said staff should be allowed to keep their children in private schools at taxpayers' expense because continuity of education, particularly at secondary level, was an important factor.

De Piero said: "Expecting the taxpayer to pay the public school fees for the children of civil servants who are based in the UK is simply a luxury we cannot afford.

"At a time when the coalition's cuts are threatening the education of the many, there can be no justification for this huge subsidy for the few.

"In this age of austerity, when public services are being cut, it cannot be right that we continue to spend these huge sums on private education. Ministers must urgently look at how to reduce this bill."

• Private schools
• Civil service

The Independent has asked its long-standing, award-winning education editor Lucy Hodges to leave.

She has refused to accept a redundancy offer and has been backed by the National Union of Journalists' chapel.

Her situation has caused concern among some staff who believe there was an understanding following the paper's acquisition by Alexander Lebedev in March that there would not be any mandatory redundancies.

Hodges has been with the Indy for 11 years, having worked for the paper as a freelance for four years before that, specialising in the coverage of higher education.

She was responsible for editing the free-standing education supplement, which has since been absorbed within the main paper.

I understand that she was offered an alternative to redundancy, a post on the foreign desk, which she rejected.

The Independent's management originally demanded that she leave the paper by tomorrow and conduct her appeal against redundancy while serving her notice out of the office.

An NUJ protest against that decision, with the threat of a chapel meeting later today, led to a change of mind. She will remain on the paper until the matter is resolved.

Some of her Independent colleagues are upset that the paper has just hired two new writers - Julie Burchill and Mary-Ann Sieghart - while casting out the education editor.

One staff member told me: "I can see the logic, because it's possible that high-profile columnists may attract readers. But it also suggests the paper is being dumbed down.

"Higher education may not be sexy, but the government's cuts mean it is an important story right now, and Lucy, who is one of the most knowledgeable correspondents in the field, is the best person to cover the subject."

But a senior Independent executive said: "It's a simple matter. There was an education supplement and there is no longer, because there was no advertising support for it and we were losing money. So the job of editing it has vanished.

"Let's say we stopped covering cricket, then the cricket correspondent would be redundant.

"We offered Lucy a good job on the foreign desk and she turned it down, which is a pity. In view of this, we can't understand why the NUJ is making a fuss.

"What I can say without a doubt is that this is a one-off situation. It is not the thin end of the wedge. It does not presage a wave of redundancies."

• The Independent
• National Union of Journalists
• Alexander Lebedev
• National newspapers

Education secretary tells MPs he had to act fast on academies because of huge gap in attainment

Inequality in Britain is so entrenched that "rich, thick kids" achieve more than their "poor, clever" peers even before they start school, the education secretary said today.

Michael Gove told MPs on the cross-party Commons education committee that a "yawning gap" had formed between the attainment of poor children and their richer peers.

Gove has come under criticism for using parliamentary procedures usually reserved for national emergencies to rush through his academies bill.

The bill, which became law today, will pave the way for hundreds more schools to opt out of local authority control and become academies.

Gove told MPs he had needed to act fast because the attainment gap was "a problem we can't work on quickly enough".

"We are falling behind … other countries are moving faster ahead," he said. "Rich, thick kids do better than poor, clever children before they go to school. Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of our society, the situation is getting worse."

Gove was later criticised by a teachers' leader for using the term "thick". Mick Brookes, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said: "Thick is not a word that is currently in use in schools. It is demeaning to children."

The academies legislation will allow parents, teachers and charities to set up their own Swedish-style "free schools".

Gove revealed that Richard Dawkins, an academic and prominent atheist, is interested in setting up an atheist free school. Critics of faith schools have warned that religious fanatics could try to take advantage of the new law and create schools that teach their beliefs. Dawkins has described faith schools as a form of child abuse.

Gove told MPs that he encouraged atheists to start their own schools.

"We want choices for children," he said. "There are concerns about inappropriate faith groups using this legislation to push their own agenda, but we have been working on the regulations to ensure that we don't have any extremist groups taking over schools."

MPs quizzed Gove and his top civil servant over errors in a list of cancelled school rebuilding projects put out after Gove scrapped the £55bn Building Schools for the Future programme. Hundreds of schools celebrated the news that their building plans were still going ahead, only to discover that they had in fact been scrapped. Many teachers and local authorities had spent several years and millions of pounds negotiating the plans. Gove was forced to apologise in the Commons.

David Bell, the permanent secretary of the Department for Education, admitted to MPs that he had ignored advice to check the list, which was found to have 25 errors.

Partnerships for Schools, the quango responsible for BSF, had warned Bell to check his facts with local authorities before telling hundreds of schools whether their buildings would go ahead.

Bell said he had put Gove in an invidious position. "I think it was a mistake not to put to the secretary of state the possibility of checking the list with local authorities and I take responsibility for that."

Gove said he would continue to invest in new school buildings, despite having axed BSF. Cash would go directly to schools and local authorities, he said.

• Academies
• Schools
• Free schools
• Education policy
• Michael Gove
• Equality

Like the House of Commons itself, Julian Glover has taken too little time scrutinising the academies bill (The left reacts to Gove's bill like a childhood nightmare, 26 July). It is not a minimal piece of legislation; neither is it simply the logical extension of what is now the case.

First, the initial tranche of academies majored on driving up standards in deprived areas. That is why the Church of England got involved and is currently the largest sponsor of academies. But this new bill favours already "outstanding" schools for fast-track academy status. These do not tend to be in deprived areas.

Second, when such schools become independent of the local authority, the ability of those authorities to deliver essential services to other schools must be compromised. Education funding is at best a zero-sum game.

Third, this bill puts significant additional powers into the hands of the secretary of state for education. Whether or not such centralised control proves to be better for schools than that exerted by local authorities remains to be seen. But they will certainly not be independent – just differently dependent.

John Saxbee

Bishop of Lincoln

•?Julian Glover is right to focus on how high the government will set the pupil premium for disadvantaged children. Save the Children is calling for a £3,000 premium, which could pay for extra personal and small-group tuition, longer school days and high-quality extracurricular activities. This would ensure heads have the funds to make a considerable impact on the pupils who need help the most. Rather than prescribe how the money should be spent, we think it's important that heads are asked to demonstrate the progress they have made with their most disadvantaged pupils.

Sally Copley

Head of UK policy, Save the Children

•?The constitutional innocence with which the precipitate passage of the academies bill has been treated is astonishing. It will give this and any future education secretary, in England, unprecedented powers, exercisable without reference to any elected body: opening a school whenever he wants; deciding where any individual school should be built; funding any school he likes on any terms he chooses, or, after due notice, ceasing to fund any school contracted to him whenever he likes. "Independent" academies and "free" parent-led schools are, of course, wholly dependent on the secretary of state for their annual grants and solely accountable to him. So they may find it prudent not to annoy him.

The untrammelled concentration of power in the hands of a single government minister was what the Butler Education Act of 1944, now effectively dismantled in a couple of days, was careful to avoid. The Liberal Democrat leadership in the Commons has been complicit in allowing this. As Lord Greaves has said, in doing so it has provided compelling reasons for those, such as myself, who thought the Liberal Democrat Party believed in local accountability for local institutions, to turn away in disgust.

Peter Newsam

Thornton le Dale, North Yorkshire

•?The Campaign for Science and Engineering (New academies will leave pupils struggling to succeed, say critics, 26 July) is right to be worried about the teaching of science in academy schools. The percentage of pupils taking GCSEs in physics, chemistry and the biological sciences in academies is markedly below schools in the maintained sector. And it is the same case in the humanities. Just 17% of pupils in academies take geography GCSE, compared to 27% in the maintained sector; 21% take history GCSE, compared to 31%; and 26% take a modern language, compared to 44%. New evidence from the Historical Association also indicates that academies are more likely to teach history at key stage 3 within a less focused integrated humanities programme. A worrying picture is emerging, with non-specialist teaching of history at key stage 3 being far more common in academies than in other types of school and less time being allocated to the subject.

Perhaps it is time the debate over academy schools moves on from questions of governance to what pupils are actually learning.

Tristram Hunt MP

Lab, Stoke-on-Trent Central

• Academies
• Schools
• Free schools
• Michael Gove
• History and history of art

It was meant to be a satirical look at racial integration, but a South African student film gained notoriety on the web for the way black staff were treated

Four white former students in South Africa today pleaded guilty to humiliating five black workers in an infamous internet video. The case of the "Reitz Four" – named after their university hall of residence – has been one of the most inflammatory in South Africa's tortuous journey towards racial reconciliation.

The video, shot in 2007, showed five black employees of Free State University in Bloemfontein being forced to re-enact initiation rights for students. The four middle-aged women and one man were made to drink full bottles of beer and perform athletic tasks.

The final extract of the film appeared to show a white male urinating on food, then shouting "Take! Take!" in Afrikaans – compelling the campus employees to eat it and causing them to vomit.

In a surprise move at Bloemfontein magistrates court today, former students Roelof Malherbe, Schalk van der Merwe, Danie Grobler and Johnny Roberts pleaded guilty to illegally and deliberately injuring another person's dignity.

Their defence lawyer, Kemp J Kemp, conceded that while the workers voluntarily took part in a mock initiation ceremony, the accused realised that it had degraded them.

But Kemp insisted that the former students did not urinate in the mixture that the workers drank. He said they used a bottle and put it in their pants to make it look like they urinated into the mixture of Oros (squash), garlic and protein powder.

The court accepted the guilty plea and adjourned until tomorrow for closing arguments from lawyers on sentencing, unlikely to be imprisonment.

The video, which emerged on the web in 2008, triggered anger and soul-searching in South Africa, where races were legally segregated until Nelson Mandela's election in 1994. The university in Bloemfontein has been regarded as a stronghold of Afrikaners, the descendants of Dutch settlers who ruled during apartheid.

Commentary on the video in Afrikaans included sarcastic references to the university's policy of integrating the campus dorms years after the end of apartheid.

Police dispersed stone-throwing students on the Free State campus and classes were cancelled. The men's residence was also shut down after the video received worldwide publicity.

There was further controversy last year when Jonathan Jansen, the first black vice-chancellor of Free State University, dropped disciplinary action against the former students .

The move was condemned by leaders across the political spectrum as an "abortion of justice", but won support from Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who chaired the country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Black students make up 60% of Free State University's 25,000-strong student body. Most of the support staff are black, but the teaching staff are mainly white.

Amid tensions on the campus in 2008, lawyers for the students said although it appeared as if the food had been urinated on, a "harmless" liquid had been squirted from a bottle.

Apologising in the statement, two of the students said they had been "crucified as racists" and regretted making the film, meant as a "satirical slant" on the issue of racial integration at the university hostels.

In a sign of the gravity of the case, Johan Kruger, South Africa's most senior prosecutor, appeared for the state today. Defence lawyer Kemp had represented Jacob Zuma before he took office as president last year. Prosecutors dropped the corruption charges against Zuma.

The four former students still face another case at South Africa's equality court.

• South Africa

Art historian and biographer, her work infused large, iconic subjects with new life

Carola Hicks, who has died of cancer aged 68, was a glamorous academic and a serious populariser of art. She created something new in the world of contemporary biography, writing the life stories and afterlives of iconic works of art such as the Bayeux tapestry and the stained-glass windows of King's College Chapel, Cambridge. She swept the dust off old masterpieces, explained their cultural contexts and infused them with life for a new public.

Her first book to reach a wide general audience was the acclaimed Improper Pursuits: The Scandalous Life of Lady Di Beauclerk (2001), a gripping account of an 18th-century aristocrat, an earlier Lady Diana Spencer. This Lady Di defied convention: she abandoned her husband, the second Viscount Bolingbroke, for a secret liaison with Topham Beauclerk, concealed her illegitimate child, divorced, remarried and earned her living by becoming an accomplished painter. Carola's biography illuminated 18th-century artistic life and exposed the consequences of transgressive behaviour by women.

Her next book, The Bayeux Tapestry: The Life Story of a Masterpiece (2006), was the first of her innovative biographies of works of art. Carola brought fresh insights to this medieval strip cartoon and instrument of political propaganda. Most groundbreaking was her investigation of the afterlife of the Bayeux tapestry: its rediscovery by 18th-century antiquarians, its survival though the French revolution, its reinvention by the pre-Raphaelites, its skewed interpretation by over-reachers from Napoleon to Heinrich Himmler.

She followed this success with The King's Glass: A Story of Tudor Power and Secret Art (2007), which Radio 4 serialised as its Christmas book of the week. As Henry VIII's queens disappeared, they were erased from the stained-glass windows of King's College Chapel. When he replaced orthodox Catholicism with his own Supremacy and Reformation, the glass was adapted to reflect this, too. The magisterial images were made by immigrant craftsmen handling tiny pieces of luminous glass. "This book is in part a hymn to their light, with glass of beryl and amethyst, sapphire and emerald … in miniature the story of the nation," Peter Ackroyd wrote of it.

Born in Bognor Regis, West Sussex, Carola was the daughter of actors, David Brown and Margaret Gibson. After her father died on active service in North Africa in 1943, Carola was brought up by her mother, who continued her stage career. Carola was educated at the Lady Eleanor Holles school at Hampton, Middlesex, and then at Edinburgh University, where in 1964 she took a first in archaeology, and was one of the stars of the department.

True to her thespian inheritance, she played Olivia in Twelfth Night on a student tour of the Highlands and Islands. During one exploit, she and fellow actors constructed a Loch Ness monster out of hessian, wire and newspaper and faked a sighting, reported in the national press. After acting in repertory and television, Carola returned to Edinburgh and gained her PhD, in 1967, on "the animal style in English Romanesque art".

She worked on Reader's Digest and Woman's Own and for the Council for British Archaeology before becoming a researcher in the House of Commons library. Carola said you could always tell what MPs were really like by the way they treated their staff. She met her future husband, the lobby journalist and now fellow author, Gary Hicks, in the Strangers' Bar. They married in 1969.

She worked at the British Museum on the account of the Sutton Hoo Ship Burial, whose three volumes were published in 1975, 1978 and 1983, before becoming a research fellow at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, in 1978 and writing her first book, Animals in Early Medieval Art (1993). For several years from 1984 she was curator of the Stained Glass Museum at Ely Cathedral. She became a fellow and director of studies in art history at Newnham College, Cambridge, where for more than 20 years she taught as she wrote, in a lively, accessible style that combined erudition with enthusiasm.

A keen gardener, amateur photographer, ice-skater and botanic drawing student, with a lifelong love of theatre, Carola was witty and irreverent, wrote wickedly funny articles for the Literary Review, and especially enjoyed Biographers' Club events. Days before her death she had almost completed Girl in a Green Gown, a "biography" of Jan van Eyck's enigmatic portrait The Arnolfini Marriage.

Six months ago, Carola was diagnosed with cancer, which she faced with clear-eyed dispassion. She died at home, stylish to the last, with a red rose from the garden on her pillow. She is survived by Gary and their children, Colette and Toby.

• Carola Margaret Hicks, art historian and author, born 7 November 1941; died 23 June 2010

• Art
• History and history of art
• History
• University of Cambridge

Engineer and leading authority on nuclear and chemical safety

The chemical engineer Sir Frederick Warner, who has died aged 100, was internationally renowned for his pioneering work in building chemical plants and improving the health and safety conditions for workers in the chemical industry. His expertise in environmental impact, particularly of radiation, saw him lead the first international team into Chernobyl to assess the damage caused by the catastrophic reactor meltdown in 1986.

Disturbed by the fact that 31 young Soviet soldiers and firefighters had died after exposure to high doses of radiation during the containment operation, he later assembled a group of 100 retired engineers and scientists – Volunteers for Ionising Radiation – who would be available to help during any future such emergencies. After receiving advice from radiobiologists, he reasoned that people who were over 65 would tolerate exposure better than those who were younger and would have fewer concerns over possible genetic effects.

Warner - Ned to his friends - was born in St Pancras, north London, the son of Frederick, a policeman, and his wife, Annie. He was educated at Wanstead national school and Bancrofts school and graduated in chemistry from University College London in 1931. With no hope of finding a job in the middle of the Depression, he returned to UCL for a postgraduate diploma in chemical engineering. A committed communist, anti-war campaigner and passionate rugby player who became president of the University of London Union in 1933, he was so busy with his numerous interests that he had to take his diploma twice before he passed.

He worked as a chemical engineer for various companies before founding the consulting engineers partnership Cremer and Warner in 1956 with his friend Herbert Cremer. The firm worked around the world, in the Soviet Union, India, Iran, Jordan and Africa, solving problems with large-scale chemical plants, air and water pollution and coal and oil gasification. Warner found the Soviets particularly advanced in gasifying coal underground and adapted their ideas for use in North Sea oil exploration. He was particularly pleased with the work the company undertook on the mathematical modelling of flows on the river Thames and its findings on dissolved oxygen levels and sewage station outfalls. This research subsequently led to a significant clean-up of the river, which in turn enabled fish stocks to recover and saw migratory salmon and sea-trout return – having been absent since Victorian times. He retired from the company in 1980.

His international work included the introduction of Camping Gaz to the UK in the 1950s – it was being made in France but could not be sold in Britain because of complex government departmental regulations. Because he spoke French, Warner was asked to translate the company's documentation and advise it on meeting the regulations. This was straightforward for the large cylinders, but the manufacturing process description for the small ones stumped him with a phrase about a "souage" – a word even the French embassy could not help him translate. "One night I woke up and thought – could it mean swage?" he explained. An English dictionary held the answer – the name of that tool comes from the Norman French, souage. "The cylinders were welded on the swage – a bit of lateral thinking can help."

Warner's first job in a chemical works in Stratford, east London, in 1934, fuelled his lifelong interest in health, safety and risk assessment. The factory started making fire suppressants as part of the rearmament effort, which involved the use of methyl bromide, which boils at 4C (39F). With only primitive refrigeration equipment available, the workers were wreathed in the vapour and, in Warner's words, "chaps were behaving very oddly – I'd tell them to do one thing and they'd head off in the other direction to do the other". He took them to see Dr Donald Hunter at the London hospital, where they were diagnosed with methylation, including Warner himself, whose hands were trembling because of the effect on his nerves.

When the Flixborough chemical plant, in Lincolnshire, exploded in 1974, Warner was appointed as the court expert. He was told to take over the site, send away the factory inspectors and police, and seal it off: "I brought in a young graduate called Rod Sylvester-Evans and put him on site in a hut, and told him, 'You live there, you sleep there and you don't let anybody in'." More information was later needed from the control room, which had been at the epicentre of the explosion, in which 28 people had died. Warner got a team of miners to tunnel into the wreck of the control room and shore it up so that Sylvester-Evans could go in and hunt for any remaining instruments that might show what had caused the explosion.

Warner was a member of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (1973-76) and the Advisory Committee on Pollution of the Sea. He was also an assessor on the 1977 Windscale inquiry, examining the desirability of building a plant for the processing of nuclear fuel from the UK and abroad, at the site now known as Sellafield, in Cumbria. As treasurer of the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (Scope), he spearheaded a series of definitive reports. The Environmental Consequences of a Nuclear War examined the predicted "nuclear winter" effects of a nuclear holocaust; Pathways of Artificial Radionucleotides collated data on the fallout from Chernobyl; and Radiation from Nuclear Test Explosions analysed radioactivity after every nuclear weapons test.

His work with Scope earned him the 1991 Gerard Piel award of the International Council of Scientific Unions. He was knighted in 1968, elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1976, and was awarded both its Leverhulme medal in 1978 and Buchanan medal in 1982. A truly multi-skilled engineer, deeply involved in initiatives to unite the engineering profession both in the UK and across Europe, he was a founder fellow in 1976 of the Fellowship, now the Royal Academy, of Engineering, president of the European Foundation of Engineering Institutes (1968-71), and was involved with professional organisations for chemical, mechanical and civil engineering.

Warner was president of the British Standards Institute (1980-82), and reformed its finances by ensuring it earned at least half its income from independent sources rather than relying entirely on government funding. He was a visiting professor at University College London (1970-86), at Imperial College London (1970-78) and from 1983 onwards at Essex University. "I'm glad to say all my doctorates are honorary," he said in an interview, "it's the best way to get them I think – the easiest way!"

Warner is survived by his wife, Barbara, whom he married in 1958, and by two sons and two daughters by his first wife, Margaret, who died in 2006.

• Frederick "Ned" Edward Warner, chemical engineer, born 31 March 1910; died 3 July 2010

• Nuclear waste
• Chemical engineering
• Engineering
• Engineering general
• Science policy

Our father, Don Headey, who has died aged 88, packed enough interests for 10 people into his life. Beekeeping, organic gardening, scouting, puppetry and pottery were a few of them, all underpinned by his strong Christian faith.

The son of a Methodist minister, he was born in Chalford, Gloucestershire, and moved with his family to Stockton and Sunderland before spending his teenage years in Leith, Edinburgh. It was there that, seeing the effects of drunkenness on the streets, he became a lifelong teetotaller.

Don's parents could not afford for him to continue in education so he lodged in Hampstead, north London, while working for Customs & Excise in the City. To save money, he walked to and from work, and this was probably responsible for his legendary stamina.

When war broke out he registered as a conscientious objector and spent the years 1941 to 1944 in civil defence. By then, the family had moved to Liverpool, where he met our mother, Joan. They married in 1945, beginning a loving partnership that lasted 62 years.

Don enrolled for emergency teacher training, in which he found his vocation, working in primary, secondary modern and comprehensive schools in Liverpool for the rest of his career. He became head of science at Knowsley Hey school and was at his happiest in the classroom, never having ambitions for management.

Don had joined the Scouts in Scotland, and after the war started a cub pack at Childwall Valley Methodist Church, which had been founded by his father in the 1930s. He served as district commissioner for the Childwall Scouts, in Liverpool, from 1965 to 1974.

Marrying into Liverpool's Welsh community, Don took it upon himself to learn Welsh – he was never fluent, but good enough to impress the locals on our holidays in Caernarvonshire. When we moved near to one of Liverpool's biggest synagogues, he learned enough about the Jewish faith from our neighbours to be able to give talks at a local primary school. For a while his garden seemed to grow horseradish for most of the passover meals in south Liverpool.

The organic gardening movement took off quite late in Don's life, but he embraced it with a passion and became a founder member and treasurer of Liverpool Organic Gardeners. He was much in demand as a speaker on organic gardening and on beekeeping, which he practised for more than 60 years.

Joan died in 2007. We survive him, along with his four grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

• Teaching

Review concludes that lack of focus on children's welfare was partly to blame for seven-year-old's death by starvation

Ministers must urgently review the law on home education to prevent further tragedies, the independent review into the death of Khyra Ishaq recommended today .

Seven-year-old Khyra starved to death in 2008 at the hands of her mother, Angela Gordon, and Junaid Abuhamza, who were both jailed after admitting manslaughter earlier this year.

The review concluded that flaws in home education laws were partly to blame for the death. The laws' sole focus on parents' rights – rather than their children's – enabled Gordon to ignore social services and made it impossible for them to intervene.

The review calls for changes to the law to ensure that social services speak to children to assess whether home education is in their interests, as well as their parents. The review found Gordon had become increasingly aggressive towards her children's teachers when she removed Khyra and some of her siblings from school in December 2007.

Gordon wrote to authorities to tell them that she wanted to educate her children at home. Birmingham city council's education welfare service – known as the Education Otherwise team – visited Gordon with a social worker to assess whether she was fit to home-educate her children.

The serious case review found the welfare worker used a "tick-box" approach for this assessment. The welfare worker did not ask to see examples of the kinds of lessons Khyra would be taught or inquire into how many hours of education Gordon's children would receive each week. At no point did the welfare worker request to see Khyra or her siblings. Nonetheless, the welfare worker concluded that Gordon was fit to home-educate her children.

Other authorities held "great store" by the welfare worker's assessment, the review found, and this led to a catalogue of missed opportunities to spot neglect and abuse in the home.

"There is no safeguard to ensure that a satisfactory education is being received by children and that their welfare is being safeguarded," the review stated. "The current legislation enables parents to move their children from state education with minimal reasons and provides an opportunity to render young people virtually invisible. This is a particular advantage to parents who may wish to conceal abuse.

"On this occasion, the legislative framework contributed to the unintended outcome of isolating some children within a home environment and restricted access to those children by professional agencies, effectively removing any oversight of their welfare or development. Without doubt, the legislative armour ... enabled [Gordon] to resist the advances of professional intervention and added to the perceived impotence of professionals to intervene."

Michael Gove, the education secretary, said "lessons needed to be learned" from Khyra's death and promised he would "see what changes need to be made to the existing arrangements … in due course".

Fiona Nicholson, from the national home education charity Education Otherwise – a different organisation to the one mentioned in the independent review – said blaming home education was a "red herring designed to distract attention from Birmingham's lamentable child protection record".

In April, a controversial clause to the education bill that would have compelled every parent who home-educates their child to register with their local authority was dropped. It was one of the concessions made by the then-Labour government to push through an education bill before parliament was dissolved ahead of the general election.

Ed Balls, the then education secretary, wanted to force home-educating families to accept annual visits from local authority inspectors, a move that led to home-educators demonstrating to parliament. Balls, now shadow education secretary, said he strongly urged Gove to re-introduce the legislation on home education as "an urgent priority". "He will have our full support," he said.

• Children
• Child protection
• Crime

Extra spending in Gordon Brown's first full year as prime minister failed to prevent dip in outputs, official figures show

Productivity of public services dipped sharply in 2008 despite a spurt of government spending in Gordon Brown's first full year as prime minister, first official estimates have suggested.

After modest rises in productivity in both 2006 and 2007, the measure calculated by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) is shown to have fallen by 0.9% in 2008. The biggest contributor to the fall by sector was adult social care.

The ONS is cautioning that its figures will be subject to revision and that its whole approach to measuring public services productivity remains "experimental" and under development.

Nevertheless, the initial findings for 2008 will provide further fuel for critics of Brown's premiership and for coalition government ministers seeking to justify spending cutbacks.

The productivity measure used by the ONS sets outputs of public services, such as NHS operations and GCSE grades, against inputs of labour, materials and capital assets. Outputs are at present not assessed for about a third of services including police and defence, however.

In 2008, inputs are estimated to have grown by 2.8% and outputs by 1.9%, producing a fall in productivity of 0.9%.

Adult social care is estimated to have suffered a productivity fall of 5.6% in 2008. However, the ONS says this figure should be treated very gingerly, as it makes no allowance for quality of care services, rising levels of need or the growing numbers of people receiving support at home.

Productivity falls are also shown for education (down 1.1%), healthcare (down 0.6%) and "public order and safety" (also down 0.6%). Children's social care is shown to have been down 6.0%, but its impact on the overall picture is slight because it is a relatively small sector in spending terms.

An increase in productivity is shown to have been achieved by social security administration, up 4.5%.

For the period 1997-2008, the ONS says public services inputs grew 41.5%, or 3.2% a year, and outputs grew 36.8%, or 2.9% annually. Productivity is therefore said to have fallen by 0.3% a year.

Although such figures are often contrasted poorly with productivity estimates for the private sector, the ONS stresses that it is still seeking ways better to quantify the value of public services.

• Social care
• Long-term care
• Older people
• Schools
• Health
• Child protection
• Crime
• Public finance
• Public sector cuts
• GCSEs

Research shows that 'positive income shock' can have long term health impacts