By Richard Garner
Education Editor

With Ofsted's remit being extended to inspecting all children's services, its usual annual state-of-the-nation assessment of our schools got lost yesterday because of more pressing concerns about child abuse in the wake of the tragic death of Baby P.

A pity, really, because chief schools inspector Christine Gilbert had a remarkably forthright message for ministers - that too many children and young people were being offered services that were "patently inadequate" - particularly if the lived in disadvantaged communities.

by Richard Garner
Education Editor

The Government's decision to abolish tests for 14-year-olds has been welcomed by almost everyone as a good way of reducing the testing burden on pupils - the only small note of dissent has come from some teachers who believe their workload will increase through a move to teacher assessment.  They should get real.  They won't have to teach to the test - and they should only be doing what they were before the whole key stage three apparatus was thrust upon them.

By Richard Garner, Education Editor

Chris Keates could be forgiven if she woke up this morning and wondered whether it had been a good idea to tell a TV programme that she believed there should be a change in the law relating to prosecuting teachers who have affairs with pupils above the age of consent in their schools.

Headlines like "Don't Charge Teachers Over Sex With Pupils" didn't exactly spell out what it was the general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers was trying to say.

By Richard Garner

Schools Minister Andrew Adonis appears to have come in for some criticism over the Government's decision to boost the number of state boarding school places for vulnerable children and those in care. The critics are saying the last thing these children need is a large institution with which they are not familiar and where they know no-one.

By Richard Garner

A dilemma over foreign students is exposed by Professor Geoffrey Alderman's claim that universities are encouraging lecturers to turn a blind eye to plagiarism by them in an attempt to ensure they stay on their course. He was backed up today by an anonymous whistleblower from one of the Russell group universities - the top twenty research institutions in the UK - who said overseas students were passed even if they spoke little English.

Surely the point is that rather than being passed despite their lack of English, it would make sense to invest in more remedial help to enable them to improve their English?

By Richard Garner

The Government deserves credit for tackling underperformance in schools - but whether effectively "naming and shaming" the 638 schools that fail to get thirty per cent of pupils to obtain five A* to C grade passes at GCSE including maths and English is the best way forward is debatable.

A look at the list - all of whom will have "action plans" for improvement drawn up duriing the next fifty days - shows three areas which retain grammar schools (Kent, Lincolnshire and Birmingham) have the largest number of schools on the hit list.  Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, acknowledged the performance of secondary modern schools was something that ministers had to tackle.  Anyone in the know could probably have told him that before the list was published and that - one of his suggestions - drafting in a grammar school head to work with a local secondary modern for one day a week might not provide the best solution. How about swapping the pupils around instead?

By Richard Gardner

The Government is right to press ahead with a radical reform of pupil referral units - dubbed "sin bins" to many outside the inner sanctum of the education world.

A glance at the White Paper published on Tuesday which shows only one youngster in 100 taught in them manages to obtain five top grade GCSE passes makes it clear that the status quo is something we can no longer put up with.

By Richard Garner

The National Union of Teachers is justified in expressing concern over the materials included in the lesson plan commissioned by the Ministry of Defence for teaching about the Iraq war. As Steve Sinnott, its general secretary, says, it makes no mention of civilian casualties or the fact that the UN failed to sanction the invasion. A High Court judge ruled that Al Gore's Oscar-winng film, An Inconvenient Truth, could not be shown in schools without teachers providing "balance" and correcting inaccuracies in it.  The same should be the case for the MoD lesson plan.

By Richard Garner

The move by Newbury Park primary school in Rebridge, north-east London, to teach its pupils forty languages by the time they transfer to secondary school is to be applauded.

Of course, learning so many languages, they do not study all 40 in depth and the project - under a different language spoken by a pupil as a home language is chosen as the "language of the month" just gives them a smattering of phrases in that language and a little bit of cultural knowledge about the country concerned.

By Richard Garner

It really should not come as a surprise that a youngster who shines at a struggling comprehensive - getting its best A-level results even if he or she does not get three straight A's - can do just as well at university as someone from an independent or grammar school with higher grades. The effort the former has had to be put in to overcome what could be an anti-education culture in their community should be recognised.

Yet the idea that pupils from poorly performing schools should be offered places at prestigious universities with lower grade passes sends a frisson of horror down the spines of the country's independent schools with threats of law suits to their pupils who are refused places following.