The Olympics were supposed to give competitive sport in schools a huge boost. But government cuts mean that children are now doing less than before

The man and boy raise their weapons in salute, before closing to engage. They get each other’s measure for a few seconds before the child darts at the man’s chest with the tip of his black plastic foil. It’s a neatly executed lunge. Under soft yellow light in a primary school hall in Tower Hamlets, east London, eight boys and a girl are learning to fence. Inevitably, there are giggles as the masks go on, and the children have to be discouraged from slashing away at each other’s foils like pirates with cutlasses. Their coach, Hijrat Popal, dissuades them from this waste of energy. He urges them to go in for the kill with an attacking move instead. He makes them pay attention to their footwork, and the children begin to learn this sport’s lessons; poise, co-ordination, agility.

As London prepares to host the Olympic Games, it would be cheering to say that scenes like this are being repeated in schools across the country. But they aren’t. School sport is suffering. Competitions are being cancelled. After-school clubs are being scrapped. PE teachers are receiving less training. And the government’s austerity measures are being blamed.

One of education secretary Michael Gove’s most unpopular acts was to abolish the national network of school sport partnerships. These saw groups of schools working together to increase the quality and range of sport on offer to children. In each one, a secondary school PE teacher was given two days a week to act as a co-ordinator while a teacher in each of the primary schools was paid to receive extra training in PE and sport.

An outcry from teachers and athletes forced the education secretary to keep the scheme going until last summer. Gove agreed to a further concession – to carry on providing money to release a secondary school teacher for one day a week. In some parts of the country, schools have pooled resources to sustain these partnerships, freeing up teachers and employing coaches to run sports sessions. That has happened in Tower Hamlets. Elsewhere, school sport is feeling the pinch.

Simon Spiers, headteacher of King Alfred’s specialist sports college in Wantage, Oxfordshire, says: “In areas where primary and secondary school heads believe it’s important, they’re funding it. If not, they’re not. We’re into our first year of that, so the differences aren’t that large. But if this continues, we’ll see a big disparity.”

It is a deeply sensitive subject for the government. And not just for the usual reasons that school sport matters – the fact that one in five children leaves primary school obese, or that exercise improves behaviour and attention. One of the pledges that helped win the Olympic Games for London was a promise to “inspire young people around the world to choose sport”. The culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, whose cabinet brief includes the Olympics, declared last year: “I can sum up our sports policy in three words: more competitive sport.”

The government has created a new school games tournament – sponsored by Sainsbury’s – with a national final taking place in the Olympic Park, in May. Around 12,000 schools, both state and private, are now signed up for this, a government spokesman says. To put that in perspective, there are around 20,000 state schools in England.

It is hard to be precise about the impact of the cuts because, at the same time ministers scrapped the sport partnerships, they got rid of the annual survey that collected information about every pupil. But when you speak to headteachers and surviving school sport co-ordinators it becomes clear that – ironically, perhaps – it is competition between schools that is suffering the most.

Jo Marston stayed on as school sport co-ordinator in Thirsk, North Yorkshire, after Gove pulled the financial plug because the schools in her area collaborated to keep a sport partnership going. Now she spends three days a week organising school games and the rest of the time offering teachers guidance on coaching.

“I’ve already noticed there is much less attendance at events,” Marston says. “We’re probably working at about 50%-75% attendance. It’s because schools haven’t got the money for transport to go out and play competitions, and they can’t release the staff because they don’t have the money to pay for supply, to take a class teacher away from directly teaching for a competition. That’s hit us really hard.”

Marston wants to make it clear that she’s not a whinger. In fact, she feels privileged that her local schools have pitched together to keep some competition going, and believes things are worse elsewhere. Still, the fact that teachers cannot be released during the day means a lot of competition is now taking place after school hours. And some schools have just dropped out.

“I had two aquasplash [swimming and other aquatic skills] competitions last week with four schools each. We’ve done it before with nine or 10 schools. We’ve had to cancel some competitions because nobody wanted to enter them. I’ve had three lots of sportshall [indoor] athletics I have had to cancel because nobody entered.

“This is what the government is looking to increase, and they’ve put us in a position where we aren’t able to do that. We’re doing a lot of virtual leagues, where the school gives me the results and I put them on the website, It’s ridiculous – the thing we’re trying to focus on and increase, and they take away the resources to be able to do that.”

She describes the years of spending under Labour as “halcyon days”, when schools – especially primaries – were introduced to a breadth and depth of competition they had never seen before. “Primary schools played football and netball – now they do aquasplash, fun runs, sportshall athletics, Quicksticks hockey.” The Daily Mail has lampooned this diversity as schools ditching traditional sports for “cheerleading, yoga and circus skills”, echoing the coalition’s criticism that participation in sports such as rugby, hockey and netball fell under the last government.

But less conventional sports often act as a bridge to more familiar team games. Between 2003 and 2010, the number of secondary school children playing two hours or more of sport a week rose from 20% to 85%.

Schools in Marston’s part of North Yorkshire are weathering the cuts with “triangular” fixtures – where three school sides play at the same event. This obviously means the children are not playing for as long as they would at a normal event. Marston has also arranged fixtures very close together so school teams can walk to each other’s grounds rather than having to hire buses.

But small schools are struggling. “It’s no longer equitable. Some schools with 23 pupils don’t have the resources to go out to competition. If you’ve got a big school with 420 pupils, quite a big workforce, [you're] able to leave school and take the children. When you’re in a rural area, it’s the small schools that suffer.”

It is the same story on the Lancashire coast, where schools have been forced to abandon a winter cross-country league. Attendance is down at competitive events, says Matt Hilton, co-ordinator for the Wyre and Fylde school sports network. As in North Yorkshire, this partnership is being sustained by local schools clubbing together. But money is much tighter now.

“We’re having to work differently because of the times that we’re in,” says Hilton. He reels off a list. There isn’t the money for “freeing up teachers, hiring facilities, purchasing medal certificates, hiring equipment”. He cites the example of a recent indoor athletics competition in which 28 local primaries took part. Before the cuts, around 35 schools would have entered.

Parents are increasingly being asked to dip into their pockets. Gavin Storey, headteacher of Cullercoats primary school, in Tyne and Wear, has cancelled after-school clubs in badminton and dance because his school cannot afford external teachers. Instead, some of his staff volunteer to run after-hours football and aerobics sessions, while parents pay £2 a class for a gymnastics club.

Storey says: “I’m very conscious of the economic climate. We don’t want to have extra clubs because I’ve got to ask parents to contribute to that, and people are struggling with the basic cost of household utilities, food etc.” Schools in his neighbourhood are still running competitions, but they have contracted. “A hockey competition that used to go on to a regional level is now just for local schools – there’s no movement on to the county and regional level. But you want competition for some of your elite teams. The government wants more competition – where is the competition for that elite level?”

Everyone you speak to agrees that primary schools are worse off than secondaries. They rely on secondary schools with their specialist staff to provide a wider range of activity for their children.

The Department for Education has made £32.5m available this year to release secondary school sports teachers for one day a week to work with primary schools. But that money runs out next year, and because it isn’t ring-fenced, hard-pressed headteachers are tempted to spend it on other priorities.

Around 80% of all secondary schools in England are signed up to the coalition’s School Games, a government spokesman says. But less than half (45%) of the country’s primary schools are. It is a common fear that without support from secondary school colleagues, primary school PE teachers will stick to the safest options and avoid more hazardous activities such as gymnastics or dance. In primary schools, teachers have to range across subjects. That limits the amount of time they have to prepare for PE when they do their postgraduate certificate in education (PGCE) courses.

Lorraine Everard, sports strategy manager for a partnership of 54 Sussex schools, says: “If primary school teachers have spent more than two weeks of their time training on PE they have done well. Some of them have done three days [PE training] in the whole of their [PGCE] course. Gymnastics, for example. They’re not confident in teaching it, therefore they won’t teach it well or will avoid it completely.”

Teachers are nervous of activities such as gymnastics not just because of the risk of injury, but because it requires them to hold children.

Everard says: “It could go back to the situation we had 10 years ago, where new staff coming in are not doing PE because they don’t feel confident. That might not be manifesting itself right at the moment, but increasingly it will.”

The decline of school sport is particularly dismaying because in many parts of the country, this is the only way children get a taste for sport. In Tower Hamlets, 80% of children never do sport outside school, says Chris Willetts, manager of the borough’s school sport partnership. “It’s a mix of cultural factors – and a lack of spaces, a lack of clubs. This is a very densely populated borough.”

Tower Hamlets is an inner-city neighbourhood; many of its schools are housed in dishevelled but still handsome Victorian brick buildings. But it is also a crowded landscape in which the dominant note is concrete grey. The streets are busy with traffic and there isn’t a single blade of grass on any of the borough’s school playgrounds. It was once a “real backwater” for school sport, Willetts says. Now there is a remarkable spread of sporting activities on offer here.

On a recent winter’s afternoon, two girls were being taught to kayak on dry land. The girls, pupils at Virginia primary in Bethnal Green, perch on machines that resemble rowing equipment. But instead of the contraction and extension of sculls, they manipulate a pole that mimics the dipping motion of a paddle. Meanwhile, the rest of the class toss balls to each other to build up their core strength, or use broomsticks as mock-paddles. The most adept paddlers will get a taste of the real thing when they go kayaking on Shadwell Basin, part of London docks, this summer.

A few streets away, a game of indoor cricket is under way at Old Palace primary school. Seven boys in burgundy sweaters play with a plastic bat and tennis ball. The level of talent on display is variable. A few of the boys knock the tennis ball easily out to the boundary – in this case, that’s the wall of the school canteen. Others swing wildly and whack themselves “out” on the plastic stumps. The coach isn’t being a stickler for the rules. Instead these boys, aged between seven and eight, are being taught the basics of the game – how to bowl, bat and field.

Sport can be a ticket out of a tough neighbourhood. That doesn’t just apply to elite performers who can win sponsorship. In Tower Hamlets, the sports partnership takes children out to Blackheath cricket club every summer where they mix with boys from Dulwich College, the south-London private school. The idea is that sport can be a passport to success in later life – a networking tool.

“They learn to handle themselves in certain social circumstances a bit better because of it,” Willetts says. “It can be difficult to get some of them to open up a little bit, just through lack of confidence. There are a lot of professional people who play [at the cricket club] – doctors, teachers, lawyers, bankers. Our kids are playing with them. It’s good for aspiration.”

Few doubt that the Olympic Games coming to London this year is inspiring a burst of creativity and enthusiasm for sport in Britain’s schools. The fear is over what comes next. While ministers boast about an Olympic legacy, the risk is that sport in schools is withering away so fast that a future generation of potential Olympians will be blighted.

online school degrees

Number of places on offer rises by more than 25% – an increase driven by family breakdown and pressure on working parents

State boarding schools are witnessing a surge in popularity, with the number of places rising by a quarter over the past decade – an increase driven in part by family breakdown, which has in effect left some children homeless.

Two academies have opened boarding facilities this term, and a third is due to open residential quarters in September, raising the number of children in state boarding to more than 5,000 from 3,800 at the start of the last decade. Five more academies plan to open boarding facilities, including one in south London, which hopes to send inner-city children to board in Sussex.

Instead of the cold showers and ascetic dormitories of public school tradition, modern boarding quarters feature purpose-built blocks with ensuite bedrooms, access to Wi-Fi and thumb-print recognition entry systems.

The Harefield academy in Hillingdon opened a boarding facility with 50 places this academic year, mainly to provide for children with difficult home lives. This includes pupils who were “sofa surfing” because of family breakdown or the death of a parent.

The school also selects 15 children a year for their sporting excellence, and some of these pupils have chosen to board because they were commuting long distances or because they wanted more time to train.

Boarding has helped diversify the school, which now includes two boys from the Bahamas and children from Spain. Principal Lynn Gadd said: “Harefield is very white, working class, and we felt we needed a slightly bigger global dimension, so we offered a few places to students who could bring that richness.”

Hilary Moriarty, director of the state boarding schools association, suggested that changes to working lives had increased the appeal of boarding for families. She said: “Many boarding schools now offer weekly boarding, which is an attractive proposition for many families, particularly if mum and dad both work – on Monday we all go to work, see you on Friday. If you’re on a train at 7am, get home at 7.30 or 8pm, there’s very little time for the kind of ideal vision of family life that we had 30 years ago.”

At Ashby school in Leicestershire, which has almost doubled its boarding wing to 72 places this academic year, headteacher Eddie Green concurred: “There’s a number of reasons [why children board]. Modern family life is one of them. Parents are working overseas, or working longer hours. We have students coming from abroad who value the English educational system. Quite a lot are from Hong Kong. We’ve got students from EU countries where the parents have gone to live abroad.”

Boarding school accommodation is being created around the country. Priory academy in Lincoln is due to open a sixth-form boarding house with 60 places in September 2012, catering for demand from RAF families and pupils who commute long-distance.

The Wellington academy in Wiltshire, sponsored by the public school Wellington College, opened twin boarding houses for 100 students this academic year.

One of the most ambitious boarding school projects is a plan by a school in Stockwell, south London, to set up a satellite school for its pupils in the home counties.

Durand Academy plans to open a junior school in London this autumn, and from 2014 students will attend a boarding school in Sussex. Under the plan, which has received £17m of government funding for building work, pupils will be driven to Sussex on Monday and return home on Friday. The aim is to move children to an environment free from negative influences and offer an extended school day combining study with music, drama and sport. Unlike other state boarding schools, it will not charge for accommodation. Instead, its running costs will come out of private income the school generates from a swimming pool, gym and block of flats.

A similar motive drives plans for a boarding “free school”, which will admit children at risk of going into care. About 20 children in each year-group of this proposed school would have been identified by social workers as being at risk of entering care, its backers say. The school would have a “family” system of house-parents providing pastoral care for the boarders.

Lee Donaghy, who is proposing the school with his wife, Ann, said: “Our central motivation is to give the most disadvantaged and marginalised children in society an educational experience that is on a par with the very best that’s on offer in British schooling. One thing that struck us powerfully was a state boarding school head saying that boarding provision for this group of children works because for the first time in their lives they have access to something that others desire – and are even prepared to pay for.” The proposed free school, which would open in 2014, would be based wherever the need is greatest, Donaghy added.

Other state boarding schools are urging the government to provide funding for building work so they can expand. State boarding scho ols are permitted to charge parents to cover accommodation costs – with fees of £10,000-£12,000 – but restricted from charging more. This limits their ability to accumulate surpluses for construction work.

Ray McGovern, chairman of the State Boarding Schools Association, said: “If we manage to get the investment, then we can fund other children who need boarding places but whose families can’t afford it. But we need to know what the government’s strategy is going to be.”

online school degrees

Schools failing to reach minimum standards face being closed and re-opened as academies

More than 100 secondary schools in England face being closed and re-opened as academies for failing government targets, official data reveals.

League tables of more than 3,300 secondaries published by the Department for Education on Thursday show that 107 schools are failing to reach minimum standards required by the coalition.

In all schools, at least 35% of pupils are expected to gain five or more GCSEs at grades A* to C, including English and maths. Those schools that fail to meet this target, and whose pupils are not achieving above-average progress in English and maths, are considered sub-standard.

The headteachers of under-performing schools may be replaced and their management investigated by education department officials. The number of failing schools has, however, fallen since last year, when 216 secondaries fell short of government targets.

An analysis of the data, which is based on last summer’s GCSE and A-level results, by the Guardian has found that in 55 schools – not including special schools – fewer than 10% of pupils achieved five A* to C grades at GCSE, including English and maths.

The secondary school league tables also show:

• Teenagers in care and those on free school meals are about half as likely as their peers to achieve five good grades at GCSE.

• In some schools, no teenagers are being entered for traditional subjects, such as history, geography or a modern language.

• In more than 1,700 schools, a maximum of 10% of pupils take a combination of traditional subjects that includes English, maths, two sciences, a language and a humanity.

• In more than a fifth of secondary schools – not including those for children with special needs – no more than half of pupils made the progress expected of them in maths between leaving primary school and completing their GCSEs.

By including data on the grades of pupils in care and on free school meals, the secondary school league tables show the stark contrast between the achievements of disadvantaged children and their better-off peers.

Just 34% of those in care or on free school meals achieve five good GCSE passes, including English and maths, compared with 58% for all pupils in state schools.

In 339 schools, less than a fifth of these disadvantaged pupils achieve five good grades, including English and maths. Just one in 25 pupils achieves a C or higher in a combination of English, maths, two sciences, a foreign language and a humanity.

Nick Gibb, the schools minister, said the figures revealed a “shocking waste of talent” and warned that “all too often, pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds aren’t given the same opportunities as their peers”. He warned that the coalition would not let schools “coast with mediocre performance”.

However, the league tables also show some exceptional achievements.

In 524 schools, at least 50% of pupils who had been considered to be low-achieving at their primary schools managed to gain five or more GCSEs at grades A* to C, including English and maths.

The school with the best record in this respect is Tauheedul Islam girls’ high school in Blackburn, where 69% of pupils with low prior achievement at primary school achieved five or more good grades at GCSE.

The highest-performing comprehensive at GCSE was Thomas Telford school in Shropshire. Some 98% of its pupils achieved five or more A* to C grades including English and maths. The school outperformed several academically selective and private schools.

On average, 58.2% of pupils in state schools achieved five or more A* to C grades including English and maths.

Colchester Royal grammar school in Essex had the highest average points score per student at A-level – 1,477.1 points – and Broadgreen International school in Liverpool improved its A-level score by 161% between 2008 and 2011.

The tables reveal dozens of schools are shunning traditional subjects such as history, geography and modern languages at GCSE.

In 125 schools – not including special schools – no pupil was entered for either history or geography. Ninety-four of these schools were fee-paying. In 77 schools, no pupil was entered for a language GCSE.

Last year, the government started to measure schools by the proportion of pupils who achieved a C grade or more in English, maths, two sciences, a foreign language and a humanity at GCSE. This combination is known as the English baccalaureate, or Ebacc.

The coalition hoped that by adding the measurement to the tables, it would fuel a rise in the take-up of traditional subjects. Some 24% of pupils were entered for these subjects last summer, a rise on the year before when 22% were. Just 18% achieved the English bacc last summer, compared to 16% the year before.

In 1,760 schools, at most 10% of pupils achieved the Ebacc. Bucking the trend, however, is Sevenoaks school, a mixed independent school in Kent, and St Michael’s Catholic grammar in Barnet, north London, where 99% of pupils achieved the Ebacc this year.

Again for the first time this year, parents will be able to compare schools based on the progress pupils have made since primary school.

The Guardian’s analysis shows that in just over a fifth of secondary schools – not including those for children with special needs – no more than half of pupils made the progress expected of them in maths between leaving primary school and completing their GCSEs.

Almost half – 45.6% – of pupils who were at the level expected of them in primary school failed to achieve five or more GCSEs at grades A* to C including English and maths.

The tables also show the average state secondary school spends £5,712 per pupil, but 30 state schools spend more than £10,000 per pupil. In state schools where over 90% of pupils achieve five or more grades at A* to C at GCSE, including English and maths, average spend is £5,096 per pupil.

Stephen Twigg, Labour’s shadow education secretary, said the government should stop “promoting pet projects”. “If the government wants to promote English and maths across the education system, it cannot simply focus its attention on the minority of academies and free schools, or the English bac which is only taken by around one in eight pupils,” he said.

online school degrees

Headteacher puts Shropshire school’s success down to its three-hour lessons and extended day

Thomas Telford school in Shropshire is the country’s top comprehensive for GCSE results, according to this year’s school league tables.

Some 98% of the school’s pupils who sat GCSEs last summer gained five or more at grades A* to C, including English and maths – a feat many grammars and private schools failed to achieve.

The headteacher, Kevin Satchwell, put the school’s success down to its three-hour lessons and extended day. By the time pupils start their GCSE courses, they have had the equivalent of an extra academic year when compared to their peers at other schools.

Lessons start at 8.15am and go on until 4pm, and in some cases 6pm. Classes are in three-hour blocks, which enable pupils to “really get stuck into whatever it is they are doing and have more fun,” Satchwell said.

“They are not distracted by bells going off every three-quarters of an hour and they don’t have to rush from one lesson to another so often,” he said.

Satchwell said longer lessons and an extended day were seen as experimental when he introduced them upon opening the school 21 years ago. Now many schools have copied the model.

“It’s not rocket science,” he said. “Longer lessons consolidate pupils learning and make for a calm environment, which is similar in many ways to a university.”

The school, which has consistently been rated as outstanding by inspectors, has a below-average proportion of pupils on free school meals (12%). The national average is almost 16%. It has very few pupils whose first language is not English.

Parents receive reports on their child’s progress 10 times a year, far more frequently than in most schools. Satchwell said this provided a “strong scaffolding” that ensured pupils, parents and teachers worked well together.

The school is a city technology college, which means it is state-funded and accountable to central government rather than its local authority. City technology colleges were conceived in the 1980s under the Conservatives.

Satchwell said he intended to carry on as headteacher of the school until he was “carried out”.

online school degrees

Serious case review finds Hillside school grossly negligent in failing to stop Nigel Leat’s sexual abuse of pupils over 14 years

A school “failed on every level” to prevent a teacher from sexually abusing pupils in his classroom despite concerns about his behaviour being raised for 14 years, a serious case review has concluded.

Nigel Leat was jailed indefinitely last year for abusing children he taught, often when other pupils were present, and sometimes filming his attacks.

A review of the case published on Thursday found that staff at Hillside first school in Worle, Somerset, had raised concerns about Leat’s behaviour 30 times.

He was seen touching, cuddling and even kissing pupils and every year picked out a “star” pupil he would lavish attention on.

Though such behaviour is “typical of grooming activity”, the report said the concerns were not passed on to school governors or education authorities, and that each incident appeared to be treated in isolation. It said there was a “lamentable failure by management to create an environment in which the needs of the child were paramount and good practice was promoted”.

Ofsted carried out inspections and described the level of care afforded to children as “outstanding” during the time Leat, 51, was offending. The education watchdog was not able to say on what basis it reached its conclusion because its records are not retained.

Tony Oliver, chair of North Somerset Safeguarding Children Board, said: “There was a failure at every level within the school. The fact that these incidents were reported within the school and not acted upon is incredible.

Oliver said it was grossly negligent that the 30 incidents staff raised concerns about were not reported to education authorities or the police.

He said: “There was an endemic culture of neglect. In terms of safeguarding, parents at the school rightly expected their children would be cared for and kept safe.

“Procedures were not followed and this prevented the correct action from being taken. Concerns were not followed up and this led to children not being protected from Nigel Leat. This was a gross failure of responsibility.”

The review said that 20 pupils were either abused by Leat or witnessed abuse.

Staff at the school first noticed Leat selecting girls who were “less academically able, emotionally needy or pretty” as his “favourites” a year after he started teaching there in 1996, according to the report.

His behaviour was so well known that staff tried to prevent children likely to become his “star pupils” from being put into his classes.

In 2004, a mother claimed that Leat had been taking pictures of her daughter with a mobile phone but he denied the accusation and no action was taken.

Four years later, two children told staff that Leat had been touching their legs and kissing one of them, causing her to be physically sick.

Another member of staff saw Leat projecting an indecent image of an adult on to a wall during a lesson, warning pupils not to tell their parents what they had seen. Leat was also seen lifting up and touching young girls in the playground and tickling and cuddling pupils in class.

Official records show that those who reported Leat’s behaviour were told they should not “insinuate things” or “accuse him of things”.

Leat was only arrested in December 2010, when a schoolgirl told her mother he abused her “every day apart from when the teaching assistant was in the classroom”.

A police investigation found the abuse took place in the school’s computer room, resource room, staff room and during lessons with other pupils present.

Leat, a father-of-two from Bristol, admitted 36 sexual offences including attempted rape, sexual assault and voyeurism. He was jailed indefinitely at Bristol crown court in June last year.

The headteacher, Chris Hood, was sacked in December.

online school degrees

US school children, accustomed to a diet of pizza and hot dogs, will find healthier food on their trays under new government rules

The new US Department of Agriculture (USDA) rules aim to boost the nutritional quality of the federally funded meals consumed by roughly 32 million US school children.

The rules represent the first major revision of school meal standards in more than 15 years and are intended to combat the nation’s childhood obesity crisis – nearly one in three children in America is overweight or obese.

The revamp comes just months after US lawmakers protected pizza’s status as a vegetable and killed proposed limits on weekly servings of starchy vegetables like potatoes.

In addition to doubling produce servings, the new guidelines call for serving only fat-free and low fat milk, child-appropriate portion sizes and reductions in sodium, saturated fat and trans fat.

They fall under the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act (HHFKA), which was championed by first lady Michelle Obama. President Barack Obama approved the measure in late 2010.

The new standards will be largely phased in over time, starting in the 2012-13 school year. They are estimated to cost roughly $ 3.2bn to implement over the next five years, starting in the 2012-13 school year.

HHFKA provides more funding to schools to help cover the extra costs associated with the menu changes.

Lawmakers altered the school lunch guidelines in November, when they barred the USDA from limiting the weekly servings of French fries and ensured that pizza counted as a vegetable portion because of its tomato paste.

Trade associations representing frozen pizza sellers like ConAgra Foods Inc and Schwan Food Co as well as French fry sellers McCain Foods Ltd and J.R. Simplot Co were instrumental in blocking changes to rules affecting those items.

Those actions, which caused a public uproar, won cheers from critics of the rules. They held up the changes as an example of overreach by the federal government, saying it should not meddle in the food decisions made by families.

“What we are announcing today are science-based rules and regulations that are going to substantially improve the meal qualities across the United States for children,” USDA Undersecretary for Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services Kevin Concannon said on a conference call.

Margo Wootan, nutrition policy director for the non-profit Center For Science in the Public Interest, said that the new standards were a big improvement despite food industry lobbying and the congressional revamp.

“The new school meal standards are one of the most important advances in nutrition in decades,” she said in a statement.

The Environmental Working Group said the adjustments could pack a financial punch since they may help reduce medical bills related to diabetes and other obesity-related chronic diseases.

“A healthier population will save billions of dollars in future healthcare costs,” said Dawn Undurraga, EWG’s staff nutritionist.

As an example of a new meal, the USDA said an elementary school lunch could be whole wheat spaghetti with meat sauce and a whole wheat roll, green beans, broccoli, cauliflower, kiwi, low-fat milk, low-fat ranch dip and soft margarine.

That lunch would replace a meal of a hot dog on a bun with ketchup, canned pears, raw celery and carrots with ranch dressing, and low-fat chocolate milk.

As part of the new standards, USDA will increase the number of inspections of school menus.

The USDA gives school districts funds for meals through its National School Lunch and School Breakfast programmes.

online school degrees

Tories’ favourite teacher slammed over her proposed secondary school with a ‘private ethos’ in south London

Katharine Birbalsingh, the teacher described as a Tory darling for her attacks on state education standards, is at the centre of a dispute over her plans to open a free secondary school with a “private ethos” in an area of south London desperately in need of primary schools.

Birbalsingh has been accused of wasting taxpayers’ money by parents and teachers in Tooting, Wandsworth, the proposed site of the Michaela community school, where Mandarin and Latin will be on the curriculum.

The new secondary school will take money away from the local authority if it attracts pupils from schools under the latter’s control. And critics say because the department for education has earmarked half of the £1.2bn it has allocated to school building on free schools, it does not have enough money to tackle the national crisis in primary schools.

Official figures show that there will be a surplus of 2,000 secondary school places in the borough once Birbalsingh’s school has been built, but that there is already a need for an extra 115 primary school places and the area will be short of 600 places by 2015.

Nationally, of the 62 free schools due to open that are championed by the education secretary, Michael Gove, only 21 are primaries, yet official figures show that the number of children of nursery and primary school age in England is due to rise 14% by 2018. The increase of more than half a million children will take the primary school population to its highest level since the late 1970s, and London councils estimate there will be a shortfall in the capital of about 65,000 by 2015.

Birbalsingh, who became a cause célèbre in Conservative ranks after she criticised the indiscipline in state schools during a speech at the Tory conference in 2010, insists that her school will give parents the choice to send their children to an institution where the focus will be on traditional subjects.

She told the Observer that the school would benefit from the guidance of Anthony Seldon, headmaster of the fee-paying Wellington College, and of the 31-year-old chair of governors, Neil Mahapatra, an Eton-educated former assistant to Lord Rothschild and a Conservative parliamentary candidate, currently setting up a private equity firm.

Birbalsingh said that ICT would not be taught at her school because the emphasis would be on maths, English and foreign languages, not skills. The best performing four pupils from the school each year win the “prize” of boarding at Wellington for a week.

Birbalsingh said: “I don’t know how people can criticise those who are trying to do the right thing. This school will take children from Lambeth, Merton and Wandsworth. It is also needed in terms of ethos.” However, local opposition to the school is growing, with public meetings and a petition planned. There is concern that the site chosen for the school, which is due to open in September, is home to 400 businesses and that the move could lead to a loss of jobs.

Birbalsingh’s school was due to be sited in Lambeth, where there is a shortage of secondary school places, but was blocked when the local authority sold her preferred site to property developers. Janet Eades, a retired teacher from Wandsworth who is leading the campaign against the free school, said: “I would like to know what the demand and need is for this school in Tooting, which was deemed viable by the department of education because there was a need in Lambeth. How does this benefit Tooting or Wandsworth? It is a mess and is a sign of a planning failure and we are going to fight it hard. The money spent on this school could be used to expand primary schools in Wandsworth or carry out vital repairs on outstanding secondary schools in the area. We don’t need this school.”

Birbalsingh has not had a permanent job in a school since she agreed to leave St Michael and All Angels Academy, in Streatham, south London, two years ago following concerns at the school about her use of images of pupils during her controversial speech at the Tory party conference. However, there will not be an open application process for the position of head at the Michaela community school, which Birbalsingh is taking.

Stephen Twigg, the shadow education secretary, said that the case illustrated why the government should redraw its free school programme to take account of the crisis in primary school provision. He said: “There is an urgent crisis in our primary school system that the government is ignoring – 180,000 more places are needed before the election.

“Ninety per cent of the need is for primaries, yet half the funding from the autumn statement will go on pet projects like free schools. Only a third of free schools in the pipeline are primaries, and the areas with the biggest need – Barking and Dagenham, Bracknell and Milton Keynes – will not get a free school.”

A spokesman for Communitas, the public relations company hired by Michaela school’s project management firm, Place Group, refused to provide details about how much public money had been spent on the proposed school.

online school degrees

Ofsted instructed to carry out inspection of Downhills primary, where the governors are resisting academy status

Michael Gove has instructed Ofsted to carry out an inspection of a primary school where the governors are resisting academy status.

Lawyers representing the governing body of Downhills primary in Tottenham, north London, have accused the education secretary of illegally trying to force the school to become independent of its local authority and be taken over by a private sponsor.

The school was given a “notice to improve” by Ofsted last January as inspectors judged it was doing less well than expected.

Primary schools are expected to ensure at least 60% of 11-year-olds reach the level expected for their age in English and maths. A school is judged to be below the “floor standard” if it is also below average for the progress pupils make between the ages of five and 11.

Downhills is just above the floor standard, with 61% of eligible pupils getting the expected level in English and maths, according to results published last month. Nationally, 74% of 11-year-olds reached this level in May.

The Downhills headteacher has said the school has worked hard to improve the quality of teaching. Out of 15 class teachers, six are new this academic year.

Governors have said converting it into an academy is “premature” ahead of its next Ofsted inspection.

David Lammy, the former education minister, is MP for the Tottenham constituency which includes Downhills and was a pupil at the school. He has protested against Gove’s treatment of the school.

The Department for Education said: “Given the importance placed on a further Ofsted inspection by the governors at Downhills, the secretary of state has asked Ofsted to undertake an inspection. This will provide an independent assessment of the school’s position.

“We can’t just stand by and do nothing when schools are sub-standard year after year. Academies are proven to work. They have turned around dozens of struggling inner-city secondary schools across London and are improving their results at twice the national average rate.”

In a speech this month, Gove described opponents of academies as “ideologues happy with failure”. He warned: “Change is coming. And to those who want to get in the way, I have just two words: hands off.”

Gove said he was frustrated by some “obstructive” local authorities and areas, such as Haringey in north London, where he said he had been asked “not to challenge the leadership of the lowest performing schools”.

online school degrees

While condemning global injustices against children, we fail to examine the ethics of removing seven-year-olds from their families

Texas is a largely Christian state that appears to believe in neither forgiveness nor redemption. Last week the Guardian revealed the extent to which it has criminalised its children. Police now patrol the schools, arresting and charging pupils as young as six for breaches of discipline.

Among the villainies for which they have been apprehended are throwing paper aeroplanes, using perfume in class, cheeking the teacher, wearing the wrong clothes, and arriving late for school. A 12-year-old boy with attention deficit disorder was imprisoned for turning over a desk; six years later, he’s still inside. Children convicted of these enormities – 300,000 such tickets were issued by Texas police in 2010 – acquire a criminal record. This can make them ineligible for federal aid at university and for much subsequent employment.

Yet most of them have committed no recognised crime. As one of the judges who hears their cases explained, “if any adult did it it’s not going to be a violation”.

On the other hand, no charges have been brought against a Texas judge called William Adams. Last year a video was released which showed him beating the living daylights out of his daughter with a leather belt. The attack was so savage that when I watched it I nearly threw up. Adams cannot be prosecuted because the beating took place eight years ago. But even if it had happened yesterday, he might not have been charged, as he could have claimed that he was disciplining his child. In both cases the law permits people to do things to children that they could not do to adults.

But before we start feeling too superior, we should remember that systematic injustice towards children is common to many nations. Consider these cases, all from the past few decades: the theft of babies and forced adoptions in Spain; the teenage girls pressed into slavery in Ireland’s Magdalene laundries; the sexual abuse in its industrial schools; similar institutional abuse, also by Catholic priests, in many parts of the world; sexual abuse and beatings in Welsh children’s homes; the British children told, wrongly, that they were orphans and exported to Australia, Canada and other Commonwealth countries; the assaults by staff in privately run child jails. It seems to me that such abuses have three common characteristics.

The first is that the countries in which they occur appear to possess a sacrificial caste of children, whose rights can be denied and whose interests can be disregarded with impunity. The second is that these countries have a powerful resistance towards confronting and addressing this injustice: discussing it often amounts to a taboo. (These two traits were chillingly dramatised in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go.) The third is that systematic abuse becomes widely acknowledged only after determined people – such as Margaret Humphreys (who campaigned on behalf of the child migrants) and Alison Taylor (the Welsh care homes) – spend years trying to force it into the open, in the face of official denial.

So I want to try once more to begin a discussion about an issue we still refuse to examine: early boarding. It is as British as warm beer, green suburbs and pointless foreign wars. Despite or because of that we won’t talk about it. Those on the right will not defend these children as they will not criticise private schools. Those on the left won’t defend them, as they see them as privileged and therefore undeserving of concern. But children’s needs are universal; they know no such distinctions.

The UK Boarding Schools website lists 18 schools which take boarders from the age of eight, and 38 which take them from the age of seven. I expect such places have improved over the past 40 years; they could scarcely have got worse. Children are likely to have more contact with home; though one school I phoned last week told me that some of its pupils still see their parents only in the holidays. But the nature of boarding is only one of the forces that can harm these children. The other is the fact of boarding.

In a paper published last year in the British Journal of Psychotherapy, Dr Joy Schaverien identifies a set of symptoms common among early boarders that she calls boarding school syndrome. Her research suggests that the act of separation, regardless of what might follow it, “can cause profound developmental damage”, as “early rupture with home has a lasting influence on attachment patterns”.

When a child is brought up at home, the family adapts to accommodate it: growing up involves a constant negotiation between parents and children. But an institution cannot rebuild itself around one child. Instead, the child must adapt to the system. Combined with the sudden and repeated loss of parents, siblings, pets and toys, this causes the child to shut itself off from the need for intimacy. This can cause major problems in adulthood: depression, an inability to talk about or understand emotions, the urge to escape from or to destroy intimate relationships. These symptoms mostly affect early boarders: those who start when they are older are less likely to be harmed.

It should be obvious that this system could also inflict wider damage. A repressed, traumatised elite, unable to connect emotionally with others, is a danger to society: look at the men who started the first world war.

Over the past few days, I have phoned the education department, the Boarding Schools Association and the headteachers of several schools to ask them a simple question: how did they decide that seven or eight was an appropriate age for children to start boarding? In every case the answer was the same: they didn’t. This, they all told me, is just the way it has always been done. No inquiry, no committee, no board, no ethics council has, as far as they know, ever examined this question. Very young children are being sent away from home in a complete vacuum of professional advice. Compare this with the ethical agonising over whether or not children should be taken into care and you encounter the class prejudice common to all British governments: the upper classes require no oversight.

So yes, rage against Texas and its monstrosities, and wonder at the cruel, authoritarian system a nominal democracy can produce. But remember that this is not the only place in which governments endorse the damage done to children.A fully referenced version of this article can be found at www.monbiot.com

online school degrees

Downside School apologises to parents over revelations resulting from police examination of school records

Seven Roman Catholic monks with links to a top public school have faced police investigation over child sex and pornography offences, the school admitted today.

In a letter to the parents of the 1,500 pupils at Downside School in Somerset, Dom Aidan Bellenger, the Benedictine Abbot of Downside, apologised to parents and named some of the monks who were picked out by a criminal investigation looking at 50 years of confidential school records.

Of the seven monks from Downside, he said four had faced police action and two, against whom allegations “were founded” , had restrictions imposed on their ministry. The seventh was cleared and allowed to return to his monastic life.

The school has already announced a review of the school’s governance after a monk and former teacher at the school, Richard White, was jailed for five years for sexually abusing two 12-year-old boys in the late 1980s.

His abuse was known about by monastic and school staff at the time but he evaded criminal charges for more than 20 years.

“We are truly sorry that children and young people have been abused by those whom they should have been able to trust,” Dom Bellenger wrote.

“We are committed to doing everything possible to ensure that such things do not happen again.”These unhappy events inevitably cast a long shadow, but your chief concern will of course be the welfare, security and happiness of children currently at Downside. Many steps have been taken to ensure that the Downside portrayed in some parts of the media is a thing of the past.”

Records stretching back 50 years were made available to Avon and Somerset Police.

These records brought to light the abuse carried out by White, known as Father Nicholas when he taught geography at the school.

Downside has been criticised by one of White’s victims, Rob Hastings, who waived his right to anonymity and urged other victims of abuse at the school to contact police.

The 35-year-old said it was time the school faced up to the level of abuse which went on, criticising the school for covering it up for so long.

“I feel that Downside had been infiltrated by paedophiles at all levels,” he said.

“The school needs to admit its level of failure to support the safeguarding of children. Once it has done that it is in a place to move forward and make it a safer place.”

online school degrees