• Support groups explore masculinity as a concept
• Critics claim societies a front for 'macho activities'
After decades of feminism, equal rights and "women-only" support networks, a lower, deeper voice is attempting to make itself heard at some of Britain's leading universities.
Male students are "manning-up", setting up men's groups to celebrate and explore the concept of masculinity amid accusations of sexism and gender stereotyping.
Manchester University has created the first official MENS Society – Masculinity Exploring Networking and Support – despite outrage from critics who claim the existence of such a group undermines women's ability to speak out for equality.
Meanwhile, at Oxford University the formation of Man Collective – Oxford (MC-O), launched "as a response to the current state of masculinity" has been branded "reactionary and ridiculous".
Detractors allege they are just a front for macho activities and beer-drinking marathons, but supporters insist they are essential as young men struggle to cope with the pressures of being a man in the modern world.
Alex Linsley, 20, founder of MC-O, said: "There is so much conflicting information for men. There is massive confusion as to what being a man means, and how to be a good man. Should you be the sensitive all-caring, perhaps the 'feminised' man? Or should you be the hard, take no crap from anybody kind of figure?
"Neither of those are particularly useful paradigms. But there's perhaps things we could learn from both perspectives".
Men, who could feel pressured to "man-up" in a mixed gender environment, might feel less vulnerable discussing such issues in a male-only setting.
The Merton college student admits launching his organisation with the testosterone-fuelled invitation – "Have you got balls? Literally. If you have how does that make you feel?" – has drawn stinging criticism.
Given that men already dominate political and economic life, British society didn't need "much more celebration of masculinity," claimed one critic.
Kat Wall, the Oxford University's student union vice president for women, accused him of gender stereotyping but welcomed the debate and hoped he would work with the women's campaign to "facilitate a discussion forum on the issue of masculinity".
But Linsley, an economics and management student who started MC-O after being struck by the number of 18- to 25-year-old males committing suicide in Oxford, has also received positive feedback.
While self-improvement among women was common with magazines bursting with advice, there was little for men, was the message. "Do you expect men to mysteriously find their own way alone?" questioned one supporter on the Cherwell university newspaper website.
"I want to create this forum for men, so men can learn from each other and discuss these issues and make a positive step forward," said Linsley.
In Manchester, the MENS Society, which despite its name has women among its 306 members, claims it highlights not just masculinity issues, but also raises funds and awareness for men's mental health, testicular and prostate cancer as well as male rape and domestic violence issues.
Its campaign for official ratification from the student union's societies committee has provoked furious debate. Originally called the Men's Society, it has now agreed to the MENS compromise. Founder Ben Wild, 21, a politics and modern history student, said he was "relieved that the societies committee has acknowledged the importance and promising benefits of this new society, the first of it's kind in a UK university".
"Why have one? Because so little was being done on raising awareness on issues specific to men, such as male depression, which occurs because they can't live up to this very idealised traditional masculine role," he said.
Such arguments hold little sway with opponents, however.
Olivia Bailey, NUS national women's officer, said: "Discrimination against men on the basis of gender is so unusual as to be non-existent, so what exactly will a men's society do?"
"To suggest that men need a specific space to be 'men' is ludicrous, when everywhere you turn you will find male-dominated spaces," she added.
Caitriona Rylance, chair of Manchester Communist Students, said that while the society now claimed to be about "self-betterment" it's original aims were "Top Gear shows, gadget fairs, beer-drinking marathons and Iron Man competitions".
Wild responded: "There has been so much false information peddled. I'm teetotal, and our first event was a sober pub crawl. And we've compromised on our beard-growing contests to make it more inclusive."
Professor Marilyn Davidson, an expert in diversity and equality at the Manchester Business School said: "It is interesting that this is happening. And there is an obvious need. One of the problems men have is that they don't have the support networks when they are under stress that women do.
"If we were talking about business and all-male clubs, they were the gatekeepers who were stopping women entering. But I don't think these groups are doing that. It's not us against them. It's just about supporting each other."
Patrick Leman, from Royal Holloway University of London, said: "In some senses it is to be welcomed, because it is good that young men reflect on who they are and what they should be doing. That sort of reflected self-awareness is not something that is particularly associated with men. But I went to Oxford, and it could, of course, just turn into another awful drinking society."
However, Martin Daubney, 39, editor of the lads' magazine Loaded, was contemptuous. "I don't think men are remotely confused about what it takes to be a man. They just get on and do it. My generation would not sit round and build a website about being confused. It's complete navel-gazing bullshit."
Schools watchdog mauled as critics bite back at 'wasteful' bureaucracy
Ofsted is facing a crisis in public confidence as it comes under a series of attacks on its authority this week, with the watchdog accused of being "flawed, wasteful and failing".
The children's services inspectorate will be criticised today by service heads in every local authority in the country, headteachers' leaders and in a damning forthcoming report by MPs on the government's school accountability system.
Its new inspection regime is accused of forcing social work departments to focus on passing inspections instead of looking after children, giving good schools mediocre ratings on routine technical matters – such as fences not being high enough – and more claims that sub-contracted inspectors are not fit for the job.
Pressure further intensifies on the watchdog as a former chief inspector of Ofsted, Sir Mike Tomlinson, today suggests it is struggling after a major expansion two years ago to include responsibility for inspecting children's services as well as schools and childcare.
The attacks come as Christine Gilbert, the chief inspector at Ofsted, prepares to publish the watchdog's own annual report tomorrow after arguably the most difficult year in its history, during which it has been battered by accusations of failings in the Baby Peter case and struggled with its controversial new inspection regimes.
Tomlinson, a respected government adviser who led Ofsted between 2000 and 2002, today raises new questions about Ofsted's ability to fulfil its role. "The question needs to be asked and answered as to whether Ofsted has the appropriate skills and experience to carry out its agenda," he told the Guardian. "Inspection systems that rely too heavily on data and tick-box systems is not what we need. I worry we are heading that way."
The 2007 expansion of Ofsted made it the biggest regulator in England and since then it has introduced new inspection methods for schools and local authorities.
A document drawn up by the Association of Directors of Children's Services, which represents the head of children's departments in English local authorities, claims that new annual performance profiles being developed by Ofsted are "not fit for purpose". Separately schools have expressed concerns about the new school inspection regime under which they cannot be rated good if their exam results are low – regardless of their social context. They can also be marked down on routine matters of safety.
Lawnswood school in Leeds, a rapidly improving school with a good reputation, was penalised after a survey suggested that 1.3% of parents reported their child did not "feel safe" there. A second school was judged to be inadequate because inspectors said the fence around the playground was low enough for children to be abducted and another failed because inspectors were offered coffee before they were asked for identification.
John Dunford, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said schools felt they were being "caught out" in inspections. "It's brought in a climate of great anxiety because you don't know whether the inspector will trick you on safeguarding."
A report from a powerful committee of MPs, to be published shortly, also criticises Ofsted for having insufficiently trained inspectors and for relying too much on exam data in their inspection of schools.
Barry Sheerman, chair of the children, schools and families select committee, said schools in challenging areas felt "aggrieved" that even when they were doing well against the odds, they could be failed for low GCSE results.
A spokesman for Ofsted said: "We are disappointed to hear the ADCS criticisms but have to say that their views just don't accord with what we are being told by directors and frontline social workers who have actually experienced our children's services inspections. The feedback we are getting is much more positive."
The new EU foreign minister is an alumnus of my sixth-form college in Wigan
There was one crucial detail missing from this week's many profiles of Baroness Ashton, the EU's first high representative for common foreign and security policy.
Before she worked for CND or enrolled to study economics at Bedford College, or became director of Business in the Community, chairwoman of Hertfordshire Health Authority, a junior education minister, a peer, leader of the Lords or European Commissioner, long before any of that, Cathy Ashton was a pupil at Up Holland grammar school, just outside Wigan.
In 1977, Up Holland grammar became Winstanley College, a sixth-form college you may recognise as having ranked first in the Guardian's countrywide collation of A-level results, but which to me will always be a low-lying straggle of buildings, mainly built in the 1950s, where I spent some of the happiest times of my life.
In those days, our most famous alumnus, and a point of much pride, was Richard Ashcroft from the Verve. The years that followed would bring many more notable former students: the British 400m runner David Grindley, footballer Leon Osman and numerous Hollyoaks actors. And now, with considerable pride, we can add one more to that list: one of the most powerful women in the world.
Robert Yates returns to the streets of Liverpool, where he grew up, to report on a story of deprivation and hope
In a parade of shops on County Road in Walton, north Liverpool, a couple of signs compete for attention. "Slip! Trip!" offers the first, in the window of Walton Accident Claims – the jaunty exclamation marks explained perhaps by the possibility that there's some money at least in injury. A couple of doors along, at Pilgrim Travel Specialists ("Official agent of the Liverpool Archdiocesan pilgrimage"), a poster advertises deals on flights to Fatima, Knock and Lourdes.
I wander in for a chat, and leave – courtesy of the amiable gentleman keeping shop – with a printed prayer. "Lord, enlighten me on my path," I read, and my irreligious soul wonders if many booking their trip to Fatima are enlightened enough to pop next door for more worldly conversation at the accident specialists.
Consolation of one sort or another might be the order of the day in these parts, you might figure, if you had just spent some time studying the different indices of deprivation, the governmental way of measuring national misery. Deprivation, according to these calculations, has seven dimensions: income; employment; health, deprivation and disability; education, skills and training; barriers to housing and services; crime; and living environment.
However, problems – like privileges – are apt to cling to one another. Areas tend not to score well on, say, average income, and do badly on health, or vice versa; while if a place finds itself at the bottom of a table on housing, the likelihood is that its educational score will be equally poor. These are all-or-nothing tables.
So, if life chances in Britain are still all too determined by an accident of birth, and you wanted to get on, where would you least want to be born? View the information through the prism of Westminster constituencies – the places where we'll be voting within a few months – and there'd be a few contenders for this grim crown. A seat in inner Birmingham, perhaps, or one in Manchester, a couple in inner London; and while Scotland has its own indices of deprivation, Glasgow East's comparable figures would win it a shout. And then there's Walton.
Walton has a certain advantage, at least for me: I grew up there. The first 18 years of my life – I left for university in the mid-80s – were largely played out within its boundaries. My old school stands just across the way from Pilgrim Travel and Walton Accident Claims; my old home is down the road; my parents, and much of my extended family, still live in these parts.
When, as happens most weeks, a new survey lands on my desk highlighting some social ill or other – we must be the most scrutinised nation on earth – a thought crosses my mind: I bet my old patch gets a mention.
The latest "starring" role for Walton came just two weeks ago. It stands at the very top of "Welfare Britain", a table ranking Westminster seats according to their number of benefit claimants. Walton has a total of 28.9% of adults on out-of-work benefits (made up of 15.5% on incapacity benefits, 4.6% on lone parent benefits and 8.8% on Jobseeker's Allowance) .The nature of this table – or at least the way it was pounced upon by some newspapers and politicians – fits with the temper of the times. No longer just a series of dispassionate numbers, the table points to much more charged territory – we're talking character, responsibility, morality. In the wake of the economic crash, we've been in the mood for self-scrutiny; it's as if a veil has been removed after the years of apparent boom, and we're now seeing parts of our country afresh. Something has gone wrong, runs the chatter; something is broken, and that something tends to be located in places like Walton.
My interest was not just in finding out what, if anything, was broken. There are other questions to ask. What's changed in a place like Walton over the past several decades? Let's be honest, we're hardly starting from scratch here. Parts of Liverpool and Glasgow have been heading tables of social problems for decades. Are these places better or worse than they were 30, 20, 10 years ago – or, more to the point, 12 years ago, when Labour took power? For a key Conservative charge in the forthcoming election campaign will be that Labour has done nothing, or worse than nothing, for these places, its heartlands. They don't come much more heartlands than Walton. In the 2005 general election the local MP, Peter Kilfoyle, secured the third biggest majority in the country. His share of the vote was 72.8%; the Conservatives polled 5.9%. As a child, I don't remember ever seeing a Tory candidate canvassing in the streets. Though that, in part, might be because my later teenage years coincided with Walton's role in one of the most colourful – to put it at its most neutral – episodes in recent political history.
The area was the base of the Militant Tendency, the entryist sect within the Labour party which effectively took control of Liverpool council in the early 1980s. I went to a few local "Militant youth" meetings but got sniffed out as a class traitor in the making: I was beginning to fancy myself as a reader of tricksy novels, while the Militant-prescribed texts extended only to Robert Tressell's Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and more or less anything by Marx.
"There'll definitely be a more visible Conservative presence this time," says Tony Caldeira, a local businessman (he runs the Caldeira "cushion empire") and chair of the City of Liverpool Conservatives. "People are saying 'Thank goodness you're back.' But it's not going to happen overnight."
I warn Peter Kilfoyle of the Conservatives' march – or hesitant steps – into his territory. It's not a threat that appears to overly concern him. "What would they know about anything? I mean really..." Kilfoyle has spent some time inside the ministerial tent (he was a junior minister in Blair's first term), but appears most at home as a "friendly critic" of the leadership. In response, however, to Tory accusations of Labour neglect of the heartlands, he shows no ambivalence in choosing his enemy.
"When they were in power, the Tories just ignored the Waltons of the world. The problems of housing, of unemployment, of education were just put in the 'too hard' file and ignored." By 1997, after 18 years of Conservative government, already difficult problems had become "ever more complex to deal with", he argues.
This will be in line with the government's defence of its record over the next several months. In its account of the past 30 years or so, Labour's job has been about trying to mend what had been terribly neglected. If, at times, their efforts have resulted in what seem like bodge jobs, it's a mark, the government will argue, of how bad things had got by 1997.
What's more, Kilfoyle points to successes with the very young (especially via Sure Start), in improving schools, and some regeneration of housing ("Though you'll see there are ways to go in some areas").
The apportioning of blame or success over the past 30 years has to be seen, Kilfoyle concedes, "against a backdrop of 100 years or more. The role of the Waltons has been to provide a huge pool of unskilled labour. Finding ways ahead, once that labour was no longer needed, was never going to be easy..."
Despite the flight from many of our large cities and towns in the latter half of the 20th century (Liverpool's population has declined by more than 250,000 over the past 40 years, to 450,000), the country's population bases are still, it could be argued, overly shaped by the economic imperatives of earlier centuries. Towns grew during the industrial revolution because they were in the right spot – perhaps close to sources of coal or close to the sea.
If populations were purely determined by availability of work, the shift away from the country's Waltons might have been even greater. Not that such upheaval was desirable, or indeed practical – at least, that has been the consensus view of British governments of all stripes, who have made it their business to persuade industry to develop in the "wrong" parts of the country. In the 1980s and 90s the Tories encouraged private enterprise into deprived areas, while Labour has tried a whole host of ways to provoke urban renewal, led by the New Deal for Communities.
The right-leaning think-tank Policy Exchange has argued that the prospects for those living in areas that have received significant levels of assistance have "not been transformed in the past decade". This has nothing to do, notes one of the reports (Success And The City) with populations' intrinsic intelligence or ability (in case there were any doubts on that score!) Instead, it backs the "locational" theory of success and failure: "The key difference is that the people of Swindon live in Swindon, and the people of Warrington live in Warrington."
Much fun was had with one Policy Exchange report, Cities Unlimited, published in August 2008. The top line – which ran in news bulletins, and provoked many a teasing column – was that those living in the depressed north should move south, a sort of mass migration to London, Cambridge and Oxford, with southern cities expanding to accommodate them.
However, to ask if public investment in depressed parts of Britain has been worth it seems only sensible. Which is not to say that once asked, one might conclude, along with Policy Exchange, that it is akin to throwing good money after bad.
Another view might be to see such investments as decent attempts to resist or at least modify history. And, since it does not appear entirely viable for Liverpool and Glasgow et al to up sticks, what else is there to do?
As part of the Tories' advance guard into the inner cities, Chris Grayling, Shadow Home Secretary, has also acquired a second title as the Shadow Minister for Merseyside. "Because his mother once met someone who knew someone from the Wirral," quips Kilfoyle.
In Liverpudlian political circles, mocking Grayling, who makes a monthly visit to the city, has become something of a local sport. It's true that he needs to work on his inner Scouseness – after a tour of Toxteth, he managed to suggest that Manchester United's Gary Neville, quite open in his dislike of Liverpudlians, would be a "good role model" for local youths.
But what does it matter, I say to Kilfoyle, that Grayling is an outsider to the city, that he doesn't spend his weekends fretting over Everton or Liverpool scores?
"It matters because he, they [the Tories] don't have a clue about places like this. We're talking about different reference points, different societies..."
But are we? Kilfoyle's riff on Grayling leads him to a central question, the central question, when analysing the Waltons of the country. Are they just different in degree – poorer, not so well-educated, not so well-housed, and under-employed? Or are they different in kind, places apart, where different values apply?
A group of women, long-term unemployed, in their 20s and 30s, are talking me through the pros and cons of taking a minimum-wage job. Listening to one, her approach resembles that of a business planner analysing options. She has come close to accepting a couple of jobs, but if she worked full-time, with the loss of housing benefit, and the additional cost of childcare, she would be £30 a week worse off. So she sticks on benefits, she says. This is offered with no apology – and perhaps none is due. Positions reversed, would I act any differently? I can certainly understand the calculation. She doesn't strike me as lazy, just working to financial incentives. Still, I suppose I expect some sort of shrug, some recognition of drawing on the collective purse.
There was a passage in David Cameron's speech to the Tory conference this autumn which spoke to this scenario. "In Gordon Brown's Britain, if you're a single mother with two kids, earning £150 a week, the withdrawal of benefits and the additional taxes mean that for every extra pound you earn, you keep just 4p." In fairness, these are situations which the government's welfare reform is endeavouring – tardily perhaps – to sort out.
Another of the women tells me about a recent night out, and the extortionate levels now being charged in the local clubs. So it cost her £6 to get in, £4 for a drink, £1 for a smoking band – "£11 straight away." I'm not expecting people on benefits to lock themselves up, to not socialise until they are back on PAYE. But what hits home is the matter-of-fact manner in which the anecdote is relayed. Its point is not the need for an occasional blowout, but the cost of the drinks. Had I expected some comforting platitude, some polite phrases that recognised the debt to others' taxes?
One does not have to be a sociologist to recognise how "benefits culture" develops. Children grow up, not seeing much in the way of economic activity. Their parents have been unemployed, grandparents, too. It's what they know. When it comes to their turn to sign on, they deal with it, as if it's natural.
Unemployment running through generations is now one of the routine markers of deprivation. But it's only when you're in a place like Walton, where this link from grandparent to parent to child is all too visible, that you realise just how quickly the generations can pass by.
"We're now up to about fifth-generation unemployment," says Frank Prendergast of the Breckfield and North Everton Community Centre, a smart, nimble organisation (generating most of its own funds) whose remit is to get involved in more or less anything which might improve the area. "There are many families where the role models – the parent disappearing from bed and coming home in the evening – are often just not there."
Walking away from my meeting with the women, and back through the main shopping drag of County Road, heading towards Anfield, I thought of how often I'd read reports from the poorer parts of our cities, and shaken my head at the routine descriptions.
Against a backdrop of discount supermarkets and shabby housing, locals – often fat locals or prematurely aged locals or struggling-with-drink locals – would shuffle along streets strewn with used needles. I'd decide that the reporter had pressed the "broken society" magic key on his keyboard. But I was beginning to think that I'd best use the magic key myself.
Nothing in the constituency is as deflating as the sight of the "V-streets" (Venice, Vienna...) that press against the Kop End of Anfield, Liverpool FC's ground. A Walton boast is that it's the only Westminster seat to accommodate two Premiership football teams; and if outsiders visit Walton the overwhelming odds are that they're on their way to either Anfield or Goodison Park, home of Everton.
Most of the terraced houses of the "V-Streets" are empty, their windows boarded with metallic sheets, bearing the City of Liverpool crest. Much of the area – the most deprived part of this most deprived constituency – is being knocked down, a process which won't be complete for several years. Every so often, a satellite dish announces there's a house still occupied, and in one glorious instance of a bid to cling on to some dignity, the owner has customised the front door with a little mock Tudor.
I don't remember the constituency ever looking this grim, this forbidding. Nor do I remember drugs being dealt by day on County Road; though what else might I want to buy?
Returning to the main thoroughfare, I note plenty of places to eat, if you want your food fast and fried; several bars of the vertical drinking sort (the tiny number of seats allowing bodies to pack in tight of a weekend or on match days), a couple of pawn shops, several "pound" shops and several more of those personal injuries specialists, a real growth area since my day.
There are shops and small businesses just like these on my local high street, in Islington, north London. But, there, the discount supermarkets stand close to a designer furniture shop where just a handful of items can account for an average annual salary. And yes, there are pound shops and "all-day breakfast" cafés, but a few doors away there's a master butcher, plus a fishmonger and the auction house where my wife and myself engage in our bourgeois rights to buy a piece of antique furniture.
This high street mix – typical in many parts of inner London – results from the wealthy and the poor living cheek by jowl. By contrast, one of the key defining features of a heartlands territory like Walton is that it is socially uniform. The professional classes don't live here. Shopping is, of course, the least of it. The lack of social mix will have more profound consequences elsewhere – in the local schools, for instance. The liberal dream of school as a place where children from homes of very different means and different expectations might get to know each other at least remains a possibility in mixed inner London.
When I was at school, I can't remember any friends whose parents were not unskilled workers. (Among those who worked, that is.) The teachers and doctors accounted almost exclusively for the professionals in the area (and they would tend to live elsewhere).
The picture remains the same or is possibly now even more polarised. The estimable Joseph Rowntree Foundation has outlined how increasingly over the past three decades, in Britain – inner London apart – the rich and poor have clustered into ghettos. In crude terms, this means a place such as Walton has lost ever more of the small numbers who might be defined – in terms of the key markers such as income and health – as average Britons.
This isolation of the heartlands strikes me as key. There are people every bit as poor as the struggling Walton resident only a skip away from the Georgian townhouses of the Islington street where my family and I live. But they will be exposed every day to other lives. They might be poor, but they see, says Professor Richard Webber, expert in classifying social groups, "evidence of the rich, and the very act of seeing might offer a ladder of opportunity." The Walton child, by contrast, doesn't "meet other lives, doesn't see middle-class 'specimens'," says Webber.
I suppose I now qualify as a specimen. Feeling a bit bleak, I pop into a bar for a drink. Trying to make sense of my thoughts, certain words – "harsh, brutal" – keep popping into my mind. Everything feels harsher now, more brutal. Many more shops have heavy security protection with counters replaced by grilles; warning signs, not welcome notices, decorate the doors.
Liverpool as a whole has, of course, recently regained a place in the sun – including its year as European City of Culture in 2008. Nobody I speak to in Walton is displeased that the city is now a destination for weekend breaks, that its fine architecture and arts are gaining a wider audience. But for some locals, there's a sense that the centre can sometimes seem to work against its neighbouring areas; that the centre can absorb available resources. Many mention the flight of the police from the area.
"Town is a great place to be, very safe, and there are police on every corner. But try and find one on County Road when the gangs are up to no good at night," says Peter Kilfoyle. Grand designs for our old cities are bound, at times, to harm the less elegant quarters.
At my parents' place, later, my dad wants to temper my observations. A retired building worker, and sage in this as in most things, he doesn't disagree with my view of the increased harshness of the area's main thoroughfares. But perhaps I'm trying too hard, he suggests. If I were not "on research" – but at home for Christmas, say – we wouldn't go for a drink on County Road. Instead, we might head for the warmth and good humour of the local working men's club – where for years, in his spare time, my dad kept the books, after teaching himself accounting.
His lesson is a good one. Sometimes you find what you are looking for. If you've got a camera, or notepad, it's not difficult to find "broken society" vignettes – kids throwing stones, or more likely aimlessly kicking a can. But there will also be other kids, less visible, trying to find some peace to do their homework. Those are Walton lives, too.
It's also good to hear my dad's enthusiasm about some of the changes of the past few years – he raves about the "brilliant" Sure Start nursery my niece has just graduated from, detailing the care and the expertise of the staff.
The following day, I determine to seek out good things. To Tory claims that not enough has been done in such deprived areas, the regular Labour response is: look to the infrastructure. And it's true that, starting from the Pilgrim Travel Centre (the prayer still sitting in my pocket), I could head in several directions and find examples of substantial investment.
Turn left, walk a couple of hundred yards, and I'm outside the Breeze Hill Neighbourhood Health Centre, a £6m product of a public-private partnership involving, among others, Liverpool Primary Care Trust and healthcare firm Assura. Inside, in addition to a suite of primary care services, there are two GP surgeries, and the appearance of a clean, efficient machine that means business.
Equally radiant with its newness and expensive looks is the nearby Alsop Community Sports Centre. The centre – which opened in the summer of 2007, a joint venture between the city council and the Big Lottery Fund – is built on the site of the old Queens Drive baths, which had been standing (barely standing towards the end of their run) for over 100 years. I spent hours of my summer holidays inside, horsing around its Edwardian columns, divebombing from its shabby genteel balcony. But for all its decadent charm, a visit in the 70s and 80s never left you in any doubt that you had missed the pool at its best.
By contrast, the local children get to enjoy their new centre box-fresh. The first time I visited, 18 months ago, it wasn't the facilities, impressive as they were – 25m pool, well-appointed gym, cricket nets, sport hall – which left a mark, but the very idea of state-of-the art gear in Walton. You can get used to making do.
During school hours, the sports centre is used exclusively by the pupils of my old school, Alsop High, the largest comprehensive in Liverpool. The school itself has also had a costly makeover, including new technology rooms, and a new music, art and drama building.
It is in schools, generally, that investment is most visible. Venture a mile towards the city centre and you fetch up at North Liverpool Academy, whose futuristic exterior appears to have landed in the middle of Everton from a brighter, happier place.
These major developments on the Walton landscape – especially of the educational sort – fit into a national picture. Capital funding available for investment in education went from £683m in 1996-67 to £5.1bn by 2005-06. In an area such as this, the buildings – above and beyond their practical virtues – are meant to work as statements. They are designed to reassert the basics of the welfare state in the poorest parts of the country – here, too, you can have the best.
It's New Jerusalem again, but this time brought to you via more complex, more modern financial arrangements. (About half of the funding on schools structure has been Private Finance Initiative funded, through different schemes, including Building Schools For The Future.) In a speech in 2004, the then prime minister Tony Blair promised that investment in schools would "see the entire secondary school building stock upgraded and refurbished in the greatest school renewal programme in British history".
"We're getting there, it's starting to look good," says Alsop's very impressive headmaster, Phil Jamieson, signalling the new developments and more to come. (Some of the children are still taught in Portakabins.) The latest Ofsted report described the school as "outstanding", in an inner-city area "with many social disadvantages". The proportion of students eligible for free school meals is three times the national average; those with learning difficulties more than twice the national average. At Alsop, noted the report, students make "exceptional progress" and there's a "strong trend of improvement".
I first saw Alsop again – after heading off for college, post A-levels – when it featured on television. Some of the scenes for the Jimmy McGovern-scripted drama Hearts & Minds (broadcast on Channel 4 in 1995), were shot at the school. The school was fictional but recognisable, and the drama brought into focus fractured recollections, allowing me to convert remembered, lived messiness into a subject for debate. In short, the drama asked – or at least this is how I chose to take it – how far schools, in hard-pressed areas, could, or should, be a haven from their environment. How much should they be a shelter from social problems, a place for learning, pure and simple, where potential could flourish?
Back at the real Alsop, in 2009, and across much of the state sector, the argument has been won by the contextualists – that is, by those who argue that you can only properly assess a school's performance by looking at its "raw material". Formally, this measure is represented by the Context Value Added (CVA) which has accompanied all school attainment tables since 2002 (initially just as Value Added).
The job of CVA is to see how well a school improves pupils, taking into account prior attainment, on entry, and other factors outside a school's control – chiefly levels of deprivation.
But the CVA can also throw you, confuse you (and, dare one say, offer false comfort?) A little while back, my mother called me to say that my old school was one of the best performing in the country; she'd read as much in the local paper, she said, and sent me the relevant clip. How could this be possible when, even after the huge improvement wrought by Mr Jamieson and his crack team, 33% of its pupils achieved Level 2 Threshold – which equates to five or more GCSEs at grade C or above, including English and maths – against a national average of 49.7%?
It's possible via the magic of CVA – which also provides an efficient insight into how divided we've become. Is Britain now such a patchwork quilt of extreme expectations that what in one school might be cause for complaint can be another school's masterly performance?
Sometimes it clarifies your thinking to look at the other extreme. Last year I spent some time at Eton. If Alsop and Eton have little else in common, there was at least a shared uniformity of social background in their pupils. And the more time I spent with the boys and the "products" of very different schools – both my brothers-in-law are Old Etonians – the clearer it seemed that to blame one sort of school for failure is as difficult as praising another for success.
By and large, pupils end up at Eton because their families are doing well for themselves; by and large, they then go on themselves to have good school careers and good careers full stop. To attempt to determine how much of this is down to the school and how much down to the pupils' background is a tricky task. Their parents are well placed in the professions, in politics, in finance. The boys do not need to do much research to see how things work; they walk along the corridor at home or at school, or telephone a member of the family.
So even if a pupil performs well at a school such as Alsop, there are the hidden ladders to success not caught in league tables. One of the country's leading employers, Terry Leahy, chief executive of Tesco (who has served on government committees to advise on education), told me of his brutal phrase for this practical knowledge exhibited by some children, and not by others. It was, he said, "a knowing how to win". It came with a package of attributes, he added, including "confidence, poise, an ability to project". And when he saw people, in interview and elsewhere, with these attributes, he could usually predict their background – "from the middle classes and beyond".
Mr Jamieson asked me for my impressions, seeing the old school again. How had it changed? Portakabins aside, there was much less of a sense of make-do. You could see the pupils taking pleasure in the quality of the music equipment or the new gym. Games lessons during my last years at school entailed jumping on a bus for a 10-minute ride to the pitch – changing into our gear on the bus – before running around for what was left of the hour, and changing back into our uniform on the bus. (A shower could wait.)
The children at Alsop seemed happier, more civilised than they – than we – were in my day. I would bet that, on average, the school was more successful (I left school before 1988, when the league tables were introduced, so comparisons are difficult). But, at the top end, was there a limit on ambition? Should not a school like Alsop – the largest in Liverpool, one of our great cities – be producing a host of regular candidates for Oxbridge, say? There hadn't been any in recent years, said Mr Jamieson. On a previous trip, as we walked around the school, we came to a board listing recent school leavers who had gone on to university – mostly local, I noted, quite a few to the "new" universities.
The handful of us who went to university when I was at the school would never have dreamed of staying at home, I said; leaving was part of the adventure. Economic reasons, Jamieson figured, a reluctance to incur too much debt – you had a grant, he reminded me.
In 1994, only 12.8% of students lived at home; now the numbers have risen to more than 20%, and the majority of those are from the lower socio-economic backgrounds and attend the new universities. The prospect of higher education has become routine in Walton. Good news. But have the pupils' stories become less special, less transformative? →
← At Alsop, in my day, the numbers in the sixth form were tiny; there must have been about 15 of us, from a fifth-form of about 250. But the handful of us who then went on to university mostly went to elite institutions. An effect of the small numbers, perhaps.
But there was also something else going on, something more general, something less specific to my school. Maybe we benefited from the vestiges of a healthy elitism, courtesy of the last generation of teachers who had spent their early years in grammar schools (Alsop became comprehensive in the 60s, but some veteran teachers, shaped by the grammar schools, were still around in my day). With pupils they could tease into developing an interest, they did so with a passion, and wanted to see them thrive at the highest level. (A warm, late night during the summer holidays – I must have been about 15 – I came home to find my mother exalting one of my teachers, a lovely, clever man, then in his 60s, who had paid a visit, in his time away from school, solely to offer kind, encouraging words.) These teachers made no apologies for preferring Oxbridge to the local polytechnic (as it was then).
Returning to earth, from my musings, is it possible, I asked Jamieson, that "value added", and the ethos that informs it, limits ambition? He thought not, and cited the example of an exceptional Alsop pupil who had just secured 13 GCSEs, made up entirely of As and A stars. It motivated and encouraged both teachers and pupils – it showed them how far they had come.
Received wisdom has it that league tables are mostly studied by the pushy and anxious middle class. This might well be so. But talking to Walton parents, I was surprised how frequently they mentioned "value added". One mother offered a "we're doing well despite how deprived we are" appraisal of school performance, which sort of spooked me – it spooked me even more when I heard a 13-year old, from another Walton school, utter similar lines.
As a child, do you know that you are deprived if you're not continually reminded of it? Perhaps you do – you watch television, note other lives and compare, contrast. But in the recent past, these disadvantages were not so formalised, not so much a solid part of the landscape as they are now – certainly not for school children. I can't remember ever having conversations with my schoolmates about how "disadvantaged" we were.
Alsop forges links with welfare bodies in the area, with groups dealing with delinquency, with drugs. Also, within the school are six full-time Pastoral Support Mentors, who work with pupils in a "non-judgmental way". There's an area within the school where pupils can drop in, informally, I'm told. But staff can also refer a student – if, for instance, the teacher thinks the child has social or family difficulties.
Teaching in a school like Alsop is evidently no longer just about the 3Rs. "You can't ignore what's around you," says Jamieson, "social problems become school problems..."
Of all the social problems in Walton, the most intractable was housing, Peter Kilfoyle had said. And, as he ran through the issues, most seemed to be the same as those I had grown up with. Too many people were still living in sub-standard conditions. But how to make good without disrupting solid communities? How to fund new homes if councils have little money? And – more of a new challenge, this – how to revive a diminishing appetite for social housing?
When did social housing begin to lose its force as a repository of hope, of a better future, and become an option of last resort? The 1950s? The 60s? It was still cause for celebration in our family as late as the early 80s, when my parents, after years of trying, managed to secure a social house. I remember clearly the sense of hope my family felt, watching from the door of our soon-to-be demolished house as a new low-rise estate took shape a couple of hundreds yards away.
The house had long been overripe for demolition – it was a "classic" two-up, two down terrace, outside lavatory – though my parents never stopped endeavouring to modernise it. But securing priority on the council list then, as now, was not always a straightforward affair. After one visit to the housing department, my mother laughed as she recounted to my father, my sister and myself (then already teenagers) that the housing officer had told her if she were to have another baby, a council flat from the existing stock might be ours. (Another baby would mean more "points" in the Need League Table.)
Eventually, however, new stock was approved by the local authorities and, new baby no longer necessary, we were assigned one of the new homes. Our family, it seemed, had been deemed deserving – that both my parents worked, and paid the rent on time probably helped. My sister and myself – well past the age when we felt comfortable undressing in front of each other – would have our own rooms for the first time. There would be a small garden instead of a backyard; we'd have a bathroom for the first time. But many of our neighbours were moved elsewhere – to older housing provision, to "difficult" estates.
By then we were already anomalies, in our new social house. We were anomalies because the heat was already elsewhere. The "property- owning democracy", to borrow Anthony Eden's phrase, put into practice by Margaret Thatcher, was on the march. The Housing Act that came into force in October 1980 gave the then more than 5 million tenants of council houses or flats the right to buy their home – at a discount of up to 50 per cent. By 1982, 400,000 had exercised this right and, by 2003, more than 1.5m council homes had been sold.
The act provoked a train of events with two distinct outcomes. A majority of Britons now had, and retain (and why not?) the taste for owning their own home. But those estates, where the right to buy did not seem an attractive or plausible option – especially in the north, and especially in areas of high unemployment – became increasingly removed from mainstream society.
We've now learned to call these "sink estates" (not surprisingly, the phrase has its origins in the 1980s): grim enclosures of poverty and crime, and often, as in Anfield, not in monolithic tower blocks but in strung-out streets.
Talking to the few remaining residents of the "V-Streets" and its surroundings, I'm reminded how in these designated areas of deprivation, one sometimes felt that new housing had become a cure-all. The prevailing view was often that if an estate were knocked down an area could start again. As if everything – all the social ills – could be sorted with a re-build.
"Come back in 10 years' time and this will be paradise," one of the last residents standing tells me, only half in jest.
"It's not where you come from but where you're going to," proclaimed David Cameron, soon after becoming leader of the Conservative Party, articulating the key belief of our time, the secular faith before which we all bow down.
But what happens when where you come from determines where you're going to, ever more the case when inequality increases, as it has done over the past decade?
What happens, it seems, is that we get confused. We confuse issues of practicality (sorting out welfare reform, for instance, eradicating benefit traps), with morality, damning too many as lazy, cynical, lacking in character (character was one thing that did not seem to be wanting in Walton).
"I'm getting ready for a bath of morality," says one nursery teacher in Walton. She tells me she fears that this bath will be accompanied by reduced funding – though the Conservatives have claimed that Sure Start is safe with them. "And all the progress we're making with kids in the area, getting them early when we can be of influence, might well be lost."
What else are she and her colleagues trying to do, she asks, but nurture "self-reliance"? Observing the older children, her graduates, beginning to make their way through schools in the area, she feels there has been some success – "self-reliance spreading out, like some benign virus into Walton!" she laughs. So, no, in her mind, at least, Walton is not broken. Not yet. "We're pretty stretched, though..."★
Three cheers for Barbara Ellen, a beacon of sanity in the hysteria that surrounds degrees for nursing ("It's about time we gave nurses a degree of respect", Opinion). Why does bringing nurses in England into line with their counterparts in other parts of the UK, their colleagues in midwifery and other health professions seem a bridge too far? Nostalgia certainly has something to do with it. We all hark back to the "good old days"; the problem is that there has been no "golden age" of nursing.
No, it is a question of understanding the demands that modern healthcare make on nurses. No other profession has to defend itself against the absurd accusation of "too clever to care" or "too posh to wash".
Woe betide anyone who thinks caring is a simple science. Nurses need to be well educated to support patients in the fast-moving world of healthcare. Caring, compassionate and clever are what the public and the healthcare system demand and deserve from modern nursing.
But the system also needs to be designed to enable nurses to make the best possible use of their skills. Nurses want to work in an environment where their skills are recognised and valued with the right support systems. Degree-level registration recognises this and is an important step in securing the caring and qualified nursing workforce we need for the future.
Professor Anne Marie Rafferty
head of Florence Nightingale School of Nursing & Midwifery
London SE1
■ As a graduate nurse, I would like to reply to those who have made comments to the effect that graduate nurses will be "too posh to wash". More than a fifth of nurses in England and Wales are already graduates. It is important to recognise that the modular degree programmes they undertake are both theoretical and practical. In addition to compulsory modules, students select modules that relate to their own area of work.
As a paediatric nurse, I have colleagues who have undertaken modules on the care of children with diabetes in a community setting; caring for children with burns; nursing babies on a ventilator; and caring for adolescents in hospital. Nurse training must keep up with their expanding role and I believe that becoming an all-graduate profession is the right way forward.
So are we too posh to wash? Despite the employment of housekeepers and care workers on hospital wards, most of us still carry out those traditional tasks. They contribute to nursing being such a deeply satisfying profession.
Alan Griffith
Leeds
■ When all "nurses" have degrees, we shall, indeed, have no one to do the grunt work. There will be no response to the patient in pain or desperately waiting to have help to the lavatory, more elderly patients will leave hospital suffering from serious malnutrition, and death on a general ward will continue to be an undignified, lonely experience. We will have reached the point at which the profession loves it computers and calculations and despises the loving care that used to be its hallmark.
Joyce Brand
Leintwardine
Herefordshire
■ Yes, public-school boys continue to long for "nursie" as much as they continue to seek comfort in suet puddings. There was no other comfort. The problem is that these public-school boys, now in positions of authority, including David Cameron, become misogynists.
That they don't know it makes them all the more dangerous. Hence the attitude towards nurses. The "keep 'em in their place" attitude stems from two sources: betrayal by the mother who sent them away, often at eight or younger; and lack of love from the surrogate mothers (matrons) they found at school whose job didn't include loving them. No wonder the fury spills out in continuing patriarchal attitudes and behaviour towards women, especially those in the "caring professions".
Jane Barclay
Exeter
New skills could be included in literacy lessons
Primary school children should be taught to understand the "language" of advertisers and spin doctors to stop them becoming too susceptible to sophisticated campaigns, it has been claimed.
Steve Fuller, a professor of sociology at Warwick University, believes that "media literacy" should be taught to children from the age of five beside maths and English. "It should have the same significance as reading, writing and numeracy skills – a fundamental skill that all people need to be considered fully functioning adults," he said.
Fuller, who is leading a major academic programme into why people copy behaviour, argued that lessons could help young people – and adults – be less gullible by understanding how advertising works and how to criticise it. They would also be less susceptible to subliminal messages.
"To a certain extent, kids already have this skill and they build it up through trial and error but I think it should be taught in a systematic way," said Fuller, who pointed out that such messages could influence the political direction of the country.
The notion of the spin doctor, he said, had blurred the lines between advertising, PR and political campaigning. "If people are susceptible to certain types of messages then it can be easy to play on that."
Cary Bazalgette, chair of the Media Education Association and former head of education at the British Film Institute, said that the necessary skills should be covered in literacy lessons. When children start school they have often watched films such as Shrek or Toy Story that are much more complex than the books they are exposed to, she said. "We have a public discourse saying television is bad for kids. It is a literacy that we just ignore. Yet children understand the language of moving image media," she added.
But Tim Bell, one of the best known figures in the communications industry, said that teaching children how to be critical in this way was a waste of time. Lord Bell added: "What we need are people who are educated and have open minds."
In August, journalist Toby Young announced in this newspaper that he wanted to found a new type of 'free' school where access to a good education is not based on income. Three months on, his biggest problem is battling bureaucracy and accusations of middle-class snobbery
I emerged from a meeting with the DCSF (Department for Children, Schools and Families) on Thursday with my head spinning. So much jargon and so many acronyms. Apparently, my group is engaged in an effort to set up a 4FE (four-form entry) PPS (parent-promoted school) and our fate turns on whether we can convince PfS (Partnership for Schools) that the LEA's (local education authority) PPP (pupil place planning) underestimated the expected increase in demand over the next 10 years. If we can, BSF (Building Schools for the Future) might fund a "new build". Or would the money come from the SCS (schools capital stream)?
I have been leading the efforts of a 250-strong local parents group to set up a new school in Acton, west London, since last September and by far the biggest obstacle is that the process is designed to be navigated by experienced officials, not amateurs like me. Ed Balls, the schools secretary, has said he wants more parent-promoted schools and he has dropped the requirement that academy sponsors have to put up £2m, but the process needs to be made a lot simpler.
The DCSF has advised us to work closely with our local authority, yet the children's services department of Ealing council isn't set up to accommodate parent initiatives either. A new high school is being built in Greenford and the initial suggestion was that our group should make a bid to run that. But the site is five miles away and if the school is oversubscribed, we wouldn't be able to get our own children in. That was the fate that befell one of the founders of Elmgreen in West Norwood, the only successful example of a parent-promoted school.
We want to set up an academy a bit closer to home and we're working with the local authority to persuade the DCSF that there's a genuine need for a new school in the area. Unless you can persuade them that the demand for places is going to outstrip supply, you can't get a funding agreement. Our task will be easier if the Tories win the next election, because they have no such qualms about over-capacity. Michael Gove has announced he wants to create 220,000 new secondary school places — and if some of them end up being surplus to requirements, so much the better. He wants there to be competition between school providers. In practice, this means Gove will drop the need for academy sponsors to enlist the support of their local authorities or demonstrate an insufficiency of supply.
Critics of the Tory policy claim that the money to pay for these 220,000 places would otherwise be spent on existing schools, but that's not strictly true. The Tories are planning to dip into the Building Schools for the Future pot and, as its name implies, a good percentage of that money is earmarked for "new builds".
So the issue isn't whether existing schools will suffer if the DCSF diverts resources to parent promoter groups. It's more a question of who should be allowed to set up new ones: local authorities or local parents?
The Tories believe that giving the money to groups such as ours will be a more efficient use of resources, since it will cut a layer of bureaucracy and the schools we set up will be less costly. In Sweden, for instance, many "free schools" rent commercial office space. If the DCSF doesn't have to finance "new builds", but simply has to provide groups such as mine with enough money to pay the rent, they'll get these 220,000 new places at bargain basement prices.
There's another, more subtle version of the taking-money-away-from-existing-schools argument. If the Tories allow excess capacity in the system then the new, parent-promoted academies may attract students who would otherwise go to local authority schools, thereby leaving them under-subscribed. Since maintained schools are funded on a per capita basis, that will mean a reduction in their annual budgets.
The Tories don't have a problem with this – they want unpopular schools to close – but in reality it is a red herring. The population of the UK grew by nearly 2 million in the five years to 2006 and shows no signs of slowing down. For the foreseeable future, demand for secondary education will always outstrip supply and few maintained schools will end up under-subscribed.
We have no doubt that the school we want to set up will be popular with local parents. Its key differentiators will be rigorous setting, high academic expectations and an old-fashioned system of pastoral care, with a uniform, houses, etc. There is already a school like this in Acton called Twyford. The problem is, it's a Cof E school and it's so oversubscribed you can't get your child in unless you're an Anglican activist. If we set up a similar school, but open to Christians and non-Christians alike, we won't have a problem filling it. I used to describe the kind of school we want to set up as a "comprehensive grammar", but I now refer to it as a "secular faith school".
Our academy may well end up oversubscribed. We organised a public meeting above a pub on Friday, but before I could even open my mouth to tell people about our plans, I had to deal with a long line of local parents wanting to put their children's names down.
I gently explained that our school will be bound by the same admissions code as every other comprehensive. At one stage, the Tories mooted the idea of a first come, first serve admissions policy for parent-promoted academies, but they have now abandoned that.
Not all local parents are enthusiastic. "Obviously, the local comps are not deemed suitable for the Young family," complained one dad in an Acton internet forum. "I think he wants a private-style education for his kids using taxpayers' money."
That's not true. I was educated in the state sector and one of the reasons I'm doing this is because I don't want to educate my children privately. But I would like to have a choice of where to send them. At present, the only local school they'll be eligible for is Acton High. I might well end up sending some of my children there – it's very strong in the arts – but I want the option of a more academically demanding school if I think it would suit some of them better.
Another complaint is that our school will be "elitist" and critics point to the fact that we intend to make Latin compulsory up to the age of 16. Last Sunday on Sky News, Fiona Millar accused our group of wanting to set up a "middle-class" school. But it's patronising to think only middle-class parents are interested in an academically rigorous education. In fact, some of the most enthusiastic responses I've had have been from non-middle-class members of ethnic minorities, particularly Afro-Caribbeans. The students at our academy will reflect the socially and ethnically mixed nature of the area — which is exactly what we want.
The hardest argument to deal with is that it will siphon off all the most interested learners, depriving the local comprehensive of the type of children who will raise the school's overall level of attainment. But the Swedish experience suggests otherwise. The Swedish government made it easier for parents to set up schools in 1992 and today 17% of children of secondary school age are educated in "free schools". However, these schools don't have a monopoly on all the best students. In fact, the level of attainment in "municipal schools" — the Swedish equivalent of comprehensives — has gone up since 1992.
One charge I can't deny is that the majority of people on our steering committee are middle-class. Many are teachers, including a head of year at Mill Hill county school and a director of academic management at Latymer upper school. And, certainly, one of the reasons we're doing this is because we hope to educate at least some of our own children at the new school. But that's a good thing.
If more of the politicians responsible for creating our state education system had sent their children to comprehensives, instead of educating them privately, the system would probably be better than it is.
Whenever I'm feeling disheartened, I think back to a tour I was given of the Renaissance Arts Academy a couple of months ago. This is a charter school in Los Angeles that was set up by two mums who were unhappy with the way music was taught at their local high schools. At their academy, which occupies a converted department store, every student has to learn a stringed instrument and Latin is compulsory. They too were accused of being "elitist", but their school has proved popular with the local community. It's intake is 18% Caucasian, with the rest being Hispanic and African-American, and over half its students are eligible for free school meals. Not only does it provide them with an excellent liberal education, but it consistently gets the best results in the East LA school district.
As the two founders showed me round the school, they were glowing with pride. One day, I hope to return the favour.
You can contact Toby Young via email at newfreeschool@googlemail.com, or visit westlondonfreeschool.com.
Two court cases last week sparked debate about the growth of violence among young women. Here, teenagers talk about the aggression and bullying that is part of their lives
Sitting on a cold concrete step by a north London canal, dressed in pink and black with swinging plastic earrings, thick eyeliner and hair intensively straightened, the girls look like any other teenagers on any other British street.
In a week where two court cases involving vicious assaults by teenage girls ignited fears over a growing trend towards violence among young women, these two 17-year-olds are adamant that there is no such phenomenon as "girl gangs", just groups of mates who look out for each other. "If someone's been talking about you behind your back and saying things that aren't true, or if she's being making threats, then you can front her up, and if it gets mean, then you might end up giving her a slap. You can't just go around being bullied," explains Tish. "But that's not violence, that's self-defence. [If] you are a bully, then you deserve whatever you get. Violence is stabbing and a proper beating. I don't hang out with girls that carry knives."
Jozee raises her eyebrows and starts laughing. In March, egged on by her friends, who claimed her stepbrother had been spreading malicious rumours about her, Tish attacked him with a hunting knife. The bottle of vodka she had drunk beforehand made sure she didn't inflict any serious damage, unlike an incident when she was 15 and broke another girl's nose. "I didn't start that fight, she was bullying me and thought she could turn all my mates against me. She deserved that."
Bullying, both say, is about jealousy. Their stories of teenage feuds and disputes get increasingly complex until Tish is in angry tears talking about the unhappiness of her childhood, a drug-addled mum and her succession of violent boyfriends. Neither will admit to ever carrying knives, as police sirens swing past over the canal bridge – Jozee says it is too risky because police now target young women. "They didn't used to stop girls, but it's different now. Now everyone thinks you're in a girl gang when you're just out, even when you're not fighting or doing anything. I don't even like fights, but you can't walk away if a mate needs you."
The girls' attitude to violence is not unusual, according to the women's rights group Engender. A UK-wide survey by the group of 14- to 21-year-olds found that one in three girls and one in two boys thought there were circumstances in which it could be acceptable to hit a woman or force her to have sex.
While young women aged 16 to 24 still have the highest risk of becoming victims of aggressive crime in this country, recent statistics show that there has been a significant rise in the numbers turning to violence themselves. Youth Justice Board figures for last year show that, while overall crime rates are falling, there is a 50% rise in violent crime committed by young women.
From 2004-5 to 2007-8, there was a 71% rise in the numbers of young women being electronically tagged and a 25% rise in offences committed by girls aged 10 to 17. It means girls are now responsible for around 21% of offences that reach the courts. At the Old Bailey on Wednesday Hatice Can, a 15-year-old runaway from Belvedere, Kent, and Kemi Ajose, 17, from London, were found guilty of causing the death of Rosimeiri Boxall, a 19-year-old whom they tormented and bullied before encouraging her to leap to her death from a third-floor window in May last year.
After delivering the verdict many of the jury were visibly distressed as Can, only 13 at the time of the killing, broke down in tears and hugged her mother.
Last week it was revealed that a hairdresser, Ashleigh Holliman, had rammed a pint glass into another young woman's face in an unprovoked pub attack. Holliman, from Croxley Green, Hertfordshire, admitted causing actual bodily harm to Jennifer Wilson, 20, who helped track her down via Facebook, one of the social networking sites blamed for facilitating a rise in cyberbullying by girls.
As part of last week's Anti-Bullying Week, the website Bebo, which is used mostly by teenagers and pre-teens, added a new button to all its profiles, allowing users to click and report if they suspect anyone of bullying. The "CEOP (Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre) report button" gives access to advice and provides details of local police, as well as giving the user the option of contacting specially trained CEOP officers via an online reporting mechanism. Jim Gamble, chief executive of the CEOP, said it was a "one-click" access to safety advice and directions to local police phone numbers.
But Paul McKeever, chairman of the Police Federation in England and Wales, believes the police have lost so much discretion in how they deal with girls offending that more and more young women are now ending up going through the criminal justice system. He said it was "very sad indeed" that teachers and parents no longer felt able to deal with discipline and bullying, and that the police were becoming more involved in disputes between young people in a way that would have been previously unthinkable.
"We are a much more aggressive society now, and combined with the access young girls have to alcohol, plus police having to behave in a more automated manner, we are seeing far more young women exhibiting obnoxious drunk behaviour which feeds low-level violence." His own daughter was mugged by a girl gang, he said. "Violent young women are not a figment of the police imagination," he added. "The vast majority of violent crime is still committed by young men, but there is undoubtedly a rising phenomenon here.
"But let's also keep things in perspective," said McKeever. "Violent crime is committed by a tiny minority of youngsters and most children are great. Let's not demonise young people. We don't need to be afraid of them."
The trend towards violence by girls is not just happening in Britain. Other western European nations report upward trends in female crime, while research findings reveal that over the past 10 years the rate for violent offences involving adolescent girls in Canada has increased at twice the rate for boys.
In America violence by young women has been rising steeply for 15 years. Among the first to look at the trend, US psychologist Richard Felson said it challenges the deeply held assumption that violence against women is different from violence against men because it is promoted by sexism or hatred of women. He says the motives for violence are the same for all genders – to gain control or retribution and to promote or defend self-image. But women are still far more likely to be victims of gun crime than perpetrators in the US, although in the UK, by August this year, more girls had been caught carrying guns than in the whole of last year.
In Scotland, where the lord advocate Elish Angiolini last year told the Scottish parliament of an increase in "appalling acts of murderous torture" by women against women and in the number of young girls using knives, officials are linking the rise to binge-drinking and an increase in "ladette" behaviour.
"This can be gang-related or it can just be that there is someone in a group who is quite persecuted by the gang leader or their cohorts," said Angiolini. "That is the kind of machismo behaviour that hitherto we would only see from a male offender." She put the blame firmly on "the rise in consumption of alcohol".
But researchers and psychologists point out that the picture is, they believe, more complicated than that.
Dr Susan Batchelor of Glasgow University has written several academic papers on the subject and she points out that, while the figures for serious assault by girls rose by 138% in Scotland in the 10 years from 1997, violence was involved in just 2% of all the offences committed by young women.
In her latest, soon to be published report, Batchelor questions whether more girls getting arrested or charged over violence was really "the dark side to girl power" or whether in fact it was just an "invisible minority" being held up to be used as a scary example of social change for the worse.
Dr Val Besag, an international educational psychologist who works with the anti-bullying charity Kidscape, said both alcohol and shifting aspirations were key to the rise in female violence.
"Girls traditionally were heavily socialised to be nice to each other and to be ladylike," said Besag. "We would say to girls who fall out 'go away and be friends'. You say to a boy 'fight back' or 'keep away from them'. We socialised girls to stay in horrendous marriages, to work harder.
"But actually, despite all that cultural and emotional pressure, evolutionary science tells us girls are just as violent as men but they are much, much slower, it takes much more, for much longer, for us to get aroused to anger – we procrastinate. But if you throw in drink and drugs, then you shortcut that. And you can't expect to say to young women: "Here, we've lifted the glass ceiling. Go out to work but just have a small sherry while your male colleagues are knocking themselves senseless with drugs and drink. But, of course, women's bodies can't process alcohol terribly well.
"All these horrendous cases we are seeing of girls killing or bullying other girls will have drink or drugs involved. You only have to come across a crowd of drunken girls on a dark night in Newcastle to see the potential for violence."
In London on Friday night, Jozee is helping Tish, who is still upset, to get up. They are going off to go drinking at a friend's house.
"I blame my mum sometimes, because I think I've got no chances because of her, but it's not really her fault," says Tish, "I've just got a temper on me."
Labour's drive to increase the number of pupils gaining C grades at GCSE is distorting education and forcing teachers to neglect their highest and lowest achievers, the schools select committee is expected to conclude this month.
After a year-long inquiry into school accountability and inspections, MPs are ready to accuse the government of creating a system that discourages and undermines teachers. Staff, they will argue, feel under pressure to focus their attention on pupils who could achieve a C grade and improve a school's league table standing at the expense of other pupils who might otherwise be able to gain an A or A*.
The report is also likely to conclude that Ofsted inspectors are insufficiently trained.
The findings will follow a similarly damning publication by Teach First, an organisation that places top graduates into tough inner-city schools. Lessons from the Front, which involved 500 of the charity's teachers, concludes: "The current system is not fit for measuring accountability nor for informing parental choice, and is detrimental to teaching and learning. The system focuses schools on getting results, rather than on helping individual pupils to achieve their potential."
The report, which has been shared exclusively with the Observer, blames league tables and the fact that a school's reputation depends on the proportion of pupils who achieve A* to C GCSE results. It includes a quote from a teacher that it is representative of the mood among its graduates: "No matter what we do, we can never win. It's dispiriting to see ourselves lying low on the tables and know that we're there despite massive efforts by everyone in the school, every day, of every week, of every month, of every year. I have a kid who got two Ds in her science – for her that was an unbelievable achievement, but as far as the league tables are concerned, she just didn't count."
Elizabeth Thonemann, editor of the publication, said the government move towards using school report cards was a "step in the right direction", but one that did not solve the problem.
Both studies found evidence of teachers focusing on a small group of children who could swing the league table position. "That is bad for everybody," added Thonemann. "It is bad for children who are capable of achieving top grades because in terms of how it impacts on a school's reputation, it makes more sense to get kids up to C than get those at B up to an A*. It is bad for the children who feel their achievements are never going to be valued and bad for those at the borderline because the focus of their education is so much on this narrow figure."
Commenting on the Teach First findings, Barry Sheerman, chairman of the select committee for schools, said it chimed with evidence he had heard: "I think they are probably right. We have built a culture that uses a whole series of negative measures and not enough positive ones." He argued that Ofsted relied far too heavily on statistics. "People in schools feel aggrieved. They may have worked their socks off, they may have got some wonderful contextual add-value in many ways, they may have actively been producing little citizens and then what happens? They find that all that really matters is how many GCSEs have they got and at what level."
Vernon Coaker, the schools' minister, said that the government was moving away from the "relentless focus on performance tables". "However, we believe a single overall grade is important to show a clear definitive view of a school's effectiveness among all stakeholders," he said.
Getting a place on a graduate training programme can be like tackling an assault course. One determined student talks to Nic Paton about clearing the hurdles ... and winning
You may not (yet) have to stand up and sing in front of a baying audience, but landing yourself a place on a graduate training programme does appear to be getting more and more like The X Factor.
Long gone are the days of turning up for an informal chat, a quick tour of the office and a handshake with your putative line manager before being shown out of the building with a "see you in the autumn".
Students applying over the coming months for next year's graduate programmes can expect to have to leap an array of highly competitive assessment hurdles, including timed aptitude and numerical tests, phone interviews, psychometric tests, competency-based interviews and, most dreaded of all, residential assessment centres, where you are likely to have to do group exercises and presentations.
"It is a long, hard process but you just have to keep going at it," advises Matt Tasker, a Loughborough University computing and management graduate who secured a sought-after place on utility company RWE npower's two-year graduate training programme in September.
"I applied to around seven schemes and so, for a time, in the flat I was sharing with four others, there were a lot of phone interviews going on. We used to put a sign up on the door saying 'phone interview, do not disturb'," recalls Tasker, 22, who lives in Worcester.
Despite the improving economic climate, the graduate jobs market will remain extremely tough next year, not least because final-year students are likely to be up against unsuccessful 2009 graduates as well as their peers.
"It will be competitive," agrees John Morewood, senior graduate recruitment development manager at HSBC, which, for 2010, is expecting to take about 216 graduates on to its UK retail and investment banking graduate programmes. Normally, they attract about 20 applications for each place.
Candidates have to complete an online questionnaire, numerical and verbal reasoning tests, a telephone interview and go through an assessment centre.
This year RWE npower took on 50 graduates from 3,000 applications, and is looking at about 34 for 2010, explains head of graduate recruitment Bob Athwal, with a screening process similar to that of HSBC.
For Tasker, the online aptitude tests were one of hardest elements. "I got it into my head that you had to finish every question, when it's often better to take your time and get as many right as you can," he says. "It's better to complete 20 and get 15 right, than do all 30, say, but only score 10. With the phone interviews, the key was to have a long list of the times when you worked in a team, influenced someone, learned from a mistake and so on.
"The assessment centres were quite scary. Everyone tries to be smiley and polite, but you also know it is competitive," he adds. "The important thing is, just to try and be yourself." The good news is, there's a lot of support out there. HSBC, for example, has extensive examples on its careers site of what it looks for and what to expect, as do many other employers. Along with RWE npower and Enterprise Rent-a-Car, it has produced a DVD on assessment centres for university careers services.
Visit your university careers service as early as you can, recommends Tony Taylor, careers adviser at Hull University. Like most, it offers study skills sessions, workshops on application forms and CVs, and practice psychometric tests. It frequently has employers in to run mock events, particularly on assessment centres.
"By your final year you are likely to be busy worrying about your finals and stressing about getting a 2:1, so don't put it off. Around 80% of applications fail at the first hurdle," says Taylor.
"Students can be too dismissive of the experience they have. One I was talking to complained he had no experience, but it turned out he had been deputy chair of the student union and had 14 different projects on the go! So it's about understanding what employers are going to be wanting," he adds.
"I'd recommend three things: do practice numerical reasoning tests and some skills sessions, and watch our DVD," says HSBC's Morewood.
Athwal adds that you should also be researching companies and looking at their competitors. "You need to be treating it like an exam," he says.
But however much preparation you do, there is no getting around the fact that, for most graduates, there will be knock-backs and disappointments. So a lot of it is about resilience and sheer doggedness – as Tasker found. "I spent something like two hours online doing tests, only to get an instant rejection email, with no feedback whatsoever. The fact that someone had not even looked at it after all that work was disheartening," he says. "But when I got my offer before Christmas, it was a real relief because it meant I could concentrate on my finals as well as enjoy my last few months at university."
If the past is another country, Ed Balls has just confiscated the passports of our schoolchildren
Ed Balls has announced that primary school history is to be subsumed into an "area of learning" called "historical, geographical and social understanding". Personally I did prefer the words "history" and "geography", partly because they're shorter. Presumably Balls, who is highly educated, knows that the importation of a value word like "understanding" is a tactic associated with totalitarian regimes. So why does he do it?
Balls says he is strengthening the role of history in primary schools; but Prince Charles apparently doesn't think so, and on the face of it the new subject headings will do little to appease the Historical Association, which frets about the dilution of pure history in secondary schools. It is squeezed out by other subjects, subsumed into humanities, and taught in a way that promotes analytical skill, hence that word "understanding". Whether history is being downgraded or not, it seems likely that a party called New Labour, in which every young minister is a bright-eyed technophile, might not be keen on the H-word, and might be tempted to use it as children now do: "You're history" does not mean, "You are replete with the riches of civilisation". It means: "You're finished."
There also lurks an association between "history" and "British history" with all its embarrassing aspects. The motivation of our empire builders was crassly mercantile, so perhaps we ought not to revisit it. But then again, why does Balls want to foster cross-curricular "understanding" at the expense of traditional subjects? For no more moral reason than to compete in a globalised economy. The pressure of international competition means that we live in a very fast-changing world. Well, I do. Since I became a writer 20 years ago, most of my favourite bookshops have been killed by the internet; Britain has changed from a literary to a visual culture; and the book as a physical artefact is fading.
There is too much of the present just at present, and knowledge of history is an escape from it. It is also a defence against the enthusiasms of the media. While key stage 3 teaches the importance of historical chronology, the recollection of dates is regarded as a bonus rather than being essential, which clashes bizarrely with the obsession with anniversaries among journalists. I was sick of Darwin by about 2 o'clock on 1 January this year. I prefer to remember other things that happened 150 years ago besides the publication of On the Origin of Species; or it might be that I am interested in some event taking place, say, 83 years ago, which – the intervening time not being a round number – I will have all to myself.
History also shifts the focus from living celebrities to dead ones, and I do prefer my celebrities to be dead. They can't profit from their fame; they won't be given tables ahead of me in a restaurant; and the fact that their fame has survived death is proof that they were somehow significant.
History is not now compulsory at GCSE level, and it wasn't when I was at school either, there being no national curriculum to make it so. But everyone did it. When my eldest son told me he was dropping history, it was as though he'd said he was having his memory erased – and I can't bring myself to write down his answer to my question: When was Disraeli prime minister?
Our government of veneerings might consider that we won't appreciate the new if we can't call up a mental picture of the old. If we were to take our cue from LP Hartley and his suggestion that "the past is a foreign country," then we might regard the study of history as a kind of multiculturalism, in which case it would escape some of the stigma undoubtedly attaching to it.
Poor parents pick child's school because it is close to home, while middle-class parents go on good academic record
Giving parents a choice over primary schools increases the social divide, a study reveals.
The majority of poor parents pick their child's primary school because it is close to their home, while nearly half of middle-class parents opt for a school for its academic record, researchers found.
Since 1988, parents in England have had the right to express a preference of school. Successive governments have believed one benefit of this is to force under-performing schools to up their game. But academics at Bristol University and the Institute of Education London University argue that parental choice fuels class segregation in schools.
They asked 11,533 parents why they preferred one school to another on application forms. While two-fifths of parents with no qualifications said a school's proximity to their home had been the most important reason for choosing it, this was the case for only 20% of parents with degrees.
Only one in eight parents with no qualifications said academic record had been the main factor in their choice, compared with two-fifths of parents with degrees.
Some 44% of the parents who would be counted in the top fifth of earners in England said a school's academic record had been the most important reason, compared with 20% from the lowest fifth.
The study also showed parents with degrees were more likely to choose schools with a religious ethos. Just over 1% of parents with no qualifications said a school's religious ethos had been the most important factor.
Anna Vignoles, professor of the economics of education at the Institute of Education and one of the main authors of the study – Parental choice of primary school in England: What type of schools do parents choose? – said the findings showed "parental choice tended to lead to greater class segregation in schools".
She said: "Although it would be deeply unpopular with parents, the only way of guaranteeing socially integrated schools would be to run a lottery system. Schools have not got substantially more segregated, but we have one of the more socially segregated systems in the world
"We might give parents a choice for ethical reasons, but if we want social integration, choice will not bring this about."
She added that studies had shown that parental choice had failed to improve educational standards in England.
The number of schools using lotteries to allocate places has risen sixfold since 2001, research by the London School of Economics showed last month.
The system has proved controversial among parents in areas where it has been applied to break the middle-class tactic of buying a house in the catchment area.
Protests rock UCLA's campus as the University of California approves a 32% increase in undergraduate fees
Financial crisis beckons as public spending cuts loom and universities face intense competition from overseas
Universities are facing a new funding crisis with looming public spending cuts and intense competition from overseas, according to the man employed by the government to allocate money to higher education in England.
Sir Alan Langlands, head of the university funding council and a former chief executive of the NHS, warned that the UK risks losing its international reputation for higher education as other countries pump cash into universities to try to train people out of the recession.
It comes after research by the lecturer's union this week suggested that universities are already making widespread job cuts in anticipation of a decrease in public funding. In the last year 1,318 academics have been laid off and a further 5,097 are threatened, it found. Cardiff University has lost 50 jobs, City 65 and Salford 150 through voluntary and compulsory redundancies.
Langlands told a conference of university chairs convened by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce) today: "It seems to me we're in what could be a very difficult transition. We've had a period of real terms growth that may be seen in history as a bit of a golden age.
"This is happening at a time when there's intense competition for overseas students… reduced spending [and] a time when there are significant cost pressures."
He said the review of student fees, launched by Lord Mandelson this month, would have to redress the balance between the different sources of funding for universities including the taxpayer, students, graduates and employers. Currently the bulk is paid for by the treasury, suggesting he believes that fees – or some form of contribution from students – will have to rise in the future.
But those reforms could not realistically start before 2012 meaning universities face up to three years of funding cuts first. He said the cuts could start as soon as the new year when Hefce receives its budget for 2010-11.
"There's no doubt we will be experiencing these short-term reductions," he said.
"That strong position is now under challenge from intense competition from overseas. The UK and Spain are the only countries in Europe not investing in higher education.
"Right across Europe we are seeing a new wave of education provision taught in English and indeed in Scandinavia too."
He described how governments in Germany, Australia and the US had made universities central to their fiscal stimulus plans. President Obama has prioritised spending on higher education to help rebuild the economy out of the recession.
Langlands cited figures from the Institute of Fiscal Studies, which suggest that government spending is limited to levels not seen since the 1970s. In September, leaked Treasury documents which suggested each department is facing a cut of 9.3% between 2010 and 2014. If investment in schools and the NHS is ring-fenced other areas would be even worse affected.
Universities are also vulnerable because other sources of funding, including the NHS and teacher training budgets, are also under threat, Langlands said. Grants from the big medical charities have also been affected as many rely on large endowments that have suffered in the recession.
Some universities are already taking drastic measures to cut their costs. UCU claim 187 jobs are at risk at Leeds University as part of a round of major spending cuts. The vice-chancellor has announced that he wants to cut spending by £35m. Last year its total expenditure was £440m.
Mandelson, the business secretary who is also responsible for universities, has launched a new plan for universities which suggests that funding would be increasingly skewed in favour of science and technology subjects. That has already been happening in some areas over the past year meaning that many arts and humanities areas have suffered. There has been a series of high profile closures of language departments in universities.
Sally Hunt, general secretary of the University and College Union, said: "We are in real danger of being left behind as we try to get back on track economically. Most countries are investing in universities and they recognise that help for education must be at the heart of their fiscal stimuli. Despite warm words from government the opposite is happening in the UK. If the government does not make bold decisions to back education now then we have little doubt that the fallout from that decision will be felt in years to come."
Horticulturalists, doctors and lawyers among instructors after Michigan legalises drug as a medicine
It goes without saying that there's no smoking in class. But there is a good deal of sniffing of leaves, discussion of the finer points of inhaling and debate over which plant gives the biggest hit.
Welcome to Detroit's cannabis college, recently opened with courses on how to grow marijuana – and harvest, cook and sell it too – after Michigan legalised the drug as a medicine.
Students get instruction from horticulturalists, doctors and lawyers as well as hands-on experience cultivating plants and guidance on how to protect their stash from the criminal element.
"Growing pot by chucking seeds in the garden is fine for the recreational industry," says the college co-founder, Nick Tennant, whose wholesome and youthful appearance, including acne-covered cheeks, startles some of the more ragged-looking students. "But when we're using this from a medicinal standpoint, you really need to document your strains and your genetics. The horticultural process is very complex. If you want to do it right you're going to need to learn. There's a lot of money in this if you do it right."
With more than 1,000 medical marijuana certificates issued each month in Michigan for users and growers to sell to them, there is demand for places at MedGrow Cannabis College, located in a small office block.
Among the first students paying $475 (£285) for six evening classes are people reliant on marijuana for pain relief and those who help them, including a clergyman who runs an Aids clinic.
Then there are young men such as Ryan Hasbany, a 20-year-old business student. He's still a year too young to get a grower's licence but he wants to learn the trade. "My father is a family practice doctor and he is issuing medical marijuana cards so I know there are a lot of people getting them. It could turn into a very lucrative business. The street prices are ridiculously high," he says of medical grade marijuana, which sells at $250 (£150) an ounce in Michigan. "There's Harvard economists who say this is what we need to bring the economy back."
Hasbany has no hesitation in admitting that he might be in a good position to judge the quality of what he grows. "I smoke it. In my high school graduating class, I'd say 25% of them were smoking it," he said.
Michigan became the 14th state to legalise medicinal marijuana this year after about two-thirds of voters supported the measure in a referendum. The move reflects growing acceptance of the drug in large parts of the country. In the past week, the US's first marijuana cafe opened in Oregon and Colorado ordered cannabis sales subject to tax.
The path was carved by California, where permission to buy marijuana requires little more than telling a sympathetic doctor it would make you feel better. Attitudes are changing in Washington too, where the Obama administration has told the FBI and other federal agencies to adhere to state marijuana laws in deciding who to arrest.
For all that, there is still hesitation over identification with what is now a legal industry in Michigan.
The first class of the evening at cannabis college is led by a physician who wants to be known only as Dr Powell. "Don't mention my first name. It'll make it harder for them to identify me," he says.
Powell explains to the students the range of conditions that permit him to issue a medical marijuana certificate, from cancer and Aids to a broad category of severe chronic pain. "If someone's had back surgery or a gunshot wound," says Powell.
There are questions. "Can I get it for gout?" asks a student. Powell thinks it unlikely.
The doctor says he is not concerned about addiction but regular cannabis users should find an alternative to smoking. That's why the course also includes a cookery class with recipes as varied as hash cakes and marijuana sushi.
The horticulture lecturer is even more wary than the doctor about being identified. "They might ask how I know how to grow all this stuff," he says. "I've been doing it for rather longer than it's been legal."
He, like many of those who lecture at Cannabis College, is also a consumer because of severe injury in a bad sporting accident. Tennant obtained a medical marijuana certificate to deal with a stomach condition that causes nausea. It is what brought out his acne.
The horticulturalist pulls open a couple of large white doors that act as an entire wall at the front of the classroom. Bright white light streams through the cracks and across the classroom to reveal a den of silver-lined walls, air conditioning ducts, fans and intense lights. At the heart sit a handful of plants – some of them bushes really.
The teacher runs through soil versus hydroponics, lights (red and blue better than LED), pruning (pluck, don't cut) and the intricacies of cloning. There's an explanation of ozone generating devices to cover the smell. "You might not want the neighbours to know. You don't want them raiding your house for your supply," he says.
Pasted to the wall is a chart of the labyrinth of marijuana species, their effect on different diseases and their particular tastes.
The horticulturist explains that there's money to be made from the trade in medicinal marijuana but growers must tailor the plant to the customer's need. "There's pot that makes you not shut up for five hours. There's pot where you sit on the couch and drool for five hours. That's not what you need if you're going to hold down a job. There's thousands of people getting patient cards and they all have needs. If you can work out how to meet those individual needs you're gonna get rich," he says.
A preview of our Kings and Queens series, illustrated by Martin Rowson and free in the Guardian and Observer this weekend
Health visitors would be encouraged to tell mothers and fathers about websites offering advice on parenting, Conservative leader says
David Cameron yesterday said a Conservative government would promote Mumsnet and other "good parenting websites" as part of a drive to encourage "social action" as an alternative to state action.
The Tory leader said health visitors would be encouraged to tell parents about websites such as Mumsnet and that information about these resources would be made available in all maternity units, early years settings and family information services.
A Tory government would also back a Mumsnet plan to set up a mentoring scheme to connect new parents with experienced mothers.
Cameron said health visitors would be encouraged to direct parents to the service where appropriate.
He made the announcement to coincide with his participation in a live webchat hosted by Mumsnet.
Gordon Brown was criticised for failing to answer a question about his favourite type of biscuit when he took part in a similar exercise last month, and yesterday Cameron encountered his own problems when a laptop crashed and he endured a barrage of complaints about his failure to respond to all the questions being posted.
In a statement, Cameron said he saw Mumsnet as a good example of the way people can support each other, bypassing government bureaucracies.
He described this as wanting "to move from state action to social action" when he delivered the Hugo Young lecture last week.
To promote Mumsnet and similar sites, a Tory government would ensure that parents found out about them, using leaflets and other publicity material.
Health visitors would be expected to provide this information and, in some circumstances, would be encouraged to help parents navigate the internet and use the sites, the Tories said.
The party also said a Conservative government would publish government information in a standardised format so websites like Mumsnet could reuse it to provide personalised online support.
In his hour-long webchat, Cameron answered the question that generated negative headlines for Brown.
The prime minister did not respond to a question about his favourite biscuit because it was not drawn to his attention, but the Mumsnet users did not realise this and their complaints about Brown failing to answer generated predictable complaints about prime ministerial "dithering".
Cameron, however, came prepared and told Mumsnet: "I like oatcakes with butter and cheese."
There were many questions about special needs, and Cameron said he believed the policy of including special needs children in mainstream schools had gone too far.
"My view is that inclusion is great for those who want it, but there are signs that the pendulum has swung too far and we are now pushing too many children with very special needs into mainstream schools," he said.
He also said he loved the political comedy The Thick of It. It was very funny, he said, "but only true about the other lot (not)".
An aide later said this was intended as an admission that the Conservative party was just as guilty as Labour of some of the follies satirised in the programme.
It is immoral to encourage young people to risk brain injury by repeated blows to the head
Your article on the resurgence of boxing highlights an irrational, immoral and dangerous funding strategy that encourages people to risk their health (Off the ropes, and back into the ring – boxing makes unlikely comeback in schools and clubs, 16 November).
You quote Rebecca Gibson of the Amateur Boxing Association saying that "the sport had benefited from the success of fighters such as Amir Khan and a jump in funding from £50,000 in 2005 to £4.7m this year". The government funding, via Sport England, is a huge amount of money; but the figure becomes positively offensive when you consider how much financial support is provided for charities working to help people rebuild their lives after brain injury.
Headway is one of those charities: through our network of 110 groups and branches across the UK, we provide support and rehabilitation programmes. This year, our total public funding was less than £300,000 – a pittance in comparison to the millions spent on promoting a dangerous and reckless sport.
The article's subhead states: "A decade ago there were calls for the sport to be banned on safety grounds. Now even its harshest critics have been won over." This is a gross misrepresentation: its critics are as determined as ever to see this dangerous sport banned.
The report also quotes Tessa Jowell, the Olympics minister, saying: "Twelve years ago I considered boxing almost too dangerous to be considered as a mainstream sport. I was public health minister and the British Medical Association quite regularly at that time called for boxing to be banned." Jowell needs to know that the BMA, like the World Medical Association, still believes boxing should be banned, due to the cumulative effects of repeated blows to the head.
Brain injury can be devastating. It can mean losing the life you once led and the person you once were, and victims often have to relearn the most basic of life skills – such as walking, talking, thinking and feeling.
Jowell said that boxing "gives [young people] self-esteem, it gets rid of aggression, yet at the same time is a highly disciplined sport. We know it can be a way of disengaging kids from gangs, carrying knives, from low-level crime and high-level antisocial behaviour." But the notion that boxing is the only sport that instils a sense of discipline is short-sighted, to say the least. If you are to succeed in any sport you need discipline.
And there is a long list of boxers – both amateur and professional – who have fallen foul of the law in the past year. Most have been arrested for, or accused of, violent crimes or assaults. So much for discipline.
You also state, "Boxing is now available in 34% of secondary schools in England", and that "5% of primary and 26% of secondary schools have a formal link with an accredited amateur boxing club". This is disturbing. The increasing number of people taking up boxing will lead to a greater demand for the services of charities like ours. I can only hope that, when the time comes, this increased demand will be met with increased funding.
As a group representing professional women working in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, social sciences, medicine and health in a leading UK university, we found your report on the lecture by Jill Berry, president of the Girls' Schools Association (Girls 'need to be realistic' about careers, 14 November) utterly depressing. We are saddened that arguments for equal opportunities have to be made over and over again. Berry asserts that a woman's aspiration for a high-flying career can "all work fine, until their children are ill", ignoring the fact that parents, male and female, often share this responsibility.
We are successful scientists, researchers and educators. Many of us daily attest to the fact that having children, ill or otherwise, does not wreck a career. Those of us who are mothers also acknowledge men and women who combine caring responsibilities with paid employment. Women scientists are not "superwomen", as Jill Berry would lead her pupils to believe, just ordinary women who get immense satisfaction from doing a job they enjoy. Some combine this with raising a family or caring for others. The reiteration of tired arguments about a woman having to balance the desire for a family against career aspirations is alarming. Are we to return to an era when careers advisers had separate lists of jobs suitable for girls?
Half the UK's talent resides in individuals that carry two X chromosomes. To discourage girls and women from developing their potential and achieving financial independence not only denies them fundamental equality but damages the economy and society. We must get real about tackling inequality of opportunity.
Professor Lindy Holden-Dye, Professor Catherine Pope, Professor Dame Wendy Hall, Dr Pamela Jackson, Professor Andrea Russell, Professor Jane Hart, Professor Geraldine Clough, Dr Kanchana Ruwanpura, Dr Vesna Perisic, Professor Mark Spearing, and 11 others
Women in Science and Technology group, University of Southampton
Professor Lindy Holden-Dye
Professor Catherine Pope
Professor Dame Wendy Hall DBE FREng FRS
Dr Pamela Jackson
Professor Andrea Russell
Professor Jane K Hart
Professor Geraldine Clough
Dr Kanchana N Ruwanpura
Dr Vesna Perisic
Dr Brita Nucinkis
Professor Mark Spearing
Dr Su White
Professor AC Tropper
Professor Jeremy Kilburn
Dr Malgosia Kaczmarek
Diana Caicedo
Clare Hooper
Asa Asadollahbaik
Rocio Aldeco-Perez
Kamaljit Kerridge-Poonia
Sunny Takhar
For an on behalf of the Women in Science and Technology (WiSET) group at the University of Southampton
Watchdog finds two leading examiners – OCR and Edexel – far more lenient with top grades than other boards
Some exam boards are more likely than others to award pupils a top grade for their science GCSE, the exam watchdog Ofqual has revealed, prompting concerns that some teenagers are being awarded grades they do not deserve.
Ofqual's analysis of the grades awarded this summer showed that two of the leading exam boards – OCR and Edexcel – were "more lenient" than the rest.
OCR, which is part of Cambridge Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge, awards more than 3 million exam certificates each year. Edexcel, which has just won the contract to mark the 600,000 Sats papers that 11-year-olds will sit this summer, sets more than 1.5m exams across the world each year.
In contrast, the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance (AQA) exam board, which sets more than 3.5m exams each year, set the bar higher than others when awarding top grades, the watchdog said.
Ofqual monitored whether the exam boards were keeping to the standards it has set for A, C and F grades in GCSE science. It used the achievements of 14-year-olds in national tests to predict their grades at GCSE and compared these with teenagers' actual results.
For single science GCSE, OCR was more lenient than it should have been in awarding A and C grades this summer, while Edexcel was too generous in awarding C grades, the watchdog found.
In double science, Edexcel was too severe in awarding C grades, whereas OCR and the Welsh exam board, WJEC, were too lenient. In the case of biology, the Council for the Curriculum, Examinations and Assessment (CCEA) exam board in Northern Ireland was much more severe than others, and OCR too generous, when it came to awarding A grades.
In physics, CCEA set too high a bar for its A grades, while OCR was too generous in awarding A and C grades, whereas for chemistry GCSE, CCEA was too harsh in the standard it set for A and C grades and OCR too generous with its A grades.
Tonight, Ofqual said there was "still work to be done to complete the work of bringing standards into line".
The report said: "It is Ofqual's expectation that by summer 2010 the differences between awarding bodies will have been substantially reduced by tightening standards further, where that is fair and appropriate."
But a spokeswoman from OCR said the AQA had "distorted" the science GCSE "by setting the standard higher this summer than in previous years".
"Grade deflation is as dangerous as grade inflation," she said. "There is undoubtedly a problem with the new science syllabuses and question papers – all originally approved by Ofqual – and OCR is working to rectify the situation over time without risking unfairness to the candidates taking their exams at any particular point." Mike Cresswell, director general of the AQA, said Ofqual's report showed "other awarding bodies were unable to meet the right standard and their results were too lenient".In March, an investigation by Ofqual, found "significant causes for concern" in the science GCSE, sat by more than 500,000 students in 2008. The watchdog said there was a "lack of challenge" in papers, standards differed wildly across the three main exam boards, and there were too many multiple-choice questions.
Edexcel declined to comment.
A talented and well-connected artist with a passion for the Greek landscape
In 1946 the painter John Craxton, who has died aged 87, had a show of haunted landscapes in Zurich. He sent a postcard home, saying that he might go on to Italy, but by the time it arrived he had landed in his eventual homeland of Greece. He had been spirited away by Lady Norton, wife of the British ambassador in Athens, who – as the opening shots of the Greek civil war rang out – was seeking provisions abroad in those straitened times in a borrowed bomber. John got the pilot to divert over Venice, where the plane dipped so low that pigeons scattered in St Mark's Square.
John had the wit to grab life as it passed. He painted pleasure – poets and shepherds in Arcadia, sailors in bars, cats at play – and lived it, too. At 14, he had been taken by a friend's father from a Scout camp in France to the Paris World Exposition. They went only to the Spanish pavilion – for Picasso's Guernica. He had an amazing memory to the last but blotted out the exhibited photographs of civil war atrocities, recalling only the power of the paint. Picasso, whom he met after the war, would have a big impact on his later, semi-cubist pictures.
John's father, Harold Craxton, was a pianist, musicologist and professor at the Royal Academy of Music. The family home in St John's Wood, north-west London, was a chaotic haven with five boys and, finally, a longed-for daughter (the oboist Janet Craxton). Famous musicians visited, impoverished students were virtually adopted, meals were massed assemblies. The novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, who shared a governess with John at one point, fell for the glamour of such bohemian disorder and wrote of his parents: "They were happy and, like pollen, some of this rubbed off on anyone who came in contact with them."
While waifs were welcomed, sons were readily sent away. John, at six, was taught on a farm in Sussex. Successive boarding schools followed, unhappily, though he thrived at Betteshanger in Kent under the art tuition of Elsie Barling, a friend of the painter Frances Hodgkins. At 10, he and fellow pupils exhibited at the Bloomsbury Gallery, London, thanks to Barling.
He was always to be the painter in a family of musicians. Aged 16, he returned to Paris to study life drawing at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière (living, had he but known it, in the same street as Georges Braque – for once an opportunity missed). He enrolled at Westminster Art School and Central School of Art in London in 1940, but was rejected for military service the following year due to pleurisy. Retreating to celebrate in the National Gallery, he bumped into the sculptor Eric Kennington, father of a school friend, who urged him to get to grips with drawing.
John's key patron was Peter Watson, co-founder of the arts magazine Horizon and the Institute of Contemporary Art. When first visiting Watson's flat, he was welcomed by the painters Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, who were lodging there and soon introduced him to Soho. Through "PW", he met Joan Rayner, later to marry the writer and fellow lover of Greece Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose book jackets John would decorate most brilliantly. Late in 1941 he met Lucian Freud, and for a time the two were inseparable, both taking drawing lessons at Goldsmiths College.
Early in 1942 Watson offered to fund a studio for his protege, and John found a maisonette around the corner – convincing the benefactor that Freud could take the top floor and they would both still focus on work. A neighbour railed against the mice that consumed John's still-life studies of croissants and the girls ringing his doorbell after midnight and asking for Lucian. Mercifully, he missed the dead animals brought in for Lucian to draw (one putrid monkey corpse was hidden in the oven when Sir Kenneth and Lady Clark came to tea).
Finally, in 1944, they were evicted. John secured a solo show at the Leicester Galleries and also a commission for WJ Turner and Sheila Shannon's innovative New Excursions into English Poetry series. He produced 16 lithographs for the anthology The Poet's Eye, selected by Geoffrey Grigson, plus a giant-eyed cuttlefish for the cover. These magnificent images drew on the pastoralism of Samuel Palmer, the anthropomorphic trees of surrealism and the pared-down landscapes of his mentor Graham Sutherland, with whom he sketched in Wales. They announced John as a major new talent.
His wartime paintings and drawings, with their yearning for escape, were soon given a "neo-romantic" label that he hated. He had worked from Dorset to Pembrokeshire to the Isles of Scilly before Watson brokered a postwar trip to Paris, and then to Zurich.
From late 1946 to early 1947, he and Freud painted on Poros. John, travelling widely across Greece, then paid his first visit to Crete, where his future lay. He said: "I have little sense of being 'British'. In Greece I found human identities, people within their own environment. This new world fitted me artistically, and suited me socially and financially."
In 1951 Frederick Ashton telegrammed to request sets and costumes for his Festival of Britain production of Daphnis and Chloë at Covent Garden, starring Margot Fonteyn and Michael Somes. The resulting hand-painted scenes showed dazzlingly-lit, sea-lapped Greek landscapes of rocks, vines, fig and olive trees. In 2004 John recreated his designs, largely from memory, for the Royal Ballet's celebration of Ashton's centenary. It was as if his paintings had come to life.
After a joint 1947 show with Freud at ELT Mesens' London Gallery, solo shows followed regularly and then sporadically. The list included six Leicester Galleries exhibitions to 1966, a 1967 Whitechapel Gallery retrospective, four shows with Christopher Hull (1982-1993) and a final display with Art First in 2001. By then he had accepted election to the Royal Academy, after nomination by his friends Eduardo Paolozzi and Mary Fedden, but he exhibited rarely.
He had moved to Crete in 1960, rescuing a Venetian harbour-side house at Hania. (Typically, on his first night he was invited to dinner with Winston Churchill. They talked painting.) He split his time between Crete and Hampstead, the family having relocated in 1945 to a large house where BBC musicians rehearse to this day.
Lifting a 60-year veto on a monograph shortly before his death, he wanted little of his fascinating life to infiltrate the text. But he had lived his pictures, looking latterly like an old Cretan chieftain heading a band of friends and admirers. Recently I went to see him, aware that his latest physical travail was a bedsore. As musicians practised downstairs, I found him in tears. "Is it the bedsore?" I asked. "No," he replied. "It's the Shostakovich."
He is survived by his partner Richard Riley and two brothers.
• John Leith Craxton, artist, born 3 October 1922; died 17 November 2009
Brian MacDonald writes: I had the privilege of using Stanley Ellis (obituary, 14 November) a number of times as an expert witness when I was an investigator for HM Customs. I first met him in 1989, when I gave him a short lift to Isleworth crown court. We spoke only briefly during the car journey, and as he got out of my car, he surprised me by asking which part of the Wirral peninsula I was brought up in (astonishing, as I had left the Wirral nearly 30 years earlier). Stanley was enthusiastic and meticulous about his specialism and fair in his opinions. He will be missed.
Our new primary school curriculum trusts teachers' professional judgment, as we move towards a consensus on education
Over the past six months of being schools minister, I've had the pleasure of getting back into schools, meeting teachers, pupils and others on the front line in education. It's a different world from when I started out as a history teacher in 1976 – a definite change for the better.
Government is sometimes accused of being out of touch with teachers in our schools. Now, however, we have published a new curriculum, which has been developed with expert advice and support from teachers and parents. We are moving towards a consensus on the best way to educate our children.
It is clear to see how standards in our primary schools have dramatically improved. Since the mid-90s, we've leapt from 17th to seventh in the international league tables for maths; there are 100,000 more 11-year-olds now leaving primary school with better grades in English; and science results at key stage two have risen by 19% since 1997.
This is, in part, down to taking a direct approach to drive up standards in primary schools – and fast. We introduced new national strategies and pioneering programmes such as Every Child a Reader and Every Child Counts. This has been underpinned by record increases in per pupil funding.
A recent Ofsted report of outstanding practice in primary schools shows that with brilliant teaching, good discipline and an exciting curriculum, schools that were once struggling are now arming their pupils with the skills they need for life. It puts paid to the myth that schools in challenging circumstances can't achieve great things.
The inheritance in 1997 meant that laying firm foundations in our primary schools was vital, but resulted in a top-down approach. If we truly expect more schools to reach the next level and become not just good but great, we have to give more power to the experts on the ground – heads and teachers – to drive their own improvement.
Curriculum is key to improvement in primary schools and should help our children become the very best they can be. That is why we commissioned Sir Jim Rose to carry out an independent review of the primary curriculum – the first in 10 years. He spoke to thousands of teachers, children and parents, and met education specialists. The new curriculum is based on six areas of learning and reflecting the best practice across the country that Sir Jim found. Because it is based on what the best schools are doing already, teachers, parents and pupils are overwhelmingly in favour of these changes.
It's not enough to teach children in separate subjects like English, geography and science any more. By organising the primary curriculum into six areas of learning, our children can benefit from high-quality subject teaching and, for example, improve their literacy and numeracy skills through history or learn about the world around them through play. Across the world, evidence supports the "areas of learning" approach to teaching. Of 10 countries that have changed their primary curriculum since 2005, eight have organised learning around areas rather than subjects, including France, Spain, Germany, and New Zealand.
We trust teachers' professional judgment, which is why we are reducing prescription in the curriculum, giving teachers more freedom, and no longer telling schools how to teach English and maths. But we still expect the basics – like numeracy, literacy, ICT and personal and social skills – to underpin everything. The new curriculum is also sharing best practice across the board – such as teaching languages to children from the age of seven.
Following the positive response to Rose's proposals, we have made very few changes, but after consulting with parents, teachers, the science community and other interested parties, we will expect pupils to study evolution as part of their learning. We also confirm that learning about British history will be a key feature of the new primary curriculum.
Following consultations, we have also decided to take a further step in recognising the value of teachers' own assessments. From 2010, we will publish primary schools' teacher assessment data for pupils in year 6 in English, maths and science, alongside external test data for English and maths; and we will introduce a light-touch local moderation process for this teacher assessment.
This is, undoubtedly, a defining moment for the education system in England. We have the real potential to create even more outstanding primary schools, shaped by teachers who are the experts – and supported by government.
Prince Charles is wary of Ed Balls's curriculum reforms, says one of his advisers. Is he just being old-fashioned, or has he got a point
You know what they say about history. It's just one thing after another.
Well, perhaps so, but there's a gleam in Ed Balls's eye that says that won't be the case for much longer.
The schools secretary is planning a new curriculum for all primary schools that will reorganise subjects under "thematic headings". Traditional subjects such as geography and science will find themselves rolled into topics such as global warming.
And there'll be a new emphasis on children's health and wellbeing, with sex education made compulsory for the first time.
Who's not happy? The Prince of Wales, that's who. Headteacher Bernice MacCabe, one of the prince's advisers, said the old traditionalist was passionate about protecting the jewels of English literature and history and didn't want to see schools turned into "globalised theme parks".
She said Charles believed the rigorous teaching of subject knowledge was the foundation of a good education.
Who else thinks themes are silly? Stand up, sociologist and educationist Frank Furedi.
He passionately defends a subject-based curriculum in his new book Wasted: Why Education isn't Educating. He says he believes in education that "recognises the duty of one generation to impart a canon of knowledge to the next".
Furedi accuses policymakers of using the curriculum as a tool to correct society's ills from anti-social behaviour to obesity, teen pregnancy to knife crime.
And he's got a point. Ministers get to pick these themes, presumably. Will they tie them in neatly to their political obsessions du jour? Could whatever passing fads take their fancy find their way into your child's homework diary?
And then there are the poor subjects themselves. Isn't history the sort of thing that benefits from being taught in chronological order? Don't you have to understand the fundamentals of science before you start flinging about theories of climate change or evolution?
When I was being educated, long ago and far away, themes were what we had for our school dances. One year someone chose 'underwater'. Fishing nets were draped from the ceiling and as the night grew warmer, the smell of ancient fish mingled nauseatingly with the reek of cheap aftershave and teenage terror. I've been wary of themes ever since.
But perhaps there's a lot to be said for a more creative and relevant approach to getting kids excited about what they're learning.