Families receiving child benefit would continue to see the value of their payments fall in real terms for the first two years of a Labour government. Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls will announce Labour would extend the coalition's cap on increases in the benefit - due to expire in 2016 - for a further year. Under the plan, child benefit payments would not rise in line with inflation but by a fixed rate of one per cent per year until 2017, reports the BBC.
Two Birmingham children’s homes have been closed after Ofsted raised concerns about young people frequently going missing. Fairfield Children’s Home, in Erdington, and Bournbrook Children’s Home, in Selly Oak, were temporarily closed last December following a major review of care facilities by Birmingham City Council. Now the council’s cabinet member for children and family services Brigid Jones has revealed the closures will be made permanent – while an agency will be hired to take over the running of the city’s remaining five other children’s homes, reports the Birmingham Mail.
Former Ofsted deputy chief inspector and director of social care John Goldup has been appointed as interim chair of Redbridge Local Safeguarding Children Board. Goldup left the inspectorate in March 2013 by “mutual agreement”.
Ofsted’s chief inspector is expected to criticise teachers for accepting bad behaviour in secondary school classrooms. The Times reports that Sir Michael Wilshaw is to publish a report on Thursday calling on head teachers to show leadership in punishing poor behaviour.
A head teacher has warned that pressure to succeed academically is causing boys to suffer with anorexia. Bernard Trafford, head of the Royal Grammar School in Newcastle upon Tyne, told The Sunday Times that a number of boys in northern private schools are suffering from the condition.
Buckinghamshire County Council is considering recruiting social workers from abroad as part of efforts to improve its “inadequate” children’s services department. Get Bucks reports that the authority blames a “national shortage” of professional social workers for difficulties recruiting staff.
