Daily roundup: Youth homelessness, school inspections branded 'toxic' and vocational education

The End Youth Homelessness Alliance is launched today (Wednesday) at an event at the Houses of Parliament. The alliance of 12 homelessness charities and the bank HSBC aims to work at both a national and local level to tackle youth homelessness. It will also look at education, employment, health and family support issues for young people, reports Civil Society.

A report by the Demos think-tank says school inspectors' reports should be scrapped and replaced with write-ups by parents, students and teachers. The report calls the current system of accountability for schools as "profoundly toxic". It recommends that instead of Ofsted inspectors publishing their reports, schools should collect data each year from teachers, students and parents and produce "an honest account of what is strong and what is less strong in the school".

And the monitoring system for schools comes in for more criticism from the Institute for Public Policy Research in its report on vocational education for 14- to 16-year-olds. The institute says league tables based on the proportion of pupils passing five or more GCSEs graded A* to C have at times been "damaging" to the development of high-quality vocational provision. And it adds that recent changes to the way school performance is measured is likely to lead to a "rapid decline" in vocational educational provision.