Daily roundup 27 January: Strike averted, Siddiq resignation, and school funding

A strike by social workers in Kirklees has been called off. The Huddersfield Examiner reports that around 200 staff from Kirklees Council's children's services department were set to take industrial action today. With strike action postponed both sides have entered talks aimed at resolving the dispute.


Shadow childcare minister Tulip Siddiq has resigned from the Labour frontbench, telling the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, that she could not reconcile herself to the party's three-line whip to vote for triggering article 50. The Guardian reports that in her letter to Corbyn, Siddiq said voting to start the process of leaving the EU would betray her north London constituents, 75 per cent of whom voted to remain in the EU.


The Treasury has taken back £384m originally promised for schools in England. The BBC reports that the money had been announced last year to fund a plan to require all schools to become academies. But the Department for Education has revealed that when the compulsory academy plan was ditched, the Treasury took back most of the extra funding.


A Belfast court has granted leave for a judicial review into the decision to prosecute a woman under the abortion ban by helping her teenage daughter to access abortion pills. The Independent reports that it is a criminal offence to have an abortion in Northern Ireland, even if a woman conceives as a result of rape or incest, or in the event of fatal foetal abnormality.


A local education authority has admitted racially discriminating against two young boys and breaching their human rights when a school called the police after one of them told his teacher he had been given a toy gun as a present. The Guardian reports that the brothers, aged seven and five and of mixed Indian and Middle Eastern heritage, were questioned by uniformed officers in March 2016 after the school raised concerns they might be at risk of radicalisation.