Daily roundup: Asylum-seeking children age assessments, Department for Education accounts and academy funding
Neil Puffett
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Concerns over age assessments for young asylum-seekers, problems with the Department for Education's accounts and academies funding, all hit the headlines today.
Decision-making in age assessments of asylum-seeking children is inconsistent and results in children mistakenly being judged to be adults, a report by the Children’s Commissioner has found. It argued that consensual approach to age determination should be adopted involving a range of different professionals, since there is no single reliable medical measure of maturity.
The spending watchdog the National Audit Office (NAO), has refused to sign off last year's Department for Education (DfE) accounts, because it overspent by £63m, the BBC reports. The watchdog also “qualified” the 2011/12 accounts of the Young People's Learning Agency because of 14 cases at nine academies where severance payments were made outside employees' contracts without prior approval.
Meanwhile, the Department for Education is returning around £60m to local authorities after 30 councils threatened legal action over the amount of money the government had cut from their budgets in lieu of the expanding academies programme. Councils had their funding cut by £413m over two years, but in some areas the number of schools seeking academy status has been far lower than in others, leaving local authorities out of pocket.
Less than eight per cent of young offenders describe their fathers as role models, with more than half saying they have nobody to look up to, a survey by charity User Voice has found. More than 700 young offenders took part in the survey, with participants calling for specialist training for police and more personalised support for young offenders.
An additional 167,000 pupils took up school meals in 2011/12, compared to the year before, the BBC reports. Data collated by the Children’s Food Trust shows that more than three million children eat school meals with more than one million registered for free school meals.
The Department for Education has published data showing how many students went on to further education, higher education or training for each school, college and local authority in England for the first time. The statistics, published as part of the government’s transparency agenda, are designed to give parents more information to choose the right school or college for their child.