Daily roundup: Care leavers, free school meals, and Rotherham

More than half of English councils place young people leaving care in unsuitable accommodation for long periods, an investigation by Barnardo's has found. The BBC reports that 51 per cent of councils told the charity they placed teenagers in bed-and-breakfasts for a month or more in 2013/14. Under government guidance, councils should only use B&Bs in an emergency when a young person needs urgent help.

Teachers in Dorset resorted to supermarket shopping and ordering takeaway pizza after a contractor failed to deliver school dinners. The Times reports that Chartwells, which won a four-year contract to provide more than 11,000 hot meals a day to pupils in schools in Dorset, failed to deliver food. Many schools found meals were either delivered late, did not arrive at all or were of such poor quality they were unable to feed them to the children.

The chief executive of Rotherham Council Martin Kimber has announced he will step down in December. The announcement comes two weeks after a damning report into the failure of authorities to protect children from sexual exploitation between 1997 and 2013 was published. Kimber said: "I believe that new leadership will enable the town to recover more quickly from the events of the last two weeks, and strongly signal a new beginning at this critical time in its recovery." Meanwhile, The Daily Star reports that Rotherham councillors Jahangir Akhtar and Shaukat Ali, both under fire in the scandal, have been suspended.

Being bullied regularly by a sibling could put children at risk of depression when they are older, a study has found. The BBC reports that research by Oxford University found that out of 7,000 children questioned, the 786 children who said they had been bullied by a sibling several times a week were found to be twice as likely to have depression, self-harm and anxiety problems as the other children by the time they were 18.

Almost 600 two-year-olds in Bristol are set to miss out on free childcare, according to claims by the Labour Party. The Bristol Post reports that Darren Jones, the party’s parliamentary candidate for Bristol North West, said 578 children are expected to miss out on the government’s offer of 15 hours of free childcare a week.

A charity has been awarded a £2.7m contract to run 15 children’s centres in Northamptonshire. The Northamptonshire Chronicle and Echo reports that Spurgeons took over the management of the centres last Monday and will deliver services at them until 2017.