Daily roundup: Child trafficking, early intervention and academies
Tristan Donovan
Monday, April 15, 2013
Charities say Working Together fails child trafficking victims, Early Intervention Foundation launches, and Coventry poised to fight academies, all in the news today.
The revised Working Together guidance will fail to protect child trafficking victims a group of charities has warned Education Secretary Michael Gove. In a letter to Gove, the charities, which include Ecpat UK and the Children’s Rights Alliance for England, said that the lack of references to trafficking in the slimmed-down guidance risked sowing confusion among frontline professionals about how to address the problem. “Most frontline practitioners receive little or no training on how to identify child victims of trafficking,” said Chloe Setter, advocacy officer at Ecpat. “This revised guidance will worsen what is already an unacceptable situation.” The new Working Together guidance came into force today.
Prime Minister David Cameron will formally launch the Early Intervention Foundation today. The foundation, which is chaired by Labour MP Graham Allen, seeks to gather evidence of the effectiveness of early intervention services and promote their use by local authorities. Cameron said: “I look forward to seeing the foundation get to work, not only assessing which programmes make a difference but giving people working in this field clear and practical advice about where money can be most effectively spent.”
Coventry City Council is considering reorganising its schools into federations to stop the government turning its inadequate schools into academies, reports the Coventry Telegraph. The council floated the plan after Ofsted placed two more of its schools on special measures. Five other schools in the city are already on special measures.
Sheila Lock has been appointed as the interim director of children’s services in Cardiff, reports WalesOnline. Lock was previously chief executive of Leicester City Council but was made redundant in August 2011 after the city’s elected mayor Sir Peter Soulsby abolished the position. Before becoming Leicester’s chief executive she was the city’s director of children’s services.
The children’s charity 4Children has criticised the one per cent rise in working age benefits that apply from today. Anne Longfield, chief executive of 4Children, said the below-inflation increase was bad for families and is “in stark contrast to the experience of pensioners, who last week rightly benefitted from a ‘triple lock’ which saw their pensions rise by 2.5 per cent”.
And finally, two-thirds of children in the UK feel under pressure to cheat at sports, the BBC reports. A survey by the MCC and the Cricket Foundation found that a quarter of the 1,002 eight- to 16-year-olds questioned believe their teammates would cheat frequently if they could get away with it. The majority said they felt under pressure to win from other children although a smaller number said the pressure came from parents and teachers.