Daily roundup: Stress, Leicestershire cuts, and skills guidance
Laura Frankland
Thursday, February 20, 2014
Hundreds of girls admitted to hospital for stress, £12.6m of children's services cuts approved in Leicestershire, and guidance issued on improving children's basic skills, all in the news today.
There were nearly 300 incidents of girls aged 15-to 19 admitted to NHS hospitals for stress over the 12-month period to November 2013, The Guardian reports. Girls in that age group were behind only middle-aged men in numbers of stress-related hospital admissions, according to statistics published by the Health and Social Care Information Centre.
Conservative-led Leicestershire Council has approved £12.6m of cuts to its children and young people’s service by 2018 including "efficiency savings" and social care placements. The BBC says the council has identified £87m total savings over the period and plans to axe 700 jobs.
The National Association of Head Teachers and charity Family Action have produced guidance for parents to use chores such as shopping and cooking to improve children’s basic skills, The Telegraph reports. It will be issued to schools across Britain.
An increasing number of under-18s with mental health problems in England are being treated on adult psychiatric wards, reports the BBC. Data returned by 51 of the 58 NHS mental health trusts in England showed that 350 under-18s have been admitted so far to adult mental health wards in 2013-14, compared with 242 two years earlier.
Schools minister Lord Nash has written to the Samworth Academy, sponsored by Nottingham University, warning that its standards are “unacceptably low” and that it must improve or face intervention, according to The Independent. The letter highlights inadequate progress in English and Maths, high exclusion rates and low attendance. Forty academies have now received such “pre-warning” letters.
And finally, young people in Staffordshire have taken to the streets to protest against the county council’s proposed closure of the Chesterton Vision youth club. "It would be awful if the council took it away”, Caitlin Kosturczak, 15, told The Sentinel. "I would have to stay at home because there is nothing else to do in the area other than go to parks – but there are lots of gangs and I don't think it would be safe."