But this still leaves less than half of primary pupils and just over a third of secondary pupils eating school lunches, the School Food Trust says.

Take-up in primaries was 41.4%, up 2.1 percentage points on 2008-9, and 35.8% in secondaries, up 0.8 percentage points, it adds.

The government is reviewing school food policy.

The figures come a week after Health Secretary Andrew Lansley criticised TV chef Jamie Oliver’s campaign to improve the quality of school meals.

He said “constantly lecturing people” was “counterproductive”, saying the number of children eating school meals had gone down in the wake of the campaign.
Healthy message

The School Food Trust said the latest rise was the biggest since the school meals revolution and that the message about healthy school meals was finally getting through.

After Oliver’s campaign won huge public support, the government banned junk food from school canteens and vending machines and in 2006 new rules to make food healthier were introduced in English schools.

Strict nutritional guidelines were made compulsory in primary schools in 2008, and the same was introduced in secondaries last September.

The School Food Trust’s chairman, Rob Rees, said school meal take-up was already on a downward spiral when Oliver highlighted the issue.

This led to even more children and parents turning their backs on canteens, because they saw how poor food was.
Continue reading the main story

We want to ensure school meals continue to be healthy

Sarah Teather Children’s minister

“Now, following the introduction of national standards for meals and the hard work to improve the dining room experience for children, this is being reversed - disproving the myth that children simply don’t want to eat healthy food,” Mr Rees added.

But he added there was still a huge amount to do before the school meals revolution was complete.

Oliver said it was important that the figure kept on rising and called on the government to invest more.

“Some people in government might look at the figures and think that it’s now time to take the foot off the gas because it’s a success story,” he said.

The government is in the process of reviewing school meals with a view to improving them further.

Children’s minister Sarah Teather said: “We welcome the increase in the number of children getting a healthy meal in schools.

“We want to ensure school meals continue to be healthy and will set out the next steps for school food policy in due course.”

The Local Authority Caterers’ Association said: “In a time of economic uncertainty and tightening of belts, it is even more important for children and young people to have school meals.”

Ministers have ordered a review of the Early Years Foundation Stage framework, which sets learning and welfare standards for under-fives.

They are concerned it is too rigid and leads to a “tick-box” approach.

The framework was part of a Labour drive to improve nursery education and other early years provision.

Former children’s minister Margaret Hodge said the framework was about ensuring children got the best start in life, no matter what childcare setting they were in.

But many childcare professionals complain the EYFS framework leads to their spending less time with children and more time on paperwork.

Others argue that with its challenging early learning goals, to be achieved by age five, it sets many children up to fail.

Latest research

Well-known children’s authors including Michael Morpurgo and Philip Pullman were among those who campaigned for the scrapping of milestones , such as requiring five-year-olds to be able to write their own name and use punctuation.

And some educationalists argued the framework could harm children’s development and restrict parents’ freedom of choice in childcare and education.

Ministers say they want to focus on getting children ready for school and raising the results of those from poor homes.

The review is to be conducted by Dame Clare Tickell, chief executive of the charity Action for Children.

She has been asked to consider whether the framework that supports the learning of under-fives is based on the best and latest research.

She will consider the latest evidence about what gives children the best start at school.
Overtaken

And she will look at whether there should be one single framework for all early years providers and what minimum standards are needed to keep children safe and support their development.

She will also consider whether young children’s development should be formally assessed at a certain age.

Children’s Minister Sarah Teather said early years professionals deserved to have the freedom to do their jobs and not have to deal with unnecessary bureaucracy.

She said: “It is not right or fair that children from deprived backgrounds that do really well in their early years are overtaken by lower achieving children from advantaged backgrounds by age five.

“We need good quality early learning for all children and a framework that raises standards, as well as keeping children safe.”

Dame Clare said there had been a lot of debate about what young children learn before they reach school, and the pressure and burdens this puts on the early years sector.

“It is important that professionals in the early years have the time to tackle the important issues - helping children from poorer backgrounds, and those with special needs, as well as giving all children a fun and stimulating learning experience,” she said.

From BBC.

The jobless rate among 2009 graduates is the highest in seven years, says the Higher Education Statistics Agency.

And the number of students who managed to find employment within six months has dropped from 62% to 59%.

The figures also reveal how the chances of students finding work depend on their choice of college subject.

The agency’s figures are based on the experiences of 205,000 students six months after graduation.

This snapshot suggests that no medical students are out of work, but that 9% of language students are unemployed, rising to 14% of communications students, and 17% of those on computer science courses.

Universities Minister David Willetts said the overall figures showed that employers were continuing to recruit graduates in large numbers, “even though these are students who graduated at the height of the recession”.

The National Union of Students (NUS) said it was “a particularly tough time for graduates looking to get themselves on the career ladder”.

“University leavers will be the engines of economic recovery in the UK and the government must ensure that it invests in the creation of suitable jobs and secures access to employment opportunities to best utilise the vast pool of skills and knowledge emerging from our colleges and universities,” said NUS president Aaron Porter.

The government wants colleges to give greater information about students’ chances of finding work after graduation so they make better choices before they embark on a college courses.

“I have asked universities to provide employability statements to help people make the right choice about which course to take,” Mr Willetts said.

From BBC.

Instead parents wanted more advice on how to prepare healthier packed lunches, inspectors said.

They also said heads often felt uneasy about issuing edicts on lunch boxes.

The report also found some secondary schools in England still used systems which made pupils receiving free school meals readily available.

Inspectors visited 39 primary, secondary and special schools in England between September 2009 and January 2010 to see how they were getting the healthy eating message across.

They found more primary than secondary schools complied with the standards set out for school lunches.

In primaries, the guideline most often not met was the requirement to provide a piece of fruit for every pupil eating a school lunch.

In secondaries, the standard most often not met were those restricting meat products, deep-fried foods and starchy foods cooked in oil.

Lunch boxes

Inspectors said schools’ healthy eating policies could be undermined when pupils brought in unhealthy packed lunches.

While some schools brought in rules on lunch boxes, others were uncomfortable with this.

“Some of the head teachers spoken to were reluctant to do this because they did not think that they should tell parents what to do and did not wish to be patronising,” the report said.

“Where consultation with families had been poor or where information had not been worded sensitively, parents saw the school as being ‘interfering’ and ‘bossy’ and reacted against the advice.

“Many of the parents with whom inspectors held discussions said that, rather than being told what not to give their children, they wanted more guidance on how to prepare a healthy and balanced packed lunch.”

Free school meals

The report - Food in Schools - found most of the schools surveyed had come up with ways of increasing the uptake of school meals and free school meals.

But it found some of the secondaries were not doing enough to prevent children entitled to free school meals being singled out.

“Five of the 16 secondary schools still had systems where those entitled to free school meals could be readily identified by their peers.”

Inspectors found “the most significant and consistent weakness” was schools’ monitoring of the food they provided and the impact it was having on pupils.

“A major weakness in the schools visited was the lack of monitoring of provision to ensure that the school food standards were fully met,” inspectors said.

“Governors were often unaware of their responsibilities in this respect.”

The opportunity would not come cheap. Kaplan charges $216 a credit with the discount, compared with $26 a credit at California’s community colleges.

Supporters of for-profit education say the offer underscores how Kaplan and other profit-making colleges can help accommodate the mushrooming demand for higher education.

The number of California students choosing for-profit schools has been increasing rapidly, state officials say.

At the same time, government officials have become increasingly concerned that students at for-profit colleges are far more likely than those at public institutions to take out large loans — and default on them.

For better or worse, the tough times for public colleges nationwide have presented for-profit colleges with a promising marketing opportunity. “We thought, in light of the budget crisis and the number of community college classes which are being canceled, if we have that same class here, we would give students the opportunity to take it at Kaplan,” said Greg F. Marino, president of Kaplan University Group, a profit-making business owned by the Washington Post Company.

Kaplan signed the memorandum of understanding seven months ago.

In Massachusetts, Bristol Community College, which has to turn away many qualified applicants for its nursing and other courses in the health professions, has entered into a partnership with Princeton Review.

The Review, a private company, will expand the programs — and then charge $8,000 tuition, about double the regular Bristol rate.

“It will be our students, our courses, our curriculum, taught by our faculty, but Princeton Review’s going to pay some of the startup costs,” Sally Chapman Cameron, a Bristol spokeswoman, said of the two-tiered pricing plan. “Some private colleges nearby charge a lot more than Princeton Review will. Our region needs more health care workers, and without this partnership, we don’t have the resources to expand our nursing program.”

In California, the memorandum of understanding also requires each community college taking part to sign a credit-transfer agreement with Kaplan — and most of the state’s 112 community colleges are not eager to do so. Thus far, Kaplan has no takers for its courses.

“Faculty from across the state were uniformly irate and disappointed about the memorandum of understanding,” said Jane Patton, president of the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges, partly because faculty members were not consulted.

At the academic senate’s spring meeting, faculty members voted to urge the chancellor to withdraw from the memorandum of understanding, which they said “signaled the chancellor’s willingness to outsource the California community colleges’ mission to private for-profit entities.”

From NY Times.

With only one year of test scores for backup, the vote will be based on scant evidence that Stanford EPGY (Education Program for Gifted Youth) works, particularly in a district hard-pressed to have three working computers per classroom.

Memphis is the only large U.S. school district using the program, based on research done by Stanford University professor Patrick Suppes in the 1960s using computerized modules to help gifted learners.

As Stanford worked to broaden the model, it offered free access to tens of thousands of Memphis City Schools students while it monitored results and tweaked the program.

Last year, for instance, the district paid only $900,000 for access for 30,000 math students; Stanford subsidized 30,000 to 40,000 additional students, said Deputy Supt. Irving Hamer.

“I’m happy to get a better deal from them, and I don’t mind at all that they don’t have a whole lot of other customers.

“They give us priority treatment. They have a distinct advantage and need to be successful here before they can do much else,” he said, adding that “they are toast” if the Memphis investment doesn’t work.

Stanford also wrote off licensing fees for its new writing and language arts programs, which cranked up midyear last year.

Principals, not authorized to speak to a reporter, say the jury is still out for a variety of reasons.

Several saw no math gains in their elementary students; others said teachers dislike the program because it falls to them to make sure students put the time in.

In many cases, that means going to a computer lab, which takes them out of class.

In the high schools, one principal said it was difficult to stomach taking students out of Algebra I for remedial help in math but frequently there is no other choice.

Stanford has little research on how effective the program — designed for gifted learners — is for children needing extra help.

The one piece of research company spokeswoman Jovana Knezevic cited was done in Title I schools in California in 2006. She did not know if it had ever been published.

“Memphis is definitely our largest district. We are currently in discussion with other large districts,” she said, adding that Stanford EPGY works only with “districts that are wholly invested and committed.”

The city schools’ history with Stanford dates to the administration of Carol Johnson, who left in 2007.

Under Johnson, Stanford math was one of several interventions for struggling students.

When Supt. Kriner Cash arrived in 2008, he found implementation haphazard and expensive for the number of students actually using it.

He eliminated other choices.

That year — the only year for which there are test results — 2 percent more elementary students scored proficient or advanced on state math tests and 3 percent more in Algebra I made the grade in high school.

At the same time, state math scores were flat, proof, according to the head of district research and evaluation, that the Stanford model works.

“What we are excited about is the positive results we’ve seen and the support they (Stanford) provides,” John Barker said.

This year, the price more than doubles as Memphis presses to get 40,000 to 50,000 students enrolled in the language programs, plus maintain the 70,000 Hamer says have been using the math program.

Stanford recommends students spend 90 minutes a week with its materials, or 54 hours a year.

In reality, the average “dose” for the 61,205 students enrolled in 2008-09 was 13 hours, Barker said.

Stanford generates reports each week of which schools made the grade and circulates them to principals.

“I get a printout. If I see someone that needs five or six attempts to get the answer, you know they don’t know the material,” said one elementary principal, who has seen no gains in her students’ scores.

“My point is, if several students are missing the mark, where is the help for them?”

Without part-time teacher assistants, she’s afraid teachers will be expected to help more students catch up at the expense of others in the room.

Hamer said one of the reasons he likes Stanford programs is because they do not require additional staff.

As part of a deal brokered by a court-appointed mediator, students would end their strike — one of the largest and longest such walkouts in Puerto Rican history — in exchange for a number of concessions. Most notably, the university’s Board of Regents has agreed to cancel a special fee that would have effectively doubled the cost to attend the university’s 11 public campuses.

The deal also includes a promise that there will be no sanctions against strike organizers, who clashed at times with the police at the main Río Piedras campus outside San Juan.

The accord must still be approved by a general assembly of university students, which is expected Monday. Christopher Powers, a literature professor at the Mayagüez campus, said it was “nearly a complete victory for the students,” noting that they failed to get a promise that there would be no large tuition increase next year. Professor Powers said planned cuts later this year to the salaries and benefits of professors could set off another round of conflict.

“The fact that a student movement was able to force the administration and the government to sit down at the negotiating table and concede to nearly all their demands is a very important precedent,” Professor Powers said. “It will serve as an inspiration.”

From NY Times.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, armed groups force villagers to mine minerals like wolframite and cassiterite. Metals processed from such minerals are used in consumer electronics products, including laptop computers, MP3 players, cellphones and digital cameras.

On Thursday, a committee of Stanford’s trustees considered a resolution to create a new proxy voting guideline for the university’s investments. The guideline would support shareholders’ efforts to make companies trace the supply chain of the minerals used in their products.

The board, which met privately, has not announced its decision.

“This is a huge humanitarian crisis, and if Stanford can have an impact at all, we should try to,” said Nina McMurry, a senior and a member of Stand, a student organization that raised the conflict minerals issue with the university.

If Stanford adopts the guideline, it would be the first university in the country to take such action on the issue, according to the Center for American Progress, a policy institute in Washington.

The issue is reminiscent of “blood diamonds,” gemstones harvested from African war zones to finance insurgencies connected to human rights abuses. After years of public pressure, the diamond industry adopted a resolution to block the sale of such diamonds.

The issue of how conflict minerals — and metals like tungsten and tin that are derived from them — finance the violence in eastern Congo, which has claimed more than five million lives since 1998, has been bubbling up among organizations that promote socially responsible investing.

Bennett Freeman, senior vice president for sustainability research and policy at Calvert Investments, said, “I am confident that there will be resolutions on exactly this issue in the next proxy season.”

Stanford has no plans to promote shareholder resolutions at companies in its investment portfolio. But the new guideline would compel the university to support such shareholder resolutions when they were introduced.

Stanford’s close ties with Silicon Valley put it in a unique position to influence companies to scrutinize the source of the minerals they use.

“Companies, like individuals, are more likely to take advice from friends,” said Mark Landesmann, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and Stanford alumnus, who is a member of the university’s Advisory Panel on Investment Responsibility and Licensing.

A voluntary effort by the electronics industry to verify the sources of the minerals it uses is still in its infancy.

American companies are facing increasing pressure from the government to scrutinize supply chains for conflict minerals. In mid-May, representatives from the State Department met with executives from the electronics, manufacturing, jewelry and automotive industries to discuss how to ensure that their products are not indirectly financing the conflict in eastern Congo.

Congress is considering new requirements for publicly traded companies using the minerals. An amendment to the financial regulation bill would demand that companies report the use of minerals from Congo and its neighbors. It would also require them to detail steps taken to ensure that the minerals did not benefit armed groups.

From New York Times.

The results could offer clues about how to rectify an imbalance in the distribution of the best teachers within districts—a requirement of both the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the 2009 economic-stimulus law, and one of K-12 education’s most intractable problems.

The initiatives differ from earlier attempts to equalize teacher talent by using more sophisticated techniques to identify and target top teachers, including the use of value-added data.

They also go beyond narrow transfer incentives to include targeted retention strategies, improved professional development, and a focus on the caliber of the school leaders and peers that teachers new to such schools will be working with every day.

Some of the districts are even working to place whole teams of educators—rather than just individuals—in challenging schools, a promising approach, some scholars say, at a time when individual teacher performance has galvanized much policy attention.

“All this focus on individuals, on getting the best and brightest and placing them into schools, is a limited strategy,” said Susan Moore Johnson, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “It is driving so much of what’s going on right now, that we risk neglecting the context of these people’s work.”

Testing Theories

For years, studies have shown that low-income and minority students have teachers with lesser qualifications. The new efforts are among the first to approach the issue of teacher distribution by looking at teachers’ ability to boost their students’ academic achievement, an area that is only now generating significant research.

Many variables in the equation remain unclear. Researchers have found evidence to suggest, for instance, that school factors play an important role in a teacher’s success.

In a recent study of teachers and students in North Carolina, C. Kirabo Jackson, an assistant professor of labor economics at Cornell University, found that up to a quarter of a teacher’s estimated ability to raise his or her students’ academic achievement could be explained by what he called “match quality”—school-level factors such as differences in curricula or the demographics of the population being taught.

A federal research project, called the Talent Transfer Initiative, aims to provide insights into the question of what happens when effective teachers are assigned to schools with greater challenges.

Financed by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, the initiative offers high-performing teachers in select districts $10,000 a year for up to two years to transfer to a low-performing school in the district, and $5,000 to effective teachers already in such schools to stay put. The teachers are identified using three years of student-achievement data.

“These are teachers who have demonstrated a consistent ability to raise student achievement,” said Steven M. Glazerman, a senior researcher at Mathematica Policy Research, the Princeton, N.J.-based nonprofit group that is conducting the analysis. “The question is whether they can produce similar results in their new setting.”

Researchers identified job openings in low-performing schools, and high-performing teachers were randomly assigned to half those vacancies. The results will be compared with those for a control group of regular hires filling the remaining vacancies.

The project covers schools in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, Greensboro, and Winston-Salem, N.C.; Knoxville, Tenn.; Mobile, Ala.; Tucson, Ariz.; and Houston. Three additional, yet-to-be-announced districts have signed on to join the project.

Holly Barzar is one of 63 teachers now taking part in the initiative. The 27-year-old transferred from a school she called her “comfort zone” to one in which most students are part of the Pasqua Yaqui Tribe, qualify for federally subsidized lunches, and live in troubled neighborhoods.

Students in her new school in Tucson, the 5th grade teacher said, lacked skills, were all over the board academically, and had had “experiences no kid that age should ever have to experience—drugs, gangs, violence. They come to school not being 10-year-olds.”

With her new colleagues aware of the incentive pay, she felt the pressure to perform. Some days were excruciating.

But Ms. Barzar also found that many students had simply never been challenged academically before.

“A lot of them thought writing a paragraph was three lines on a paper. Remedying that—those were some of the longest days of my life,” she said. “But now they can write a five-paragraph essay, and they will do a good job, too.”

Despite the challenges of the school, Ms. Barzar said she wants to continue to work in similar schools.

“As corny as it sounds, I feel like I’m really making a difference here,” she said. “I tell my kids, ‘I want to see you in middle school, see your grades, meet your friends. Because if they’re not good, I’m going to tell you.’ ”

Offering Support

If effective teachers embody certain characteristics, such as Ms. Barzar’s perseverance, researchers say that the context of the schools and support offered there are important ingredients that can help attract higher-caliber teachers.

Research on teacher-transfer patterns shows that some schools, despite serving populations that are traditionally difficult to educate, aren’t hard to staff, according to Susanna Loeb, a professor of education at Stanford University who has studied teacher-transfer issues for nearly a decade.

“Schools with lots of low-achieving students lose more teachers in general, but there are a fair number of high-poverty schools that are appealing places to teach,” Ms. Loeb said.

In his recent study, Mr. Jackson also found that the teachers studied tended to be more effective in mathematics after they transferred to a new school, suggesting they actively sought out schools that were a better match for their talents.

“Teachers aren’t as effective in environments they don’t want to be in, and they don’t stay in environments they don’t want to be in,” he said.

Education Secretary Michael Gove was pressed repeatedly in the House of Commons to end the doubt over school rebuilding projects.

Mr Gove told MPs that building plans remained under review.

The construction industry has warned that firms will be shut down if school building projects are axed.

Recession

The £55bn Building Schools for the Future programme has been renovating and rebuilding schools across England.

Last autumn saw the biggest opening of new schools since the Victorian era.

But there have been unresolved questions about whether the building programme is going to be stopped by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition.

Construction industry organisation, the Construction Products Association (CPA), says the school building programme is worth £10bn a year - and has helped to protect recession-hit businesses. - reports BBC.

The CPA’s economics director, Noble Francis, says the government should recognise the value of the investment to the wider economy.

And he warned that if school projects were cut, the negative impact on construction firms would deepen until at least 2014, forecasting the closure of firms and the loss of jobs.

MPs called on ministers in the coalition government to clarify urgently whether plans that have been announced will still go ahead - or whether they will be scrapped by spending cuts.

Scaffolding

Alex Cunningham, MP for Stockton North, said there had been no new secondary school built in his constituency for 40 years - and that £5m had already been spent on rebuilding plans.

He called for information on whether plans for new schools were now going to be stopped.

Another MP told of a school propped up by scaffolding, where a local community was waiting to hear whether building plans would go ahead.

Mr Gove, taking questions alongside Children’s Minister Sarah Teather, repeatedly fended off questions about school building projects, saying that funding plans were under review.

The education secretary said the government wanted better value for money from building plans - and that too much had been spent on consultants.

Shadow Education Secretary Ed Balls also pressed the coalition partners on spending, challenging ministers on how promises about the pupil premium would be delivered.