Children

I’ve no particular beef with the French, gruesomely tortured beef as it would no doubt be, but I’m a little tired of being told we ought to follow their example with our children. Elizabeth Truss, the normally quite sensible education minister, is the latest culprit. She believes that Britain’s nurseries are chaotic, noisy places. Children would be better prepared for school, she feels, if British nurseries were more like French nurseries, in which toddlers wear couture, click their heels whenever an adult enters the room, and never laugh. I daresay she’s right, just as I’m sure people are often right when they marvel at the flawless behaviour of little French

This morning The Sunday Times revealed the existence of a ‘secret database’ holding information on 8 million schoolchildren. Information which has been uploaded by schools and social workers, and ranging from photographs to academic records and records of bad behaviour in school. The database – named ‘One’, and created and operated by a company named Capita – allows schools to upload information daily, which councils can then share with ‘other agencies’, such as youth offending teams, NHS staff and charities. If you think this all sounds a bit déjà-vu-ish, then you’d be right.  Labour’s ContactPoint database – created in 2005 as a reaction to the Victoria Climbié case in an attempt to improve child

More bad news for Britain’s families: new research shows that the cost of bringing up a child is an eye-watering £143,000. This piles more pressure on a government that already knows it has to do better to show it’s on the side of families struggling to make ends meet. Based on what parents say is essential, our report shows the minimum required to raise a child until the age of 18 today is £143,000 (including housing and childcare costs), which averages out at about £150 a week. The report also reveals that this cost is rising faster than inflation. The rising price of food, water and fuel contribute to this

On Tuesday next week, The Spectator will hold its third annual Schools Revolution conference. On the agenda will be the striking failure of new ‘free schools’ to keep pace with the rising pupil demand. Michael Gove, the education secretary, will be our keynote speaker. To book tickets, click here. A couple of month’s ago, Fraser warned that the recent baby boom would lead to a schools crisis, with demand for places outstripping supply. Today’s new figures from the Department for Education show that the crisis has already begun. This year, there are more primary school pupils than there were 30 years ago, but 3,800 fewer primary schools. Since last year,

Parliament has decamped for midwinter, but the business of government goes on. Today’s announcement, by the children’s minister Tim Loughton, is contained within a Times article here. ‘An expert panel,’ it reveals, will be tasked with designing a new system for assessing prospective adoptive parents by March next year. That new system, making it easier for suitable folk to adopt, should then be in place by the end of 2012. In many respects, adoption is perfect Cameroonian territory; being, as it is, at the intersection of social responsibility, family, deregulation, etc, etc. But politics isn’t what should concern us here. A lot of unmitigated good can be done in fixing

Social mobility has become something of a hot topic for the coalition. February’s Social Mobility White Paper made it the government’s number one social policy goal. Yet arguments over tuition fees have rather drowned out much of what they have to say on the topic, particularly when it comes to education and skills. So it was interesting to hear Higher Education Minister David Willetts restate the government’s case with a speech at the Resolution Foundation yesterday. Willetts, who has been called the poster boy of the think tank community, was as thoughtful as ever – and he didn’t mince his words. In a dig at much of the research on

There is no rest for IDS. Yesterday he was in Madrid talking about youth unemployment and immigration and today he turns his attention to child poverty. Of all life’s accidents, the accident of birth is the most decisive. It is said that a child’s prospects are determined by the age of five, and numerous other statistics and factoids lead to a similar conclusion. IDS rehearses some in a piece in today’s Guardian. IDS and Labour MP Graham Allen have conducted a report into these matters, and have concluded that early intervention in a child from a deprived or broken family is vital if the poverty gap is to be closed,

Tomorrow sees the publication of the report David Cameron commissioned on how to address the commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood. Thanks to a leak we already know most of what’s in the report. It proposes, among other things, that sexualized advertisement shouldn’t be displayed in places near where children go, that the watershed should be more strictly enforced, that lads mags shouldn’t be displayed at eye level and that it should be easier for parents to block access from home computers to certain internet sites. There’ll be those that dismiss these proposals as gimmicks or as too small to make a difference. But making the public square more family friendly

David Aaronovitch is one of the preeminent voices of the liberal-left in this country. He is no social conservative and has been dismissive of those who want a lower time-limit for abortion. But today he wrote something that reminded me of that famous Peggy Noonan column about the Columbine massacre and ‘the ocean in which our children swim.’ Aaronovitch writing about the Times’ investigation into sex gangs says: ‘Sometimes I look at what the surrounding culture says to our kids and wonder whether we are mad. On the one hand we can be persuaded only with difficulty to give them decent sex education, so terrified are we by their latent

The birth of Zachary Jackson Levon Furnish John gave that of Christ a run for its money in the broadcast news over Christmas. In Ireland, where I was, the newsreader declared that the singer Elton John and his partner, David Furnish, had had their first child. Hang on, I thought. Not so. Some woman, and possibly two – bear with me – has had a baby with one of them. And as it turned out, the birth mother was a client of the Center for Surrogate Parenting based in Encino, California, which has been providing surrogacy arrangements for gay would-be parents since 1989. Elton John and David Furnish will, I’d have thought,