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| In pictures: the Conservative conference Images from Birmingham as the Tories hold their annual gathering guardian.co.uk |
Baby P doc seeks to quit medicine A doctor accused of failing to spot signs that Baby P was being abused is seeking to quit practising medicine in the UK. bbc.co.uk |
Nick Clegg secures £7bn pupil premium as an addition to schools budget Funds from outside the education department will mean extra money targeted at poorer pupilsNick Clegg has wrung from the Treasury "additional" funds to pay for his idea of a fairness premium that would see extra support allocated to poorer pupils. The scheme will cost £7bn during the course of this parliament.At a speech today in Chesterfield, the deputy prime minister was coy about the money, saying this could be shown only next Wednesday in the comprehensive spending review. But officials say Clegg decided late yesterday to go early with an announcement, a decision which had the support of David Cameron and George Osborne but surprised senior and middle ranking Treasury officials.Today Clegg repeatedly described the funds for his fairness premium as "additional" – making clear he wants the money to come mostly from outside the education department rather than merely outside the schools budget by cutting "non-essential" education projects such as youth clubsand after-school activities, as had been suggested.A senior No 10 aide said: "The money for this will come from outside the education budget. We're not just rearranging furniture – this is real new money from elsewhere in Whitehall."Clegg has had a difficult week: some backbenchers, including two former party leaders, said that they would vote against a government plan to increase university tuition fees because it would break a Lib Dem general election pledge. Clegg persuaded the Tory leadership he should use his speech at the end of the week to try to get his party rebels back onside."There were four things on the front of our manifesto," a senior Lib Dem said today. "Increases in the personal tax allowance – well, we've started that; rebalancing the economy – well that's going to take a while; political reform – well again, we'll see. But the pupil premium – we've now delivered that. It's a very big deal. We're the junior partner in a coalition, in a government trying to cut a deficit, but we've delivered something big."In particular, the people Clegg and others have been fighting in the Treasury include Clegg's former chief of staff, Danny Alexander. He has surprised people by being a deficit hawk and has consistently argued against Clegg and on behalf of Treasury officials who believed the pupil premium should be paid for from the existing schools budget.Had David Laws still been chief secretary to the Treasury, they might have secured a larger settlement since he was the author of the policy when the Lib Dems were in opposition.The Institute for Fiscal Studies had a gloomy first take on the proposal. While it praised the policy as "broadly progressive", it had concerns about its effect."Given the scale of the cuts in departmental spending to be announced next Wednesday, it seems likely that overall school funding will be cut in real terms," said a spokesman for the institute. "If such cuts are shared equally across schools, then the pupil premium could (depending on its final size, and on the cuts to the overall budget) lead to a net result where schools in affluent areas see their funding go up on average, while schools in deprived areas experience cuts in funding."Insiders agree this creates a tension, but suggest the government will probably compensate by cutting the additional funding for disadvantaged children at schools in richer areas.Clegg's speech was also pilloried for one of its assertions. To illustrate the central thrust that poorer children miss out in a myriad ways, including growing up in less erudite households, he said: "Children from poor homes hear 616 words spoken an hour, on average, compared to 2,153 words an hour in richer homes. By the age of three, that amounts to a cumulative gap of 30 million words."Cathy Newman, of Channel 4 News, has established this research was taken from US research undertaken in the 1980s.Nick CleggEconomic policyTax and spendingSchoolsPovertyAllegra Strattonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
ID fraud costs UK £2.7bn a year Identity fraud is on the increase in the UK, costing more than £2.7bn each year despite efforts to make it harder to use consumers' details. bbc.co.uk |
Wikileaks: Death toll 15,000 above previous estimate More than 15,000 previously unrecorded deaths are contained in the leaked Pentagon files published by Wikileaks, according to one analysis of the figures. telegraph.co.uk |