New Mums 'Abandoned' During Labour

One in three new mothers is left alone during or just after labour because maternity services are overstretched, according to a survey.

The poll of 3,500 mums found almost half (43%) said they did not have access to a midwife after giving birth.

More than a third (35%) of those questioned by The Royal College of Midwives (RCM) and parenting website Netmums.com said they had been abandoned during or after labour at a time when they felt worried.

Sally Russell, co-founder of Netmums.com, said: "This survey's results should demonstrate to the Government just how stretched maternity services are.

"It shows that our members want, need and deserve one-to-one care from midwives but they are not getting this and are left alone and feeling abandoned during labour, and especially in the vital post-natal period."

    All women can expect individual support from a midwife, supported by a wider maternity team, throughout her labour and birth.

Health Minister Ann Keen

One mother said of her labour: "There were too many people on and off shifts.

"There was no continuity of care, therefore no-one was able to make sound decisions.

"I (had) seven different midwives involved just during labour. I ended up having an emergency Caesarean section."

In 2007, the Government said all women in England should be supported by a midwife they know and trust throughout their pregnancy and after birth.

Ministers promised that "by the end of 2009" women would be able to choose where they give birth and have better continuity of midwifery care.

But the survey found only 68% of women were offered a choice of where to give birth.

Baby buggy

Some mothers felt abandoned

There were some positive responses in the research, including 83% of women saying they had the name and telephone number of a midwife they could contact if they were worried.

And 72% said they had their first appointment with a midwife as soon as they wanted it.

RCM general secretary Cathy Warwick said she was pleased some aspects of maternity services were rated highly but that overall the results painted a "worrying and disturbing picture".

Reacting to the survey, Health Minister Ann Keen said: "There has been record investment in the NHS in recent years including an additional £330m for maternity services.

"All women can expect individual support from a midwife, supported by a wider maternity team, throughout her labour and birth."

NEWS BY:http://news.sky.com

Has this mother of three changed the face of British education?

Furious at her son’s struggle to  get into a grammar school, Sarah Shilling launched a petition to build the first new one for 50 years. Yesterday, the revolution began!


Decrepit and semi-derelict, The Wildernesse School doesn’t have to try hard to live up to its name. Since it was swallowed up by a local girls’ school in 2010 to form a new academy elsewhere, the days when Strictly Come Dancing’s Anton du Beke — a former pupil known back then as Tony Beke — skipped through its corridors seem a very distant memory.

Hard to imagine, then, that this sprawling site on the outskirts of Sevenoaks, in Kent, could soon provide the spark for a revolution in British education.

Yesterday, a petition raised by thousands of parents in Sevenoaks calling for the building of what is effectively a new grammar school — though technically it will be an ‘annexe’ of an existing one — won overwhelming support in a vote taken by Kent County Council.

The petition was started by a mother of three from Sevenoaks called Sarah Shilling, who despaired at the hoops her son had to jump through to gain a grammar school place.

Now, a formal proposal will be drawn up by the council to identify potential sites for the school — with Wildernesse the favourite — and to establish which existing grammar schools may want to run it.

If such a new school opens, it will be the first of its kind in England for 50 years.

For families in Sevenoaks, this is a big deal indeed. They have long complained that because of the lack of local provision, more than 1,000 children from the town must take buses and trains every day to make journeys of an hour or more to schools  elsewhere in the county.

And yet the opening of a grammar in Sevenoaks will have a significance far beyond the purely local, because it forces the controversial issue of selective education — an idea so hated by the Left — firmly back on the national political agenda.

It puts selective schooling back on the agenda

Even before the decision was taken,  the discussion of the Sevenoaks plans provoked howls of protest from all the usual suspects.

Stephen Twigg, the shadow Education Secretary, has angrily accused Government ministers of attempting to expand  academic selection, and vowed that if Labour got back in to power it would reverse any move in that direction.

‘Instead of focusing on a few grammar schools, the Government should be trying to raise standards in all the 24,000 schools in England,’ he said.

Meanwhile, Fiona Millar, partner of former Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell and seasoned education activist, was quick to join the fight, furiously peddling the argument that grammar schools limit rather than promote social mobility.

‘The most successful systems in the world are fully comprehensive,’ she claimed. ‘Bringing back selection is the wrong solution to problems that still exist in our school system, most of which can still be addressed in all-ability schools with the right leadership, teaching, curriculum and commitment from central government.’

Their fear is that what is happening in Kent could be just the start of an expansion of the grammar-school system and that Education Secretary Michael Gove is secretly keen to give this the green light.
Government approval: Michael Gove has spoken of his support for the grammar school system - much to the outrage of some education activists who believe they endanger social mobility

Government approval: Michael Gove has spoken of his support for the grammar school system - much to the outrage of some education activists who believe they endanger social mobility

Supporters of grammars argue that these are the schools parents want — and that it is the Government’s duty to deliver them.

‘The areas that have retained selection top the league tables year after year, providing the standards that parents want, and opening opportunities for children from all backgrounds,’ Graham Brady, a Conservative MP and long-time supporter of grammars, told me.

The fact that the latest developments have caught opponents of grammar schools somewhat by surprise is a result of their belief that they had largely won the argument against selection.

Having promised to open new grammars as part of his 2005 leadership campaign, two years later Mr Cameron abruptly changed tack saying that he did not think they were a good idea after all.
This U-turn was interpreted by some as being a carefully-planned ‘Clause Four moment’ — a reference to Tony Blair’s decision to cut ties with Labour’s socialist past when he became leader.


More...

    HYWEL WILLIAMS: A grammar school revolution on the way to Kent

Cameron’s strategists calculated that by ditching an educational policy associated with Tory diehards, it would appeal to voters who had never voted Conservative before. In fact, all it achieved was a backbench rebellion and simmering resentment among supporters of selective education from all political backgrounds.

In an ICM poll in 2010, 76 per cent of respondents said that they would support the creation of new grammar schools.

Instead, Cameron decided to back Michael Gove’s academies programme — the creation of independent state schools, run by head teachers outside of council control.

Opponents have been caught by surprise

But in a separate move, new admissions rules were introduced late last year, meaning that councils can no longer block the expansion of existing schools — be they state comprehensive or grammar.
With school rolls rising across many parts of England as the effects of immigration and a higher birth rate take effect, the rule changes have been jumped on by councils and parents.

Currently, across England there are 164 grammar schools educating some 160,000 pupils. Kent, with 33, has the largest proportion of them, attended by some 28 per cent of the county’s children.
In Year Six, the final year of primary school education, all pupils in Kent have the option of sitting the 11-plus examination. Those who pass the exam can then choose a grammar school to attend.

If they have passed with very high marks, they can apply for a handful of the grammars that are ‘super-selective’ — those which base their intake on performance in the exam rather than a pass and a pupil’s proximity to the school.

In Sevenoaks, a prosperous commuter town half-an-hour’s train journey to the south-east of London, there are two schools.

One is the private Sevenoaks School, whose boarding fees are now a shade shy of £30,000 a year; the other is a mixed-ability state school, Knole Academy, formed just over a year ago from a merger of two struggling comprehensives (one being Wildernesse, whose pupils vacated their old premises). There are no grammar schools in the town.


NEWS BY:http://www.dailymail.co.uk

Universities say students may face earlier loan payback

Graduates could pay higher interest rates on their student loans and pay them back earlier to help avert a funding crisis, a report says.

The Russell Group of top universities says it faces a £1.1bn black-hole in its finances by 2012-13.

The claims are in its submission to England's official review of student finance and fees.

The National Union of Students said students already paid "more than their fair share".

President-elect Aaron Porter said: "These are elite universities that are simply turning around to students saying they have to foot the bill for cuts in government funding - but they should have anticipated this and thought about their provision".

The Russell Group represents the 20 most research-intensive universities in the UK, and includes the likes of Oxford, Cambridge and University College London.

It says that without extra income its members will be forced to make significant cut-backs.

The group has suggested the £900m-worth of cuts planned by the Labour government for the next three years would bring the UK's higher education sector to its knees.

But it kept its submission to the independent review of higher education funding and student finance secret until now.

The review will report to the government in the autumn.

Under-investment
Although this submission stops short of suggesting higher tuition fees for UK students, it appears to indicate that other solutions may not be fully workable.

It also argues that one way to make the student finance system more sustainable would be to charge students a real rate of interest on their loans.

This could be linked to the cost of government's overall cost of borrowing. It also suggests the threshold at which students start paying loans back could be lowered from the present £15,000.

The Russell Group says: "The lack of a real rate of interest on student loans" is a "subsidy which imposes high costs on the Government, and which exceeds the requirements of ensuring fair access to higher education".

It is set to make a number of submissions to the review in the next few weeks.

The group says variable tuition fees have enabled top universities to maintain high standards and widen access.

Future cuts
This funding, together with the package of loans covering the fees - now at £3,225 a year - has allowed many more students to attend universities, it says.

It adds that much of the increased funding has been used by universities to compensate for a backlog of under-investment.

But it also claims the financial sustainability of the sector as a whole is severely at risk, with universities facing rising cost pressures, particularly related to salaries and pensions.

It says research intensive universities face particular pressures because of low staff-student ratios and high equipment and resource costs.

One Russell Group university loses an estimated £3,620 per chemistry student per year, it adds.

And figures like this lead the group to predict top universities will be £1.1bn in the red by 2012-13.

Russell Group director general Wendy Piatt said: "With funding reductions and the prospect of future cuts to manage, without clear means of increasing their income, meeting these challenges begins to look like an impossible task.

"There is now a real risk that we could lose academics who have been responsible for discoveries that have changed the lives of millions of people for the better."

Knowledge economy
The report says there are only three ways in which universities could reduce their annual deficits.

These are reducing costs by cutting staff; increasing income by recruiting more overseas students; or increasing income through domestic tuition fees.

It also suggests that graduates could pay back their loans earlier and at a higher interest rate.

Under the current system, students begin to pay back their loans when they start earning £15,000 a year or more, and at a low interest rate.

The public costs of funding the student finance system could be reduced by lowering the threshold at which graduates begin paying back loans, it adds.

A spokesman for the review of fees said it would consider the submission along with all the others. The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills said it would respond to the review when it reported in full.

University and College Union general secretary Sally Hunt said: "We desperately need to overhaul how universities are funded and move away from the idea that the current review of student funding is merely a question of how much student fees go up by."

NEWS BY:http://www.bbc.co.uk