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Schools in England will be sent copies of the King James Bible from this week to mark its 400th anniversary. Education Secretary Michael Gove said the text had had “an immense influence” on the English-speaking world. He said pupils should learn about its role in the nation’s history, language, literacy and culture. The move is [...]

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Thousands of children have lost the chance of a decent life because of the ban on mixed-race adoption, the state equality chief has admitted. Trevor Phillips said it was his greatest regret that he failed to challenge the race rules which denied children the chance of a loving family and instead left them at the [...]

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Michael Gove’s easy ride on academies is coming to an end. Until now, the financial advantages of academy status have encouraged a steady flow of conversions. This perhaps gave the impression of an ideologically popular policy, but the reality is that schools have just been pragmatic. From here on in, it will be much tougher. [...]

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When Sir Michael Wilshaw took up his role as the head of Ofsted in January, he made it clear he had no intention of softening the combative style that marked his spell as head of the high-achieving Mossbourne Academy in Haringey. “If anyone says to you that ‘staff morale is at an all-time low’, you [...]

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When they came to power, David Cameron and Nick Clegg said they were determined to raise the status of teaching because “the most successful countries, from the Far East to Scandinavia, are those where teaching has the highest status as a profession”. These are places where only the top graduates enter teaching, and where training [...]

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MP Alun Michael believes children as young as 14 should get the vote. Mr Michael, Labour’s MP for Cardiff South and Penarth, has long been in favour of widening Britain’s enfranchisement, saying young people are under-represented. He argues that lowering the voting age by four years would increase voter turnout as well as encouraging youngsters [...]

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Children in Hackney wait the longest in England to get adopted — an average of two years and nine months. Another London borough, Merton, has the second longest time at two years and eight months with Liverpool third at two-and-a-half years. Nationally children in care in England are forced to wait an average of 20 [...]

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A cross–party group of MPs said some of the schools, which are free of local authority control and funded directly from Whitehall, were making “very high” payments to head teachers and leaders of academy chains. The Commons public accounts committee raised concerns over a quango’s failure to “pick up warning signs of improper spending or [...]

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On the assumption that my wife, a woman of impeccable taste, will stick to her habit of never reading a word I write, it must be confided that this week I fell in love. Perhaps this puts it too strongly. It may be nothing more than a transient man-crush. Anyway, call it what you will, [...]

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Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, has pledged his support for the expansion of grammar schools, it was claimed yesterday. People who attended a reception at the Commons last month held by Friends of Grammar Schools said Mr Gove had expressed support for the example set in Kent, where a new “satellite” grammar school – an [...]

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The show will be the first ever devoted to Henry, who was Prince of Wales and son to James I. Born in 1594, he died in 1612 at the age of 18, struck down by typhoid fever. His younger brother later acceded to the throne, becoming the doomed King Charles I. During his short life, Henry [...]

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The Eye of Horus is one of the best-known Ancient Egyptian symbols, still used in jewellery and artwork despite being more than 3,000 years old. What is less known is exactly how important it was to everyday life in those early days of civilization, for a closer look at the eye reveals a complex mathematical [...]

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The UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) has given the Punjab government about £63m for education since 2009, as part of a grant that will eventually total £77m. Critics believe the foreign cash has made it easier for Punjab’s leaders to raid their own education budget to buy votes ahead of a general election expected early [...]

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Steve Iredale, president of the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) said politicians and civil servants considered themselves experts in schools – just because they had attended them as children,   Too often, their visions were based on nostalgia and myths of a golden past, he said, accusing successive administrations of a “burning desire” to [...]

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A schoolgirl has become one of the youngest councillors in the country after winning a seat on Plymouth City Council. Kate Taylor, who was standing for Labour, won her Devonport seat with a majority of 839 as her party won control of the council last night from the Conservatives. The 18-year-old, who is an A-level [...]

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An adorable Kickstarter campaign to create a children’s book about the election met its fundraising goal of $30,000 on Thursday. Support from almost 400 backers will help to make the book Roger Nix, President at Six available for purchase by the U.S. presidential election in November 2012. Author Nick Dazé says he would have never [...]

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He has survived political correctness and the PlayStation generation. Now Mr Punch is about to celebrate his 350th birthday. What’s the reason for his longevity? With his familiar cry of “That’s the way to do it!”, Mr Punch has come a long way since his first mention in the diary of Samuel Pepys. Next week, [...]

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Today, when love letters are all but extinct, teenagers conduct their relationships in coarse text-speak via mobile phones, Twitter and Facebook. But 18-year-old Herbert Wilkins and Ethel Ormerod, 15, fell in love in the more innocent climate of Victorian England. Herbert, a woollen clerk, poured out his feelings for factory machinist Ethel in a series [...]

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Levi Johnson, the father of Sarah Palin’s grandson, plans to name his new daughter after a gun. Jonson, 21, will call his second child Breeze Beretta Johnson. Her middle name is inspired by the Italian firearms manufacturer Beretta. He and his new girlfriend, Sunny Oglesby, are expecting after Sunny forgot to bring her birth control [...]

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The pressure of the French presidential election has put Carla Bruni under so much stress she has stopped breast-feeding her baby daughter, it was claimed today. The angst-ridden First Lady, 44, is suffering from a ‘real psychological shock’ at the brutality of the insults levelled at her husband during his campaign, France’s Closer magazine reported. [...]

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The Education Secretary, Michael Gove, is obsessed with a golden age that never happened, according to the general secretary of the head teachers’ union. Russell Hobby, of the National Association of Head Teachers, says Mr Gove’s belief that education was better in the 1950s and 1960s is misleading as only a small percentage of the [...]

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“Politicians,” he says, “have been downplaying the importance of history as a subject in our schools but, if they had bothered to have a better grasp of history themselves, they might have avoided costly wars. Instead they act like children. The only time that they think matters is their own.” Since the actor, author and [...]

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A young fossil enthusiast found a deer’s antler dating back 4,000 years as he walked along a Cumbrian beach. Jamie Cassidy, 8, said he spotted what looked like a stick poking through the shingle at South Walney. As he dug it out, he realised it was an ancient antler, 3ft high and perfectly preserved. Experts say it [...]

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History teaching in England is among the worst in the western world, a Cambridge University don has warned in a devastating report. Youngsters are taught a ‘mis-cellany of disconnected fragments’ and examined on barely anything before 1870, he claimed, missing out on vast swathes of British, European and world history. Professor Robert Tombs, a history [...]

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Lessons in history are being increasingly undermined by an “incoherent, fragmented and repetitive” curriculum that leaves most children feeling “bored”, it was claimed. The subject is also being distorted by a poor-quality exams system, which places an excessive emphasis on broad enquiry skills over core knowledge, researchers said. In a damning conclusion, experts claimed that [...]

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History, geography and  modern foreign language lessons are enjoying a comeback on the secondary school curriculum, according to figures released today. Overall, though, the number of teachers has fallen for the first time in years – by 10,000 – as councils prune staffing in the wake of schools opting to quit their control and become academies. [...]

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Martyn Wood is on his way to a friend’s flat above a launderette, and he is not happy. “I don’t understand it, I could count 30 properties on a five-minute walk round here that are boarded up. It’s disgusting.” He, like many others in Newham – one of London’s most deprived boroughs – is worried that [...]

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Labour demanded urgent action to ensure proper oversight of Britain’s growing number of academies yesterday as it emerged that the Government has issued warning notices to eight of the schools that they are under-performing. Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, told MPs that his department has has sent “pre-warning” letters to the academies, stating that they [...]

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A teenage girl sends a naked image of herself to her boyfriend’s mobile phone. It’s not something she makes a habit of doing, but she wants to express the young couple’s intimacy. They split up, and she soon discovers that he has circulated that private message to all his friends – even to her parents [...]

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Andrew Young issued a statement saying he was the father of Edwards’ mistress Rielle Hunter’s unborn child in December 2007, after a tabloid newspaper took a photograph of her while heavily pregnant. At the time, Edwards was days away from contesting the Iowa caucus, the first stage in the US presidential election, and internet rumours had [...]

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An unexpected social media byproduct has risen from the “War on Women” debate between Democrats and Republicans: Mitt Romney’s team was able to build an 80,000-strong women-centered Facebook community nearly overnight. The Romney campaign created “Moms for Mitt,” a Facebook community that’s being used to display Romney’s life as father and husband and to share [...]

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Boris Johnson today announced he would help create more than 20,000 part-time jobs to help more mothers back into work.  The Mayor said he would set up 7,500 posts across the Greater London Authority but would campaign for the rest in the private sector. A new report has found that London has the lowest level of [...]

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Michael Gove said formal sex education lessons may not be needed if schools can raise pupils’ overall grades across the curriculum. Addressing the Commons education select committee, he said there was a direct link between children doing well academically and their chances of indulging in “risky behaviour”. Schools’ main responsibility should be to instill a sense of [...]

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The divorcee who is on course to become France’s next first lady today suggested she will be a far more modest one than Carla Bruni. Valerie Trierweiler, 47, is the partner of Francois Hollande, the Socialist who is runaway favourite to replace Nicolas Sarkozy as President in less than two weeks’ time. If Hollande does win – [...]

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Jamie Oliver has made a blistering attack on Michael Gove over school food, claiming that some of the education secretary’s flagship academies are lowering nutrition levels among pupils and profiteering from junk food vending machines because they have been allowed to ignore national standards. The TV chef and food campaigner says the substantial progress made [...]

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Hundreds of young people are to demand that the next Mayor listens to their ideas on tackling London’s youth crime crisis. About 200 young people will call on the capital’s politicians to take action on knife and gang crime at a rally this weekend. Stella Creasy, MP for Walthamstow, started the A Mayor for Young [...]

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Frank Zimmerman, 60, who refused to attend court, emailed Mrs Mensch, who has three children, in August last year. He told her to choose which child was to die – referring to the film Sophie’s Choice in which a mother has to choose between the life of her son or daughter. Mrs Mensch had given [...]

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Extraordinary claims that the Queen Mother’s real mother was her family’s French cook are to be made in a sensational new book. Aristocratic author Lady Colin Campbell says the domestic help may have been ‘an early version of surrogacy’ for both Elizabeth Bowes Lyon and her younger brother David. The cook, an ‘attractive and pleasant [...]

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Working as an investigative photographer for the National Child Labor Committee, sociologist Lewis Hine documented working and living conditions of children in the United States between 1908 and 1924. In a series of poignant photographs, Mr Hine documented children who were sent to work soon after they could walk, and were paid based on how [...]

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Gerhard Schroeder, the former German chancellor and once one of the most powerful men in Europe, is set to be spending more time with his children as his wife focuses on a blossoming career in politics. Gerhard Schroeder, the former German chancellor and once one of the most powerful men in Europe, is set to [...]

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Michel and Edmond Navratil must have felt a sense of relief when they finally made it on to the last lifeboat to be successfully launched from the sinking Titanic. Despite their tender years, the brothers – aged just four and two – would have been aware of the terror and hysteria that had engulfed those [...]

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The Government will today unveil a revised version of the policy following opposition from heritage charities, green groups and The Daily Telegraph’s Hands Off Our Land campaign. A draft of the document has been strongly criticised for supporting a “presumption in favour of sustainable development”. Campaigners feared this could mean developers paving over vast swaths [...]

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Her crying mother asked her sister and brother to take hold of Josefina and they did, pulling the screaming girl away from her parents and towards the ship. “I didn’t want to leave, and of course my mama didn’t want us to go, but papa said it was only for a short time, just a [...]

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Up to 11 boys were castrated while in the care of the Dutch Roman Catholic church in the 1950s to rid them of homosexuality, a newspaper investigation has said. A young man was castrated in 1956 after telling police he was being abused by priests, the newspaper reported. The justice minister is investigating the role [...]

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Laid to rest in her best clothes and lying on an ornamental bed, she was probably of noble blood. Quite how the 16-year-old Anglo Saxon girl died and who she was remain a mystery. But she was buried wearing a gold cross – suggesting she was one of Britain’s earliest Christians. The skeleton and Christian [...]

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When Alice Marshall discovered a notebook that belonged to her grandfather, she was transported to his dreams during one of the darkest episodes of the Second World War. Daniel Ernest Baker was among thousands of Allied prisoners of war who, in 1945, were forcibly marched west from their camps to flee the Soviet offensive. For [...]

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For decades it had gathered dust in a box on top of a wardrobe among a war hero’s possessions. But an entry within this tatty pocket diary appears to offer corroboration to claims that Adolf Hitler fathered an illegitimate son. Yesterday one of former Royal Engineer Leonard Wilkes’s sons said the diary could offer the [...]

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When last they saw each other, cousins Leon Schagrin and Lemel Leo Adler were teens who had just a chance meeting of a few minutes as they were carted off by the Nazis to a concentration camp at Auschwitz. When the moment passed, they were taken to separate parts of the facility and never saw [...]

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Maria Fernanda Restrepo was 10 years old when her brothers, Santiago and Andres, disappeared in Ecuador’s capital city Quito. More than two decades later she has released a powerful documentary film, which has prompted a new investigation. The two boys, aged 17 and 14, had been left in charge of their little sister while their [...]

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As a force-ten gale whipped the waves into a fury around the ship, an 11-year-old boy lay alone in his cabin reading The Beano and dreaming of adventure. It was 10pm. The only sound was from a ball bearing he’d placed in his bedside drawer, which was sliding ever more frantically from side to side. [...]

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