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A fast thinking lollipop lady stopped seven wild horses galloping down a road towards a busy school.

Shocked Janice Woodland, 53, spotted the animals after helping a little girl across the road at Alderman Jacobs School.
The veteran school patrol warden immediately held out her lollipop to stop the charging animals and corralled them into a nearby garden.
Mrs Woodland helped to keep the horses penned in while police and RSPCA officers are called to the scene.
School headteacher Margaret Sargent today saluted popular Janice after she headed off possible disaster.

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Andy Mulligan follows Philip Pullman and Anne Fine to win £1,500 award for Return to Ribblestrop

A teacher’s vision of life at the most inappropriate boarding school he could imagine – think tots of rum to keep the pupils warm, regular circus training and panthers giving birth – has won the 2011 Guardian children’s fiction prize.

Andy Mulligan’s Return to Ribblestrop, about a school filled with pupils including Colombian gangster’s son Sanchez, self-harming Miles, wild Millie and a motley crew of orphans, is no Malory Towers (even the school motto is “Life is Dangerous”). A travelling zoo is adopted by the children before term has started, with a sinister policeman, hidden treasure, football and friendship all to be tackled before the year is up. The novel, Mulligan’s third, beat titles including the award-winning David Almond’s My Name is Mina to win the Guardian prize, the only children’s award judged by writers.

The chair of the judges, Guardian children’s books editor Julia Eccleshare, said the panel – last year’s winner Michelle Paver, Julia Golding and Marcus Sedgwick – “loved” Return to Ribblestrop. “It is so fresh:

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Despite the high profile of young characters such as Kurt and his boyfriend in TV show Glee, two-thirds of gay teenagers are still bullied at school. Charlie Condou, who plays a gay character in Coronation Street, considers why – and what is being done to stop it

The teenage years are tough. Fuelled by hormones, laced with uncertainty, they are the years when we try to work out who we are and find our place in the world. We can swing from intense excitement to extreme embarrassment in a heartbeat, while all the time wanting nothing more than to make friends and fit in. It’s hard for everybody but, without a doubt, for gay teens it can be a lot harder. When even the word “gay” has become a synonym for “crappy” or “pathetic”, it’s clear that the problems are incredibly deep-rooted.

Some shocking statistics: according to Stonewall, 92% of LGBT teens have been verbally abused because of their sexuality; 41% have been physically bullied; 17% have had death threats. For many gay kids, school doesn’t feel like a very safe place. I didn’t come out until after I left school and, while I was never bullied directly, I can still remember the paranoia I felt at not having a girlfriend, and the casual lies I would throw out, hoping to deflect attention from my sexuality. I was lucky in that I was popular and confident and, as a “drama geek”, mainly attached to the one department where theatricality and flamboyance were an asset, not a problem

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The head of one of Wales’ oldest schools has claimed confidence has already been lost in a new way to categorise performance.

Neil Foden of Ysgol Friars in Bangor, Gwynedd calls the banding system, which starts next month, “imperfect”.

“Schools don’t understand it, the impression we get is that civil servants don’t understand it, so what chance have parents got?” he said.

The Welsh government said it offered a clear picture of school performance.

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Parents are demanding the choice of paying for their children’s school meals online to stop them either handing dinner money to bullies or spending it on sweets and take-aways in shops.

Up to half the money handed over to pupils for dinners never finds its way into school, caterers say. A poll of more than 10,000 parents, published today, suggests that 94 per cent would prefer to pay online. The study by the Local Authority Caterers Association, to coincide with National School Meals week, also showed that 15 per cent of pupils entitled to free school meals did not take them.

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The father of a four-year-old today criticised his MP for suggesting she should get on her bike and ride to her new school – three miles away.

Paul Johnson said he thought Richard Ottaway was joking when the Tory MP for Croydon South told him he should buy his daughter a cycle.

Unemployed Mr Johnson said he had sought his help after Tillie was refused a place to her first choice Roke Primary School – which backs onto her home.

He explained that instead she was offered a place at Byron Primary, about three miles away in Old Coulsdon, which would require two buses but he would struggle to afford the fares.

To cycle would mean using the A22 – one of Croydon’s most dangerous roads and subject of a high-profile safety campaign.

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