News

The UK’s first school for children who have experienced early-life trauma such as neglect or abuse and are currently being failed by the education system could open within two years.

The short-stay school would provide children aged four to seven with therapy and education to prepare them to rejoin mainstream schooling.

Council staff in one of London’s most ethnically diverse boroughs have accused bosses of institutional racism, claiming that racial tension is escalating at the local authority with devastating consequences.

In a strongly worded letter to councillors in Lambeth, a group of staff who call themselves Lambeth Black Workers write of the “despair, humiliation, disappointments, rejection and loss of staff unity that are direct consequences of racism at work”.

Fewer problem drinkers are receiving treatment even though record numbers need help, figures from the House of Commons library show.

Just 80,454 people in England were treated in 2016-17 for addiction to alcohol,about one in seven of the 605,688 people being deemed to be “alcohol dependent”.

The NHS’s staffing and financial problems are the worst they have ever been, official health service figures show.

The number of vacancies across the NHS in England has hit a record high while NHS bosses have disclosed for the first time the service’s underlying deficit built up over recent years – £4.3bn.

Six times more children and young people in England have mental health conditions than a generation ago, research has revealed.

The proportion of four to 24-year-olds who said, or whose parents said, they had a longstanding mental health condition rose from 0.8% in 1995 to 4.8% in 2014, according to a study published in the journal Psychological Medicine.

The University of Birmingham is conducting a research project about social care services. This project is looking at what Councils can do to support people access good quality care services and we want to talk to people who have experience of being an unpaid carer to learn more about their thoughts about the social care system.

The project is also looking at the ways that people access information about social care services, in addition to the experiences of carers. As someone who has experience of supporting a friend or family member in their day-to-day life, your views are important to the project.

The government wants thousands of children in the most disadvantaged areas of Britain to join uniformed groups like the Scouts, Guides and military cadet forces, it will announce this week.

Tracey Crouch, the minister for sports and civil society, will launch a £5m budget to create 5,500 extra places in the country’s toughest areas in uniformed youth groups including St John Ambulance, the Volunteer Police Cadets and Woodcraft Folk.

Since 2010 they have been subject first to a complete pay freeze and then a 1% pay cap. This year, when the government said that, despite pay offers of more than 1% for other public sector staff, pay rises would be capped at 1%-1.5% for civil servants and those working in related areas, our members said they’d had enough and voted for strike action.

Our own research shows that the effect of the pay cap will be that by 2020, average civil service pay will have fallen in value by more than 20%. Given what our members have had to put up with, our 5% claim this year was a moderate demand.

A quarter of a million families bringing up babies and infants in England are living in privately rented accommodation that fails to meet the decent homes standard, it has emerged.

The number of households bringing up children aged under four in squalid conditions, which can include damp walls, broken heating and infestations of rats, has increased by an estimated 75,000 since 2007, according to analysis of official figures.