Teachers for Supply

Universities around the UK issued disciplinary and administrative fines totalling greater than £550,000 to students last year.

Freedom of knowledge requests from the Guardian have shown students were fined a complete of £551,237.30 for offences which includes smoking, drunkenness, and unauthorised parties within the last academic year. One institution said it used the cash collected to fund the once a year staff outing.

The results also revealed quite a lot of peculiarities within the amounts fined for every offence. At Brunel University, while “assisting students with online tests for money” landed one student with a £250 fine, another was fined £50 for “hitting a member of staff”.

A student at Kent University was fined £50 for “insulting or violent behaviour including or involving racial, sexual or other abuse, harassment or threat of violence” – the same quantity that many were charged for smoking offences.

Other offences that ended in disciplinary action at universities included keeping chickens, leaving food on a window ledge, stealing loaves of bread and being prepared for a post-examination “trashing” of another student. Warwick University issued fines totalling £350 last year to students who were “drunk”, without a further reason given.

Middlesex University issued one of the most fines, charging a complete of £61,400 for “late payments”, with students paying a £200 penalty for failing to pay tuition fees or provide confirmation of sponsorship on time. The university said the late payment charge was introduced in 2011/2012, adding: “It affected 1% of scholars, nearly all of that are overseas fee-payers.”

A spokesperson added: “If there have been no late payments, the university will be ready to save cash spent on credit control staff. We therefore view these additional costs as an instantaneous results of those students not paying on time and wish the pricetag to be borne by those people who are answerable for it.”

Bangor charged the second one most, issuing £42,479 worth of fines. Students may be further disciplined if fines remain unpaid for longer than 14 days, and then the university may begin court proceedings.

Thirty-four of the 128 institutions questioned said they didn’t fine students for disciplinary matters. A secretary at one, who wished to stay anonymous, said: “a private and unofficial observation is that there’s reluctance to fine students because [of] the financial hardship that many students face; if another remedy will be found, this will be preferred.”

Most universities said the cash collected formed portion of the “other income” bracket of their accounts. However the University of Wales Trinity St David, Hertfordshire University, and two Cambridge colleges – Downing and St John’s – admitted such income didn’t happen of their annual accounts.

The period of time students are given to pay a great varies. Many universities offer 14 days to clear fines a good way to avoid further punishment, but Oxford has the facility to issue immediate fines, which students have just two days to pay with the intention to avoid potential suspension.

Oxford said: “Immediate fines are imposed for specified acts of anti-social behaviour on public thoroughfares after university examinations. The common amount is under £100 and the fines should be paid within two working days. There’s a right of appeal and failure to pay would not bring about automatic rustication [suspension].”

Oxford and Cambridge rank seventh and fifth respectively inside the fines table. Fines for missing a supervision with a tutor vary from £10 to £200 across Cambridge colleges. While many faculties said the cash was used to fund student hardship programmes, Downing college, Cambridge, admitted using the fines to fund the “annual staff outing”.

Many universities said that they had no specific hardship policy in place to assist students who couldn’t pay, often saying that cases were treated individually. Most institutions said students couldn’t graduate unless all fines were cleared.

The National Union of scholars president, Liam Burns, condemned the dearth of support for college students who couldn’t afford to pay, saying: “At a time when students who cannot rely upon their families or savings for financial support face a living costs shortfall of £8,500 every year, it’s also crucial that any consideration of levying of fines takes student hardship into consideration.

“Students, like anyone else, have a responsibility to these around them, but any possible sanctions ought be made to be clear to the scholar previous to time, should only be issued after adequate warnings, and be in proportion to the offence.

“It’s completely wrong for money extracted from students to be siphoned off to fund staff jollies. If money is collected through fines it can be reinvested to profit students, in hardship funds and library resources.”

A well-read Scottish MSP, Alex Johnstone, has tabled a motion to the Scottish parliament to do one of those Richard III-style rehabilitation job on Macbeth. Shakespeare’s version Lies, all lies. If I read him correctly, Mr Johnstone goes as far as to fantasise a Macbeth theme park where the maligned monarch fell in battle.

It’s not recorded whether Mr Johnstone, just like the admirable Philippa Langley, has experienced a “trembling of the knees” treading at the monarch’s grave on Iona. And if Macbeth is a candidate for rehabilitation who next Rasputin (much maligned). Nero He’s had rather a foul press for the past 2,000 or so years.

In fact Richard III had more going for him than most stage villains relating to historical rehab. He’s disabled (amazingly, the skeleton proves it all the way down to the last vertebra). When Anthony Sher did Richard III he came on with such a lot of crutches he looked more like a walking prosthetics store than a monarch.

I fully expect, after what we’ve recently discovered, to live to work out a contemporary dress production of Richard III with the hero rolling on stage (“now could be the winter, etc etc”) in a motorised invalid carriage climaxing, at Bosworth, with the agonised “A go-kart! A go-kart! My kingdom for a go-kart”.

And there’s that picture of Richard inside the National Gallery, which – again amazing – is a spitting image of the hot forensic-lab reconstruction. Josephine Tey wrote an excellent novel about what’s to be deduced from that NG portrait, Daughter of Time (1951). Her detective hero, Alan Grant, a super “reader of faces”, takes one study it and concludes it isn’t the face of a mass murderer, but “a candidate for a gastric ulcer”. And, you may now add, a prolonged back-ache.

Back within the 11th century, royal portraiture hadn’t made the advances so brilliantly displayed in Paul Emsley’s recent depiction of the Duchess of Cambridge (no, i am not serious). What did Macbeth seem to be We’ll should dig up the skeleton and send the skull to the lab if we actually need to know. i do not believe Johnstone would wish that.

But does it matter If you would like history, visit the library or to Professor Google. If you wish drama, visit Shakespeare. It is not literature’s best kept secret that the playwright was dreadfully unfair in his depiction of the blood-drenched tyrant. He maligned Macbeth so one can butter up his patron King James. You do this variety of thing when you are the resident playwright of the King’s Players.

As a coolly informative BBC CV tells us, simply to take each of the fun out of the play, history was boringly different from what Shakespeare offers his audience. “Macbeth,” so it says, “was a king of the Scots whose rule was marked by efficient government and the promotion of Christianity.” Point taken, Mr Patten. But a play dedicated to the celebration of Scottish efficient governance (a topic dear to Mr Johnstone and his colleagues) does not, i believe, keep bums on seats till the fifth act.

I suspect however, that the motion to be brought before the Scottish parliament has subtler motives than just putting the record straight. Within the play, the English are Scotland’s friends in need. Malcolm recovers the throne through a Sassenach army. Macbeth, viewed objectively, is a persuasive plea for the union of both kingdoms (a sentiment which I, with as Scottish name as Mac Bethad mac Findláich, wholeheartedly share). It was for King James VI and that i, first sovereign of Scotland and England, that Shakespeare probably wrote his play (in huge haste, scholars theorise, for a state visit by the King of Denmark).

There are then, two reasons for continuing to honour Shakespeare’s version: it’s great drama and good politics. It’s horrible history, but so what

Rogue horsemeat was on Friday identified at school dinners and hospital meals for the primary time as officials from the Food Standards Agency confirmed new police raids on three more food companies.

Official tests of processed beef dishes sold in supermarkets revealed that 2% of these tested up to now had found horsemeat but as those results were being announced the scandal was confirmed to have spread to both public sector caters and major restaurant chains owned by Whitbread.

In Lancashire cottage pies destined for 47 schools around the county were withdrawn after testing positive for horsemeat. It was not clear how long the tainted food have been at the menu or what number pupils can have eaten it.

In Northern Ireland a variety of burgers bound for hospitals were withdrawn after officials confirmed they contained equine DNA and food giant Compass, which provides over 7000 sites within the UK and Ireland including schools and hospitals, said a burger product it supplied to 2 colleges and a small choice of offices in Northern Ireland and the Republic of eire had tested positive.

As the horsemeat scandal continued into its sixth week, it was revealed that:

• The Food Standards Agency’s first wave of test results from retailers found 2% of 2500 samples of processed beef products contained greater than 1% horsemeat, although experts warned the testing “didn’t get to the foundation of the scandal.” The tainted samples were from seven products that had already been withdrawn, including Findus lasagne and Tesco burgers. None tested positive for the drug phenylbutazone – or “bute” – used on horses but banned from entering the food chain.

• Pub and hotel group Whitbread, which owns Premier Inn, Beefeater Grill and Brewers Fayre, confirmed horse DNA have been present in meat lasagnes and beefburgers.

• Officials on the department of health said it had written to NHS hospitals and “social care providers” asking them to hold out “suitable checking regimes at the authenticity of food.”

• Sheffield council has suspended using all processed meat in schools and Staffordshire council said it had taken beef off school menus as a “precaution.”

• The ecu Union decided to to begin testing for the presence of unlabelled horsemeat in foods around the Continent. Tests can also be applied for the presence of residues bute. In France veterinary and sanitary inspectors continued to enquire Spanghero, a meat processing and wholesale firm, accused by the govt of fraudulently stamping the label “beef” on around 750 tonnes of inexpensive horse meat.

On Friday morning officials from the Food Standards Agency and police achieved three raids on suspect food companies – one in Hull and two in Tottenham. A spokesman confirmed computers and documentary evidence was seized, in addition to meat samples. The raids follow the targeting of a slaughter house in West Yorkshire and a meat plant in Wales as portion of the broader investigation.

Parents in Lancashire were told cottage pies on school menus were found to have horsemeat in them on Friday. The council said just a small collection of pupils were exposed to the food and insisted there has been no health risk.

County councillor Susie Charles said: “Relatively few schools in Lancashire use this actual product but our priority is to produce absolute assurance that meals contain what the label says – having discovered this one doesn’t, we haven’t any hesitation in removing it from menus.”

Other local authorities and catering companies who provide school food are understood to be undertaking similar tests but official testing of public sector caterers aren’t due until later int he spring.

The British Hospitality Association which represents lots of the major providers of meals to colleges said its members were testing their minced beef products in agreement with the Food Standards Agency (FSA) and government, although they said they were still anticipating the “overwhelming majority” of results to come back through because of a backlog on the testing laboritories.

The Department of Health said it had written to NHS providers urging them to check all relevant food and expected the implications to be made public next week.

“It’s unacceptable that any one have to have been eating meat that is not what it says at the label,” said a spokesman. “However, we want to reassure patients that although horsemeat is located in hospital food supplies there’s nothing to signify a security risk to those that could have eaten the goods.”

Catherine Brown, FSA chief executive, said the outcomes published on Friday following tests completed by food retailers confirmed the “vast majority of beef products on this country don’t contain horse meat.”

But the implications only account for roughly 1 / 4 of all of the products eaten by consumers and didn’t seek for trace contamination, a choice described as “pragmatic” by the FSA. The consequences also didn’t include the positive tests uncovered by Whitbread and Compass. “Clearly, this can be a fast changing picture,” said Brown, who said more test results will be revealed next Friday.

Mark Woolfe, who led the FSA’s surveillance for a decade as much as 2009 said the testing didn’t get to the basis of the scandal for the reason that problems inside the supply chain that resulted in the contamination within the UK were still largely unknown. “The FSA and the industry were remarkably silent on what went wrong within the supply chain of the firms that were found right at the beginning of the investigation in Ireland,” he told the Guardian. “They’ve got had four weeks to determine. Investigating the provision chain is a far more efficient approach to solve the issue than end product testing.”

Last night our surroundings secretary Owen Paterson said the “food businesses” still had lots of work to do. “They should move quickly to finish these tests and that they have to show their customers they’ve taken the ideal steps to verify this does not happen again.”

But Mary Creagh, Labour’s shadow environment secretary, said the govt had repeatedly did not get on top of the placement.

“Ministers ought to stop hiding behind the retailers and food industry and take decisive action to get a grip in this scandal now. They ought to order the FSA to hurry up its testing.”

The horsemeat scandal has spread to colleges and hospitals, with authorities struggling to maintain pace with the size of the crisis.

Cottage pies destined for 47 schools across Lancashire were withdrawn after testing positive for horsemeat on Thursday, and in Northern Ireland more than a few burgers bound for hospitals were withdrawn after officials confirmed they contained equine DNA.

It isn’t known what number pupils could have already eaten the cottage pies or how long the product have been available in schools in Lancashire.

Lancashire county councillor Susie Charles said: “We share the troubles people have about what’s clearly a first-rate problem in food supplies around the UK and Europe. Thanks to those concerns we decided to hunt extra assurance that our external suppliers weren’t providing any products containing horsemeat DNA, and one of the crucial products has returned a favorable result.

“Relatively few schools in Lancashire use this actual product but our priority is to produce absolute assurance that meals contain what the label says – having discovered this one doesn’t, we don’t have any hesitation in removing it from menus.”

David Bingham of the health service’s business services organisation in Northern Ireland, which gives meat for health trusts, said a spread from an organization in Ireland had tested positive for traces of horsemeat. “We’ve acted immediately. Once we got information there is a confidence issue we withdrew the product,” he said.

Northern Ireland’s agriculture minister, Michelle O’Neill, has called a gathering at the crisis, with other executive ministers because of attend.

The Food Standards Agency is because of publish the result of UK-wide tests for the presence of horsemeat in processed meals. The united kingdom government said retailers selling affected products had inquiries to answer about; what inquiries that they had made about their suppliers and the way similar problems may be avoided sooner or later.

In a public letter issued on Friday, 11 of the UK’s major food suppliers, including Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Asda, said they shared shoppers’ “anger and outrage” on the scandal. “We can do whatever it takes to revive public confidence within the food they buy and eat,” they said.

Staffordshire council said it had taken beef off school menus as a precaution.

A new book has attracted much interest within the Washington DC, especially on Capitol Hill, Finnish Lessons: What Can the realm Learn From Educational Change in Finland. The book arrives after Finland scored first in science and second in reading and math at the standardized test administered by this system for International Student Assessment.

Conducted among industrialized nations every three years, American students finished 25th in math, 17th in science and 12th in reading at the latest PISA assessment. Obviously, in our global economy, this nation’s international educational attainment is discouraging for our future prospects.

What stands proud to me is that Finnish students take only 1 mandatory standardized test, at age 16. Finland has an analogous variety of teachers as Ny city, but only 600,000 students in comparison to 1.1m inside the New york. Finnish teachers’ starting salaries are under within the US, but high-school teachers with 15 years’ experience make 102% of what other college graduates make. In the US, the figure is 62%.

Some of Finland’s students’ outcomes should be especially interesting to US policy makers. Fully 93% of Finns graduate from highschool – 17.5 points higher than American students. And 66% of Finns are accepted to college, a higher rate than america and every European nation. Strikingly, the achievement gap between the weakest and strongest students academically is the smallest in the world.

What might really interest some politicians is that Finland spends about 30% less per student to achieve these far-superior educational outcomes. For those who argue that a much smaller, less diverse country like Finland can’t easily be compared to the US, there is an inconvenient fact: Finland performs much better educationally when compared to similar Scandinavian nations with similar demographics. Plainly, something is right in the “Land of a thousand lakes”.

Fortunately, US education policy is evolving in the face of our relative global underperformance. Federal policy continues to move away from the rigid certainties of the Bush-era No Child Left Behind legislation. The NCLB law set a hopelessly unrealistic target for 100% student proficiency in every school by 2014. It’s clear that won’t be achieved.

Currently, 32 states and the District of Columbia have successfully applied for waivers from NCLB. To secure this flexibility, states had to have the US Department of Education approve credible plans to raise standards, strengthen accountability and undertake reforms to improve teacher effectiveness. Localizing education reform in this way should more effectively combine ambition and realism.

Additionally, President Obama’s Race to the Top program provides federal incentives for states to reform their public education offerings. These education reforms include lifting caps on the number of public charter schools, innovative policies to turn around failing schools, and improving teacher and principal effectiveness.

As an educator who opened one of the first public charter schools in Washington DC in 1998, — at the height of the crisis of our unreformed public education system — I’ve always had a different take on reform than the NCLB dogma. I could see that the predominantly disadvantaged students whom the status quo was failing would need more than standardized tests to ensure school success.

We decided to create a school that would help students develop the habits, knowledge and skills that would be required in this new century, rather than limiting our students to learning reading and math, the subjects that students are most often tested on. We require our pre-K through sixth grade students to speak, read, write and think in two languages — either French and English, or Spanish and English.

Our educational program invests in children early, to prepare them for the next step in their academic careers and beyond, into the world of work. We want them to gain the following: an understanding of how to use technology to enhance learning; an appreciation for, and facility in, the arts; scientific curiosity; an appreciation and knowledge of their cultures and those of others; and the capacity to think critically.

We are proud of our alumni, including those who have earned Posse Scholarships (college scholarships for students who exhibit strong leadership and academic potential), those who are enrolled in prestigious colleges; and those who are flourishing at high-performing highschools, such as Capital City and Washington Latin.

Our students — 69% of whom are economically disadvantaged — can perform on the highest-level academically. Traditional standardized tests fail to adequately assess our academically rich program. Yet our scholars outperform their traditional public school peers by 16% points, and charter peers by nine points. We are not in Finland yet, but we’re making progress.