"Generations of children have been let down by so-called progressive education policies which have taught skills and "empathy" instead of bodies of knowledge, the shadow education secretary, Michael Gove, said yesterday."

Grove went on, "if you come from a poorer household where you don't have your own bedroom, where the only printed material is the Daily Star, then school is the only place you learn, and progressive methods let you down."

Schools minister Jim Knight claimed the Tories were "out of touch" with reality. "This artificial distinction between trendy teaching and learning dates, events and places bears no relation to what actually happens in today's classrooms," he said.

"What I would like to see is a benefits system that would reward parents for engaging with schools - that could be linked in some way to the benefits they get.

Perhaps parents who spent time reading to their children, going to school parents evenings or helping out in their school, could get higher payments."

"Children who attend daycare or playgroups cut their risk of the most common type of childhood leukaemia by around 30%, a study estimates."

Nobody likes me
Everybody hates me
Just because I eat worms

Short fat hairy ones
Long tall skinny ones
See how the little ones squirm

Bite all their heads off
Suck all the juice out
Throw the empty skins away.

Think I'll go out and take the dog for a walk.

"Warnings to parents from 88 local authorities - half of the total - show that 28% of schools are expected to face disruption.

The one-day pay strike is being staged on Thursday by members of the National Union of Teachers."

This is in contrast to secondary school students, who perform better academically if they regularly do homework."

"This is a command line script to convert all .PNG-files to JPG. We will show you how to convert .png-files by right clicking on a folder. All the png-images will then be converted to jpg and saved in a sub folder (named ´jpg)"

I had this one my Apple Mac... Needed it on a PC and instead of paying £25 for some software I followed the instructions and it worked perfectly. Just adding this here for others who may need it and for me to find again easily later.

"Anne West of the London School of Economics told MPs, "where schools are responsible for their own admissions ... Some are likely to use whatever means they can to select their own intake." Some schools were circumventing the rules by "renaming" interviews as "admissions meetings".

Church leaders addressing the same committee challenged the findings and hit back at claims by MPs that faith schools "are adept" at keeping out children from low income families and those with special educational needs."

Research by Rebecca Allen, from the Institute of Education, submitted to the Commons education committee yesterday suggests that schools which used six or more "potentially selective" criteria admitted over 50% more pupils in the top quarter of the ability distribution in Key Stage 2 tests than they would if they recruited a locally representative intake. They also admitted half the number of pupils on free school meals than a locally recruited representative intake.The criteria the researchers are concerned about include vetting siblings' academic achievement, assessing family connections, religious criteria and interviewing pupils.

"We do all of the hard work of transcoding and hosting and streaming and thumbnailing your videos."

This looks cool. For me to receive and serve video isn't trivial. Videos can be big. Very big. 100Mb big! If I were to handle the number of videos that I do of pictures on one site, take Bodnant for example... She uploads 30 pictures in one news item post, sometimes there's 20 out of 30 that have images. Sure, you're only going to see one screen shot per video, not the whole video, unless you watch (and download) the video. But still, bandwidth and processing power would be hugely expensive.

Video usage is going to go up and up. It's on nearly every modern digicam now, and in high quality—640 x 480 x 30 frames per sec.

It'll be neat to use YouTube to serve video. For you to just press the upload button and have the news item in your pending items ready to go when it's uploaded and been processed. One click video blogging, rather like the one click video emailing. Currently, using Google Video, it's a bit 'copy/paste clunky' to add to your website.

My only worries:

1. The click throughs to adult content—can I control the interface to hide the click through?
2. Would there be ads inserted into a school's video? Can we opt out of ads? Are there ads in the first place? I'd guess so, how else would YouTube/Google pay for this?

"We now have sites in 19 LAs: Conwy, County Londonderry, County Tyrone, Coventry, Denbighshire, Doncaster, Havering (Essex), Leeds, Lincoln, Northampton, Morayshire, Powys, Staffordshire, Stockport, Suffolk, Tameside, Walsall, Warwickshire and Worcestershire."

Bonus link. Paul Hardcastle's Nineteen.