4 Monday June 13 2022 | the times
News
Children are arriving at school unable
to say their own names or drink from
cups, The Times Education Commis-
sion’s final report will reveal this week.
It will call for a kind of “five-a-day”
initiative to encourage parents to talk
to and play with their children, similar
to the healthy eating campaign.
The year-long inquiry into the state
of education in the UK, which heard
evidence from dozens of experts, pub-
lishes its final report on Wednesday. It
exposes the inequality within schools
and calls for a laser-like focus on educa-
tion, particularly in the early years.
A head teacher from Nottingham-
shire said that her school spent little
time on literacy or numeracy in recep-
tion because it had to focus on basic
care. Some four and five-year-old child-
ren joined reception class unable to say
their own names and having drunk
only from baby bottles. One child was
brought to school in a shopping trolley.
She told the commission: “We’ve got
about 50 per cent of the children in re-
ception and nursery who are not toilet-
trained. We have to employ care work-
Universities will be forced to reveal foreign funding sources
Continued from page 1
the Department for Education said.
“We believe that this amendment puts
robust safeguards in place.”
The department, which will open
applications today for a new director
for freedom of speech and academic
freedom on the board of the OfS, said
the new rules would not hamper uni-
versities’ ability to work with global
partners. A source said the act would
not apply retroactively, meaning that
universities would not have to explain
funds still being used.
Donelan said: “We are home to some
of the best universities in the world and
for decades students have travelled
thousands of miles across the globe to
study here because of our values of free
speech and academic freedom.
“It is right that we are taking new
action to protect our universities from
undue foreign influences.”
Another amendment will seek to ban“Confucius Institutes”. These bodies, of
which there are 29 in the UK, are meant
to be culture and language centres but
countries including the US and Sweden
are closing them over concerns they are
used for spying.
Kearns said last week that they were
“undermining the integrity of the Man-
darin education in our country”.
Alan Mendoza, founder of the Henry
Jackson Society think tank, said: “The
amount of foreign investment into UKuniversities has reached unprecedent-
ed levels... It’s time to shine a light on
the largest of these donations to ensure
we are all aware of which countries are
funding which programmes.”
Other amendments will include
measures to prevent universities from
no-platforming speakers students find
offensive. It will also ensure that secur-
ity costs for speakers are not passed to
student societies, preventing “no-plat-
forming by the back door”.Patients sent far away
The NHS spent £102 million
sending mental health patients
for treatment hundreds of miles
from their home for weeks at a
time last year, analysis by the
Royal College of Psychiatrists
found, equivalent to the total
annual salary of more than 900
consultant psychiatrists.
“Inappropriate out of area
placements” are the result of a
lack of local provision and can
leave patients feeling isolated and
distressed, doctors have said.AAAAAABD
DDDEEEEG
I LMNNNNO
PRRRRSXYSolve all five clues using each
letter underneath once only1 Convey, carry (4)2 Hans Christian Andersen, eg (4)3 Pointed polyhedron (7)4 Male relative (8)5 Conquering king of Macedon (9)Quintagram®No 1340
Solutions MindGames in Times
Cryptic clues page 10 of TimesDragons’ Den star dies
Festive air A Hurricane and Spitfire from the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight at Teesside Airshow on Saturday. The latter was built in 1944 but is in the desert camouflage of 92 Squadron in Tunisia in 1943
CAROLINE HAYCOCK/BAV MEDIAHilary Devey, the
former Dragons’
Den star, has died
aged 65 after a
long illness. She
founded Pall-Ex,
the multimillion-
pound freight distribution firm,
after selling her home and car in
the 1990s to finance it. She was
appointed CBE in 2013 for her
business career and charity work.Nicola Woolcock Education Editor
Some primary school pupils unable
to say their names, teachers report
ers just to change nappies. We’ve got
children who are still drinking from
bottles with teats when they start
school. They are four years old and
their language will include the word
‘bot-bot’, because that’s their commun-
ication for ‘Can I have a drink please?’
“We’re seeing children coming in still
on baby food. We had one child arrive
having had 14 teeth removed. I have a
parent who brings their child to school
in a shopping trolley because it’s the
cheapest mode of transport.”
Another head teacher, in Cumbria,
said children were starting school still
using dummies and some were brought
to school in buggies until they were six
or seven because they were easier to
contain. The school runs parenting
classes and adult literacy lessons to
address barriers to learning.
Evidence suggests that nearly a third
of five-year-olds in England are not
reaching a good level of development
and deprived pupils are almost five
months academically behind richer
classmates by the time they start
school. This gap widens to 18 months by
the age of 16.
The Nottinghamshire head added:
“We are parenting in so many different
ways. I need to do an assembly on eat-
ing with a knife and fork because the
children will eat a full Sunday dinnerwith their hands. We’re not teaching
them to write their names, we’re teach-
ing them to scribble.”
The pandemic has made the sit-
uation worse in many schools. A You-
Gov poll of teachers by the early years
charity Kindred Squared found that the
number of pupils starting in reception
who were not ready for school had risen
to 46 per cent in 2020 from 35 per cent
the previous year.
A teacher from West Yorkshire told
the survey: “We always have a signif-
icantly high proportion of children who
are not school ready, about half. This
year it’s probably 80 to 90 per cent.”
Felicity Gillespie, the charity’s direct-
or, said the findings were shocking.
She said: “One child I heard about
needed intensive physiotherapy
because they didn’t have the strength in
their legs to walk the amount they
needed to at school. Some children
spend so much time in front of the TV
they’re physically not developing their
muscle tone.
“Some will blame parents but we all
want the best for our children and
teachers say what isn’t being made clear
enough to parents is what being devel-
opmentally ready for school actually
means. We need a new national conver-
sation about parenting and the state’s
role in our children’s development.”The commission’s final report says
that the government must overcome
squeamishness about being seen to
interfere in family life and calls for
parenting classes, targeted home visits
and drop-in centres.
Baroness Casey of Blackstock, an
expert in social welfare who has worked
for five prime ministers, said that
schools could not operate as islands but
should act as bridges between com-
munities and families. “Education is
one of the ways out of poverty and so is
family. Where you have both of those
things working well, you see people
thrive and where you have one of those
things not working effectively, some-
times one can override the other,” she
says in the report.
“I’m a great believer in family inter-
vention. Some of this is about resour-
ces, but it’s also about determination
and joined-up working.”
Dame Sally Coates, director of acad-
emies at United Learning, which runs
more than 70 schools, and one of the
Times commissioners, said: “We have to
step off the idea of not talking about
what happens in the home. It’s abso-
lutely fundamental and the more we
can do to work closely with parents, the
more we can educate parents, the more
we can get involved from pregnancy,
the better.”Education Commission