6 2GM Thursday February 3 2022 | the times
News
The first home schooling register will
be introduced so that no children fall
through the cracks, the government
said yesterday.
About 100,000 pupils turn up for less
than half of their lessons but thousands
of others are thought not even to be on
school rolls nor registered with any
authorities.
The children’s commissioner for
England said she wants all children to
have a unique identifying number
across the NHS, school and social ser-
vices to help find those missing from
the system.
Rachel de Souza said: “It’s incredibly
important to have a register and I’ve
long called for it. We need to know
where all our children are and we have
to make sure they’re being educated.”
More than 500,000 children are
absent for at least ten per cent of les-
sons, 60,000 higher than before the
pandemic. On a visit to discuss criminal
exploitation, one police force showed
the commissioner a spreadsheet of
children officers had identified who
Water company ready to spend £500m cleaning up rivers
The water company Severn Trent has
said it is on track to spend more than
£500 million on schemes to help clean
up river quality as it announced a
“strong operational performance”
across the business since the end of
September.
The update comes after the group
was fined £1.5 million, plus legal costs,
last month by the Environment Agency
for illegal sewage discharges in Worces-
tershire watercourses in 2018.
Severn Trent said 90 per cent of its
Customer Outcome Delivery Incen-
tives measures, used by the regulator
Ofwat to monitor performance, were
on or ahead of target.
It expected to earn at least £75 mil-
lion for meeting regulatory perform-
ance targets.
Separately, British Land, the com-
mercial property landlord, has bought
three warehouses in Wembley for
£157 million amid booming demand for
logistics hubs and a “chronic shortage”
of suitable space in London.
The three warehouses are fully let to
Amazon, Euro Car Parts and the NorthLondon Waste Authority, delivering an
annual income of £3.6 million. Simon
Carter, chief executive of British Land,
said: “This acquisition is another
example of the strong progress we are
making [in] our strategy to address the
chronic shortage of urban logistics
space in central London.”
Meanwhile GlaxoSmithKline, the
pharmaceutical giant, has confirmed
that an HIV drug business it majority
owns will receive a $1.25 billion settle-
ment from a US rival, Gilead.
Shares in GSK nudged higher after itconfirmed the agreement involving
ViiV, its joint venture with Pfizer and
the Japanese company Shionogi.
ViiV had claimed that Gilead’s triple
combination treatment Biktarvy — an
antiviral treatment that prevents HIV
multiplying — infringed the joint
venture’s patents relating to an existing
drug, dolutegravir.
ViiV will also receive about 3 per cent
of royalties based on future US sales of
Biktarvy until 2027, GSK confirmed.
The drug earned $8.6 billion in reve-
nues last year.M25 activists jailed
Five Insulate Britain activists
whose sentencing was delayed
when four of them glued
themselves to the steps of the
Royal Courts of Justice have been
jailed for breaching an injunction
against M25 protests. Theresa
Norton, 63, Diana Warner, 62,
El Litten, 35, Ben Taylor, 27, and
Steve Pritchard, 62, were jailed
for between 24 and 42 days.Olympic protesters
A former marketing manager for
Gordon Ramsay is facing up to
five years in a Greek jail after he
and two others staged an anti-
Beijing protest at the ceremony to
light the Olympic flame. Jason
Leith, 34, of Southampton,
shouted slogans, waved the
Tibetan flag and a banner that
read “No Genocide Games” as
the ceremony began last October.Gift of Joyce letters
A collection of unpublished
letters by James Joyce has been
given to Reading University by
the author’s grandson, Stephen
James Joyce, who died two years
ago. The gift includes letters from
Samuel Beckett and HG
Wells.“There is also a lot of
family material which gives a
different light to Joyce,” Dr Mark
Nixon of the university said.Swim with mouth shut
A water company has come
under fire after its environmental
director advised seaside bathers
to keep their mouths closed. Ruth
Barden, of Wessex Water, made
the suggestion at a meeting of
Bournemouth, Poole and
Christchurch council called in
response to 17 incidents of sewage
spilling into the sea off the Dorset
coast in one week last October.Edward VIII coin sale
Shares in one of the world’s rarest
coins that is a memento of a
bitter royal dispute will go on sale
next month. The proof of a King
Edward VIII Penny had already
been minted when plans to issue
the coin were abandoned after
Edward abdicated on December
11, 1936 over his relationship with
the American socialite Wallis
Simpson. Edward asked for the
proof penny but the request was
blocked by his brother. Collectors
will have the chance to own one
of 4,000 pieces, or shares, for £50.AABBCDDE
EEEEFFFG
HHHH I I I I
JLSSTTWYSolve all five clues using each
letter underneath once only1 Spicy deep-fried vegetable ball (5)2 Monastic garment (5)3 Reject, avoid (6)4 Restless (7)5 South Yorkshire city (9)Quintagram®No 1229
Solutions MindGames in Times
Cryptic clues Page 10 of TimesIAN WEST/PAFamily affair Bob Marley’s daughter Cedella and grandson Saiyan visit the One Love Experience, a celebration of the singer at London’s Saatchi Gallery until April 18
Home schooling register to
track each child’s education
were not enrolled at school and were
unknown to other authorities.
“[That] made me very concerned,”
she said. “I have launched an inquiry to
find those children.”
De Souza said a call for data from a
handful of local authorities found
hardly any could account for all child-
ren in their area. Figures are now being
requested from all 150 education
authorities. Her office is working with
the Department for Education to pilot
live attendance data that tracks each
child, so that those who are missing
education or at risk of harm can be
identified more swiftly.
Covid attendance statistics provided
to the government each week show
what percentage of children are at
school each day but not whether the
same child is absent each time, she said.
The more detailed data is not received
by government until months later.
She identified those with special
needs and mental health problems as
two of the high-risk groups who are
turning up less than half the time.
Her recent survey, the Big Ask, found
that most children want to be in schoolbut either feel nervous because of
mental health issues or believe they do
not get enough support for their needs.
Children who are not on school rolls
include those who have never been reg-
istered by home-educating families,
parents whose children have been “off-
rolled” and have reluctantly agreed to
take their child out of school, and those
who have moved around the country
and not been logged by councils.
The Department for Education has
said it will introduce the new register at
the “earliest possible legislative oppor-
tunity”. It said: “The vast majority of
home education is already done well,
but particularly in light of the pandemic
contributing to a rise in children not
being educated in school, the govern-
ment will support local authorities to
make sure they know where every child
is being educated.”
It says the new duty on local author-
ities to maintain a register of children
not in school will help them spot and
support young people in the rare cases
they may be receiving an unsuitable
education, for example at an unregis-
tered school.”Nicola Woolcock Education Editor
AI surprises
experts with
coding skills
Jacob DirnhuberAn artificial intelligence tool developed
by Google has beaten 5,000 human
programmers in coding competitions.
The AlphaCode system, created by
the Google artificial intelligence
subsidiary DeepMind, was in the top
54 per cent of the software contest.
Oriol Vinyals, a research scientist at
DeepMind, said Google was one step
closer to creating a fully autonomous
problem-solver, considered a holy grail
of AI development.
“We’re excited by [AlphaCode’s]
potential for helping programmers and
non-programmers write code, improv-
ing productivity, or creating new ways
of making software,” he said.
The software beat challenges created
by Codeforce, a web-based platform
that ranks developers based on tests of
critical thinking, logic, algorithms,
coding and reading comprehension.
Mike Mirzayanov, the Codeforce
founder, said: “The results of Alpha-
Code exceeded my expectations.
AlphaCode managed to perform at the
level of a promising new competitor.”