Tackling the democracy deficit in schools | Letter

In the belief that young people need to grow up learning about democracy, I have spent my career in education working for democracy in schools – through student councils, parent councils and staff councils (What would you do if democracy was being dismantled before your eyes? Whatever you’re doing right now, 31 October).It has been an uphill struggle. It is rare for student councils to be given the opportunity to discuss anything consequential about school issues or their own learning.Parent councils – different from parent-teacher associations, which are mostly about fundraising – often struggle to attract parents. Parents generally want to talk about their own children, but are less keen to get involved in discussions about school policies

End-of-life care needs a fundamental review, not just more funding | Letters

Your editorial (29 October) highlights the urgent need for better funding for end-of-life care. As a physician and academic who has worked in this area for 40 years, I would like to raise three underlying issues.First, it implies that hospices are the only model for delivering good end-of-life care. It is arguable that in Britain we have overrelied on the charitable sector. We now have NHS-funded hospital palliative care teams who can provide excellent care when patients are coming to the end of life but still needing specialist treatments – which very often hospices cannot or will not offer

Almost 30% of people abused as children, England and Wales data shows

Nearly a third of women in England and Wales were abused as a child, along with just over a quarter of men, according to new figures which for the first time include emotional, physical or sexual abuse as well as neglect.The data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimates 31.5% of women and 26.4% of men experienced some form of abuse as a child, a total of 13.6 million – almost three in 10 – people

UK to launch pilot scheme that helps homeless people access banking

Homeless people will for the first time be able to open accounts with the UK’s five biggest banks, in a pilot scheme marking the launch of the government’s financial inclusion strategy.The Treasury said its new national plan was meant to ensure financial services “worked for everyone”, as it also revealed programmes that could help rebuild the credit scores of domestic abuse victims, support families with no savings and roll out financial education in primary schools across the UK.One of the key schemes will see the high street lenders Lloyds, NatWest, Barclays, Nationwide and Santander waive the need for people to have a fixed address in order to open a bank account. The move will help vulnerable people avoid the chicken-and-egg problem of needing a bank account to apply for work and rental accommodation across the UK.It will involve partnerships with the homelessness charity Shelter, which will vouch for prospective customers based on information on the charity’s database, while accompanying individuals to face-to-face meetings at a local bank branch

MPs ask HMRC to explain child benefit error that froze payments to parents

MPs are demanding answers from HMRC over a child benefit error in which payments to 23,500 families were stopped as part of an anti-fraud crackdown.Meg Hillier, a Labour MP and chair of the House of Commons Treasury select committee, has written to the permanent secretary of HMRC asking who made the decisions, why they were made and whether compensation would be offered to the victims.The letter follows a series of reports by the Guardian and investigative website the Detail on families who had been wrongly suspected of fraud after data showed they had taken flights out of the country but not returned.They received letters demanding they answer 73 questions and provide a mountain of documentation including bank statements, GP and school records on the back of information the Home Office provided.But the Home Office data was incomplete and did not record return journeys of parents, leading HMRC to believe the families had emigrated and were continuing to collect child benefit illegally

NHS staff bearing brunt as ‘ugly’ racism of 70s and 80s returns, says Streeting

An “ugly” racism reminiscent of the 1970s and 1980s has become worryingly commonplace again in modern Britain and NHS staff are bearing the brunt of it, Wes Streeting has warned.Incidents of verbal and physical abuse based on people’s skin colour now happen so often that it has become “socially acceptable to be racist”, the health secretary said.In a joint interview with the Guardian alongside the NHS England chief executive, Jim Mackey, Streeting told how he has been “shocked” hearing NHS staff, especially those working in A&E, recount growing levels of harassment, aggression and violence when their care gets delayed.Advising the public to brace themselves for the NHS in England getting overwhelmed in the coming weeks because of a triple whammy of flu, Covid and strike action by doctors as winter descends, he admitted that patients would be put in danger as a result of becoming stuck on trolleys or in the back of ambulances – situations that are known to heighten the risk of harm and death.“Even if you’ve got a long wait, which I know is frustrating, or you feel like you’ve been sent from pillar to post, which sadly does happen, there’s no excuse for taking that out on staff,” Streeting said