The NHS in England is facing a blitz on hygiene standards as a watchdog uses new powers to crackdown on infections.

They are still grappling with the alphabet, learning nursery rhymes and making toys out of egg cartons. But now children as young as four will be expected to get in touch with their feelings by filling in questionnaires which ask if they are “optimistic about the future” and “dealing with problems well”.

{mosimage}Under guidance being drawn up by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice), primary schools in England will have a duty to improve children’s emotional and psychological well-being. Schools will be expected to combat factors that are “likely to lead to poor mental health or mental disorders” by introducing programmes to help children make the transition to secondary school, teaching “emotional literacy” and providing specialist counselling services and family therapy. However, the suggestion that schools should measure happiness has been condemned by headmasters as needless bureaucracy that would divert teachers from teaching.

In a document outlining the draft scope of the guidance, Nice says that a school’s success in making its pupils happy will be measured by indicators developed by Warwick and Edinburgh universities, which monitor positive attributes, such as confidence, resilience, attentiveness and the ability to form good relationships.

The “well-being scale” involves putting 14 statements to individuals about their thoughts and feelings and asking them whether they feel like that often, rarely, some of the time, all the time, or never – not unlike the self-help quizzes found in women’s magazines. Its use in primary school could see data collected from thousands of pupils, from the age of four to 11, on whether they feel, for example, useful, relaxed and interested in other people.

The burden on primaries to improve pupils’ mental health is part of wider drive by the Government to force schools to take responsibility for elements of a child’s development that were once considered the domain of -parents and part of a good, traditional upbringing. As revealed by this newspaper, emotional literacy classes, which attempt to teach children how to manage anger and jealousy, and develop empathy and self-motivation, have already been introduced in primary and secondary schools after earlier trials.
     
The £20 million initiative has supplied schools with a mountain of documents on how to teach emotional intelligence through assemblies, dedicated sessions or discussions in other curriculum areas. It suggests using “worry boxes”, where pupils write down their anxieties and post them into a box, and “emotional barometers”, which pupils can use to show classmates the strength of their feeling about a subject.

Lancashire Social Services have branded the closure of a care home at six hours notice ‘appalling’ – and admitted they had no idea it was shutting.

A jury has returned a verdict of suicide on a 14-year-old boy who hanged himself in a privately run secure unit. Adam Rickwood became the youngest child to have died in penal custody for 25 years when he hanged himself with his shoelaces at the Hassockfield secure training centre in County Durham in August 2004.

Parents of children with congenital heart disease can now check surgery survival rates at the UK’s 13 specialist heart centres online. The initiative comes 10 years after the inquiry into the unnecessary deaths of babies treated at Bristol’s Royal Infirmary in the 1980s and 1990s.

Child sex offenders should be encouraged to seek treatment rather than be threatened with jail, the police’s child protection chief says. Jim Gamble, of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), said it was a practical way of dealing with the scale of the problem.

A coroner called yesterday for an urgent review of the use of restraint on young offenders after a jury returned a suicide verdict on a vulnerable 14-year-old who hanged himself with his shoelaces at a privately-run secure unit.

A police child protection chief has been criticised for arguing that paedophiles convicted of looking at child pornography should not necessarily go to prison. Jim Gamble of the Child Exploitation

Britain’s leading fertility expert has condemned the IVF industry, saying that it had been corrupted by money and that doctors were exploiting women who were desperate to get pregnant.

A major breakthrough for people infected with AIDS is on the horizon, according to an editorial in this week’s BMJ.