All women’s prisons should be shut over the next 10 years and inmates transferred to small specialist units, a report for the Home Office has concluded.
Its author, Baroness Corston, called for a cut in the numbers of women jailed, with a far greater use of community punishment.

PCTs could set up local quality initiatives to reward GPs for promoting healthy lifestyles, says a DoH report. In addition, all practice-based commissioning schemes will be expected to include a means of ‘incentivising practice-based commissioners to reduce people’s lifestyle risks’ by 2008/9.

One hundred teenagers wearing “hoodies” will demonstrate outside Parliament as part of a campaign calling for Government action to help young people stay out of trouble.

The number of ethnic-minority people in the country will more than double and hit the 10 million mark within two decades, it has been claimed. Oxford’s Professor David Coleman, who has fought a student backlash over his views on immigration, said the face of Britain was “radically changing”.

Children as young as four are being taught about same-sex relationships through fairytales and storybooks with gay and lesbian characters.

Babies will be assessed on their gurgling, babbling and toe-playing abilities when they are a few months old under a legally enforced national curriculum for children from birth to five published by the government yesterday.

{mosimage}Every nursery, childminder and reception class in Britain will have to monitor children’s progress towards a set of 69 government-set “early learning goals”, recording them against more than 500 development milestones as they go. At five, each child will be assessed against 13 scales based on the learning goals and their score, called an early years profile, must be passed to the Department for Education and Skills.

When children enter compulsory schooling, they should be able to read simple sentences using a phonics based approach, count reliably up to 10 and sing simple songs from memory, as well as respecting others’ beliefs and learning to share and take turns.

The Early Years Foundation Curriculum, which comes into effect from September 2008, replaces non-statutory guidance already in place. If nurseries or other care providers want to opt out of the new requirements, for example because they follow an educational philosophy that introduces reading at a later age, they will have to apply for an exemption, and would have to forfeit any state funding.

The Department for Education and Skills’s framework immediately came under attack from the National Confederation of Parent Teacher Associations (NCPTA) and from the Tories for taking an excessively prescriptive approach and targeting children far too young.

Emergency services have been called to deal with an incident at an immigration detention centre in Oxfordshire. Thames Valley Police said 35 officers were dealing with an emergency at Campsfield detention centre near Kidlington.

The government ‘thoroughly mishandled’ the introduction of the new system for out-of-hours health care in England, a group of MPs has said.

Almost half of children whose mothers smoke have asked them to quit, a survey has found. The poll of 500 smoking mothers also found two-thirds felt guilty about spending money on cigarettes which could be used for their children.

The health service ombudsman, Ann Abraham, last night found the government guilty of maladministration for failing to organise proper compensation for thousands of vulnerable people who were unlawfully charged for NHS care.

{mosimage}She said the Department of Health gave the wrong advice to NHS trusts about how to make amends to people who were obliged to sell their homes to pay for a nursing home place that should have been free.

As a result there was a postcode lottery, with some older and disabled people getting a fair deal and others denied appropriate reimbursement.

Ms Abraham said four years ago that more than 11,000 people were improperly denied free care when they were moved from long-stay beds in NHS hospitals into nursing homes. The mistake was made by local authorities, but she made NHS trusts responsible for paying compensation.

The government forecast that it would cost £180m. In a follow-up report today, the ombudsman said the department gave trusts flawed advice that took no account of the need to compensate victims for distress.

Officials also said interest should be calculated using the retail price index when they should have used the more generous county court judgment debt rate. Ms Abraham told the department to issue fresh guidance.