Specialist teams are being sent into Birmingham primary schools to target inappropriate sexual behaviour, as teachers become increasingly worried about young pupils interacting in a “sexualised” manner with each other. Teachers are concerned that children as young as seven are playing inappropriate school playground games with one another, such as the old-fashioned kiss and chase game. In Birmingham, the city council has been sending experts from its Inappropriate Sexual Behaviour Teams into schools across the city where teachers have raised concerns.

The Government’s Office for Disability Issues (ODI) has published its first Annual Report to the Prime Minister, detailing the progress that is being made towards realising the Government’s ambitious vision for real equality for disabled people by 2025.

The new Post Qualifying framework for social workers comes into force on 1 September 2007. It builds on the new social work degree and takes into account all the changes that have taken place in social work practice in recent years. Service users and carers will be central to social work post qualifying education and training, as they are with the social work degree.

Home Secretary John Reid today announced a wide-ranging reform programme designed to fundamentally change the Home Office. The radical reform plan will transform the Home Office, saving as much as £115m per year by 2010, reducing the size of the Home Office’s headquarters through an unprecedented move of staff from the centre out into communities, and following through with extensive changes and increased accountability at all levels.

Social workers should be made more accountable, according to a local MP. Eric Pickles, who represents Brentwood and Ongar, would like to see a code of conduct introduced for social workers with a built-in disciplinary procedure.

Like many gardeners Gavin McCaber is busy this time of year weeding, watering and generally tending to his plot of land. For Gavin however, gardening is more than just a hobby – for him it is also a therapy. One day a week he has a placement at the Battersea Garden project in London, where for the last five years he has been using therapeutic gardening to help him deal with his schizophrenia. Here, Gavin and others on placements are taught practical skills alongside specially trained staff who can also offer counselling advice. Since he had his first schizophrenic episode as a young PHD student 20 years ago, Gavin has rarely worked.

A former council leader and police authority chairman was yesterday cleared of sexually abusing a teenage boy more than 20 years ago. Colin Inglis, 49, was found not guilty of five charges of indecently assaulting the 13-year-old boy during the early 1980s, when he was a social worker at a children’s home in Hull. The boy, now 37 and a senior financial adviser, had claimed that Mr Inglis performed numerous sex acts on him in the home, at a sports centre and on a camping trip.

The system of NHS charges – covering parking fees, phone costs, eye tests, prescriptions and dental care in England is a “mess”, MPs say. A health select committee report calls for a review of the existing system. It suggests prescription charging should be revamped and parking made free for those who have to go to hospital for daily treatment. The government said it would consider the MPs’ report carefully, but denied charges were a mess.

More than £9.5million a year is being spent looking after asylum seeker children in Cambridgeshire. There are currently 122 unaccompanied asylum seeker children in Cambridgeshire, most of whom live in the city, and the county council pays £1,500 per week to look after each child. Children as young as 12 escaping war and torture across the world end up here after being sent to Oakington Reception Centre before officials realise they are too young to be detained. Social services are then called in to find them homes and arrange education, counselling and health care.

Prosecutors are taking a firm line on the supply of cannabis for pain relief to people with chronically painful conditions such as multiple sclerosis, despite the downgrading of the drug from class B to class C. Two crown court trials, one starting this week and one next week, will accuse four individuals of supplying illegal drugs through the organisations Bud Buddies and THCforMS (Therapeutic Help from Cannabis for Multiple Sclerosis). THCforMS says on its website that it has supplied 33,000 bars of cannabis chocolate to bona fide MS sufferers over the last five years. Mark Gibson, Lezley Gibson and Marcus Davies of THCforMS face a charge of conspiracy to supply cannabis in a trial that begins next Wednesday at Carlisle crown court.