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Many congratulations to all of those who have received honours in the Queen’s New Years Honours list and most sincerely to Jean Pickering on her MBE. Jean is the widow of the late Ron Pickering and has tirelessly raised funds for young up and coming athletes. Well done Jean. Congrats also to Jimmy Armfield CBE who won 43 caps for England and received the award for his community work in Lancashire. Finally to Ian McGeechan Rugby’s gifted and talented coach who received a knighthood.
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The director general of the confederation of British Industry, Richard Lambert, has said that Britain should be ‘ashamed’ of the state of its education system and the ‘culture of low aspiration’ it has bred. Mr Lambert says millions of pounds are wasted by schools due to constant changes in policy by ministers. He said: ‘If you look at all the data you see as a country we spend a lot on educating kids, but the outcomes aren’t great. There’s a very long tail of underperformance. I think this is more than an educational issue; it’s a social and cultural issue as well. Part of the story is the correlation between deprivation and poor academic outcomes, which are more marked in this country than we ought to contemplate. We ought to be ashamed of the numbers. The OCED figures show we have more drunkenness in students than any other country in the OECD; we have the fourth highest cohort of Neets (Not in Education, Employment or Training) after Turkey, Italy and Mexico:. There is an absolutely straight correlation between GCSE results and free school meals; a straight line so that the most deprived get the worst results.’
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An 18-year-old has been murdered following an apparent argument on face book. Salum Kombo was found lying in a pool of blood with multiple stab wounds near his family home in East London. A boy aged 15 has been charged with the murder. Gary Byrne, 46, who held the dying teenager in his arms said: ‘We saw the kid lying on the ground with a crowd of young boys standing around him. I pulled up and got out of the car. When I went over there was another guy trying to stem the flow of blood. I was speaking to the ambulance while holding his head and trying to talk to him, trying to keep him awake. His eyes were flickering and I could see the life draining from the poor kid. There was so much blood. I have never seen anything like it in my life. When the ambulance pulled up he was still alive and they worked on him for about 20 minutes but he died on the pavement.’
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An inquiry into £20m of unaccounted for Sport England funding by Tim Dutton QC has concluded that he ‘cannot rule out’ the possibility of improper payments. Phillip Mabe, Sport England’s finance director called for the investigation into the payments made through the World Class Payments Bureau (WCPB) to Karate, hockey, boxing and squash between 1999 and 2007. The Dutton investigation found that the account was set up to make payments to ‘sports which were not ‘fit for purpose’ in large part because of poor governance arrangements in their governing bodies’, with insufficient demands when public funds were withdrawn from the account. Mr Dutton said: ‘What happened was that the WCPB became a processing function for the making of payments to sporting bodies or those working for them in circumstances where the sporting bodies were not deemed fit for purpose. But also in circumstances where there was not always adequate scrutiny of the requests for payment themselves.’ Hugh Robertson, the Conservative shadow sports minister said: ‘This is a damning indictment of the lack of financial management and control at Sport England before 2007 caused in part by party political interference and constant changes of strategy from government. We must now ensure that management systems change so that this can never happen again and we need to agree a basic set of governance principles which every sport governing body must meet before receiving public money.’
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Soccer Agent Pini Zhavi received £900,000 in fees when Chelsea sold Wayne Bridge to Manchester City. This is equal to the £900,000 that is invested in community sport schemes by the Premier League via the Football Foundation. The Premier League gives annually £15m to the Football Foundation for investment in community soccer, of this; about £10.5m goes on soccer facilities; £1.8m on safer stadia for soccer fans; and £2.5m is left for community schemes. But the Premier League’s Kickz scheme takes £1.6m of this, leaving only £900,000 for the community schemes managed by the community. Between October 2008 and September 2009 agents received £70.7m in deals involving Premier League players, this is nearly 5 times the Premier League’s £15m investment in community soccer, before they take back £1.6m of it. WFTS comments - how about abolishing the trade in players that totalled over £650m in 2007-08, and instead have a compensation system where by clubs whom wish to sign players in contract have to pay half that players present contract. The money saved could be invested in youth and community soccer, and the very very questionable morality in the trading people ended?
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The Home Affairs Select Committee has produced a report stating that approximately 1000 children a year are held in secure immigration centres whilst their families wait to be removed from the UK. However, it was also revealed that some children stay in the centre from 14 – 61 days in conditions to that similar to prisons. Keith Vaz MP, Chairman of the Committee stated that detention of children should only come as a last resort. With costs to detain a person of £130 per day and a family of four up to eight weeks could cost around £20,000. The report also outlined that up to 90% of judicial review applications are never heard.
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The Transition to Adulthood Alliance are calling for young offenders institutions to do more to help young offenders find jobs when they are released from prison to cut the reoffending rates down. They believe that the lack of support and problems experienced trying to gain employment contribute to such high reoffending numbers. In a report soon to be launched by the Alliance, it recommends that all sentences of six months or less should be abolished and replaced with community sentences thereby saving government money.
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The UK has been criticised for breaching the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child for its punitive custody orders and Asbos and failing to keep children safe. The Children’s Rights Alliance for England (CRAE) is to publish its critical report this Friday to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the signing of the UN convention. The CRAE members include the NSPCC, Action for Children, Save the Children and the National Children’s Bureau. National coordinator of the alliance Dr Mike Lindsay said: ‘This explodes the popular myth that the British are child-friendly. There is a real sense of people feeling that children are ‘getting away with it’, when in fact we are a more punitive society than ever before. We punish children through the courts for things that would in the past been seen as pranks. We had six children given an Asbo for climbing a tree in Gloucester. We seem to have an innate element in our culture that seems to want to criminalise and punish everyone’.
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New figures revealed show that there were approximately 3.9 million reports of anti social behaviour last year which equates to 11,000 per day in England and Wales. Most of the reports were in relation to rowdy or inconsiderate/drunken behaviour. Others included uncontrolled pets, street drinking and nuisance neighbours.
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Young weightlifter, Zoe Smith from Greenwich showed her form in the recent Youth Games where she lifted twice the weight of her nearest rival. British Olympics chiefs last year have named 15-year-old Zoe the most promising youth athlete. Zoe also came eighth overall in the recent World Junior Championships in Thailand in the under 18 category.
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Supersized supermarket chain Asda are to be paying obese shoppers £1 for every pound of body weight that they lose. They will also be offered a photo shoot if they make their target weight. However, critics believe that this could lead to bad eating habits and bad dieting. The scheme if being trialled by the NHS in Essex and if successful could be rolled out across the country.
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