Education Resources

The Olympics were supposed to give competitive sport in schools a huge boost. But government cuts mean that children are now doing less than before

The man and boy raise their weapons in salute, before closing to engage. They get each other's measure for a few seconds before the child darts at the man's chest with the tip of his black plastic foil. It's a neatly executed lunge. Under soft yellow light in a primary school hall in Tower Hamlets, east London, eight boys and a girl are learning to fence. Inevitably, there are giggles as the masks go on, and the children have to be discouraged from slashing away at each other's foils like pirates with cutlasses. Their coach, Hijrat Popal, dissuades them from this waste of energy. He urges them to go in for the kill with an attacking move instead. He makes them pay attention to their footwork, and the children begin to learn this sport's lessons; poise, co-ordination, agility.

As London prepares to host the Olympic Games, it would be cheering to say that scenes like this are being repeated in schools across the country. But they aren't. School sport is suffering. Competitions are being cancelled. After-school clubs are being scrapped. PE teachers are receiving less training. And the government's austerity measures are being blamed.

One of education secretary Michael Gove's most unpopular acts was to abolish the national network of school sport partnerships. These saw groups of schools working together to increase the quality and range of sport on offer to children. In each one, a secondary school PE teacher was given two days a week to act as a co-ordinator while a teacher in each of the primary schools was paid to receive extra training in PE and sport.

An outcry from teachers and athletes forced the education secretary to keep the scheme going until last summer. Gove agreed to a further concession – to carry on providing money to release a secondary school teacher for one day a week. In some parts of the country, schools have pooled resources to sustain these partnerships, freeing up teachers and employing coaches to run sports sessions. That has happened in Tower Hamlets. Elsewhere, school sport is feeling the pinch.

Simon Spiers, headteacher of King Alfred's specialist sports college in Wantage, Oxfordshire, says: "In areas where primary and secondary school heads believe it's important, they're funding it. If not, they're not. We're into our first year of that, so the differences aren't that large. But if this continues, we'll see a big disparity."

It is a deeply sensitive subject for the government. And not just for the usual reasons that school sport matters – the fact that one in five children leaves primary school obese, or that exercise improves behaviour and attention. One of the pledges that helped win the Olympic Games for London was a promise to "inspire young people around the world to choose sport". The culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, whose cabinet brief includes the Olympics, declared last year: "I can sum up our sports policy in three words: more competitive sport."

The government has created a new school games tournament – sponsored by Sainsbury's – with a national final taking place in the Olympic Park, in May. Around 12,000 schools, both state and private, are now signed up for this, a government spokesman says. To put that in perspective, there are around 20,000 state schools in England.

It is hard to be precise about the impact of the cuts because, at the same time ministers scrapped the sport partnerships, they got rid of the annual survey that collected information about every pupil. But when you speak to headteachers and surviving school sport co-ordinators it becomes clear that – ironically, perhaps – it is competition between schools that is suffering the most.

Jo Marston stayed on as school sport co-ordinator in Thirsk, North Yorkshire, after Gove pulled the financial plug because the schools in her area collaborated to keep a sport partnership going. Now she spends three days a week organising school games and the rest of the time offering teachers guidance on coaching.

"I've already noticed there is much less attendance at events," Marston says. "We're probably working at about 50%-75% attendance. It's because schools haven't got the money for transport to go out and play competitions, and they can't release the staff because they don't have the money to pay for supply, to take a class teacher away from directly teaching for a competition. That's hit us really hard."

Marston wants to make it clear that she's not a whinger. In fact, she feels privileged that her local schools have pitched together to keep some competition going, and believes things are worse elsewhere. Still, the fact that teachers cannot be released during the day means a lot of competition is now taking place after school hours. And some schools have just dropped out.

"I had two aquasplash [swimming and other aquatic skills] competitions last week with four schools each. We've done it before with nine or 10 schools. We've had to cancel some competitions because nobody wanted to enter them. I've had three lots of sportshall [indoor] athletics I have had to cancel because nobody entered.

"This is what the government is looking to increase, and they've put us in a position where we aren't able to do that. We're doing a lot of virtual leagues, where the school gives me the results and I put them on the website, It's ridiculous – the thing we're trying to focus on and increase, and they take away the resources to be able to do that."

She describes the years of spending under Labour as "halcyon days", when schools – especially primaries – were introduced to a breadth and depth of competition they had never seen before. "Primary schools played football and netball – now they do aquasplash, fun runs, sportshall athletics, Quicksticks hockey." The Daily Mail has lampooned this diversity as schools ditching traditional sports for "cheerleading, yoga and circus skills", echoing the coalition's criticism that participation in sports such as rugby, hockey and netball fell under the last government.

But less conventional sports often act as a bridge to more familiar team games. Between 2003 and 2010, the number of secondary school children playing two hours or more of sport a week rose from 20% to 85%.

Schools in Marston's part of North Yorkshire are weathering the cuts with "triangular" fixtures – where three school sides play at the same event. This obviously means the children are not playing for as long as they would at a normal event. Marston has also arranged fixtures very close together so school teams can walk to each other's grounds rather than having to hire buses.

But small schools are struggling. "It's no longer equitable. Some schools with 23 pupils don't have the resources to go out to competition. If you've got a big school with 420 pupils, quite a big workforce, [you're] able to leave school and take the children. When you're in a rural area, it's the small schools that suffer."

It is the same story on the Lancashire coast, where schools have been forced to abandon a winter cross-country league. Attendance is down at competitive events, says Matt Hilton, co-ordinator for the Wyre and Fylde school sports network. As in North Yorkshire, this partnership is being sustained by local schools clubbing together. But money is much tighter now.

"We're having to work differently because of the times that we're in," says Hilton. He reels off a list. There isn't the money for "freeing up teachers, hiring facilities, purchasing medal certificates, hiring equipment". He cites the example of a recent indoor athletics competition in which 28 local primaries took part. Before the cuts, around 35 schools would have entered.

Parents are increasingly being asked to dip into their pockets. Gavin Storey, headteacher of Cullercoats primary school, in Tyne and Wear, has cancelled after-school clubs in badminton and dance because his school cannot afford external teachers. Instead, some of his staff volunteer to run after-hours football and aerobics sessions, while parents pay £2 a class for a gymnastics club.

Storey says: "I'm very conscious of the economic climate. We don't want to have extra clubs because I've got to ask parents to contribute to that, and people are struggling with the basic cost of household utilities, food etc." Schools in his neighbourhood are still running competitions, but they have contracted. "A hockey competition that used to go on to a regional level is now just for local schools – there's no movement on to the county and regional level. But you want competition for some of your elite teams. The government wants more competition – where is the competition for that elite level?"

Everyone you speak to agrees that primary schools are worse off than secondaries. They rely on secondary schools with their specialist staff to provide a wider range of activity for their children.

The Department for Education has made £32.5m available this year to release secondary school sports teachers for one day a week to work with primary schools. But that money runs out next year, and because it isn't ring-fenced, hard-pressed headteachers are tempted to spend it on other priorities.

Around 80% of all secondary schools in England are signed up to the coalition's School Games, a government spokesman says. But less than half (45%) of the country's primary schools are. It is a common fear that without support from secondary school colleagues, primary school PE teachers will stick to the safest options and avoid more hazardous activities such as gymnastics or dance. In primary schools, teachers have to range across subjects. That limits the amount of time they have to prepare for PE when they do their postgraduate certificate in education (PGCE) courses.

Lorraine Everard, sports strategy manager for a partnership of 54 Sussex schools, says: "If primary school teachers have spent more than two weeks of their time training on PE they have done well. Some of them have done three days [PE training] in the whole of their [PGCE] course. Gymnastics, for example. They're not confident in teaching it, therefore they won't teach it well or will avoid it completely."

Teachers are nervous of activities such as gymnastics not just because of the risk of injury, but because it requires them to hold children.

Everard says: "It could go back to the situation we had 10 years ago, where new staff coming in are not doing PE because they don't feel confident. That might not be manifesting itself right at the moment, but increasingly it will."

The decline of school sport is particularly dismaying because in many parts of the country, this is the only way children get a taste for sport. In Tower Hamlets, 80% of children never do sport outside school, says Chris Willetts, manager of the borough's school sport partnership. "It's a mix of cultural factors – and a lack of spaces, a lack of clubs. This is a very densely populated borough."

Tower Hamlets is an inner-city neighbourhood; many of its schools are housed in dishevelled but still handsome Victorian brick buildings. But it is also a crowded landscape in which the dominant note is concrete grey. The streets are busy with traffic and there isn't a single blade of grass on any of the borough's school playgrounds. It was once a "real backwater" for school sport, Willetts says. Now there is a remarkable spread of sporting activities on offer here.

On a recent winter's afternoon, two girls were being taught to kayak on dry land. The girls, pupils at Virginia primary in Bethnal Green, perch on machines that resemble rowing equipment. But instead of the contraction and extension of sculls, they manipulate a pole that mimics the dipping motion of a paddle. Meanwhile, the rest of the class toss balls to each other to build up their core strength, or use broomsticks as mock-paddles. The most adept paddlers will get a taste of the real thing when they go kayaking on Shadwell Basin, part of London docks, this summer.

A few streets away, a game of indoor cricket is under way at Old Palace primary school. Seven boys in burgundy sweaters play with a plastic bat and tennis ball. The level of talent on display is variable. A few of the boys knock the tennis ball easily out to the boundary – in this case, that's the wall of the school canteen. Others swing wildly and whack themselves "out" on the plastic stumps. The coach isn't being a stickler for the rules. Instead these boys, aged between seven and eight, are being taught the basics of the game – how to bowl, bat and field.

Sport can be a ticket out of a tough neighbourhood. That doesn't just apply to elite performers who can win sponsorship. In Tower Hamlets, the sports partnership takes children out to Blackheath cricket club every summer where they mix with boys from Dulwich College, the south-London private school. The idea is that sport can be a passport to success in later life – a networking tool.

"They learn to handle themselves in certain social circumstances a bit better because of it," Willetts says. "It can be difficult to get some of them to open up a little bit, just through lack of confidence. There are a lot of professional people who play [at the cricket club] – doctors, teachers, lawyers, bankers. Our kids are playing with them. It's good for aspiration."

Few doubt that the Olympic Games coming to London this year is inspiring a burst of creativity and enthusiasm for sport in Britain's schools. The fear is over what comes next. While ministers boast about an Olympic legacy, the risk is that sport in schools is withering away so fast that a future generation of potential Olympians will be blighted.

In Armenia all six-year-olds study chess; in UK schools it 'fell off a cliff' in the 1980s. But its educational benefits are plentiful

Primary school children in Armenia have more to contend with than just the three Rs. From the age of six, they all study chess as a separate subject for two hours a week. Chess is important to the very identity of this landlocked little country. Armenia suffered massacres and repression in the 20th century and has recently experienced an economic collapse. Yet in the 1960s, it provided the Soviet Union with one of its succession of world champions in the shape of Tigran Petrosian. A master of defence, his relentless grinding down of opponents made him the Geoffrey Boycott of the chessboard. And today, Armenia – with a population of just 3 million – holds the men's world team title.

So it was no surprise when an official of the Armenian education ministry told the Associated Foreign Press that teaching chess in schools would "create a solid basis for the country to become a chess superpower". But there is more to it than that: Armenia is one of a growing number of nations hoping to see wider educational benefits from encouraging chess in schools. India, Turkey and Norway have all made similar moves recently, and a summary of research produced by the Quad Cities Chess Club in America talks of enhanced mental abilities and an improvement in conventional schoolwork.

This is not a new idea. The Soviet dominance of the game was rooted in the new regime's embrace of chess immediately after the revolution. The game was seen as a cheap way to bring culture to the masses and display the new state's superiority to the decadent capitalist west. "We must organise shock brigades of chess players and begin the immediate realisation of a Five-Year Plan for chess," declared Nikolai Krylenko, the father of Soviet chess – some years before Stalin had him arrested and shot.

The international master and chess journalist Malcolm Pein, a gentler soul, is one of those who want to see the game flourish again in British schools. "There is no other activity that costs so little to organise and that cuts across so many barriers," he says. "Age, sex, race, religion … they mean nothing in chess. Anyone can enjoy it. Around 500 million people in 167 countries play the game and only football can rival that. Yet it has long been in decline in our schools."

Two years ago, Pein's organisation, Chess in Schools and Communities, launched a pilot programme involving 60 primary schools and 6,000 children. By 2015 it aims to have introduced the game to 17,000 schools and to have a million children playing. It is an ambitious target, but so far they are on track. Chess is still played by many British children, and Pein praises the Delancey UK Schools Chess Challenge. However, his impression is that many of the 2,000 schools that take part come from the private sector.

Does this mean British chess has always been confined to a social elite? Pein suggests not. Talking about the match held by radio between Great Britain and the Soviet Union in 1946, he says: "Yes, the British team were all Oxbridge types – probably because everyone else was too busy earning a living. But if you look at photographs of the audience, they don't look particularly middle class." My own experience as a member of the feared Market Harborough team of the 1980s bears this out. When we won a trophy, it would be engraved with the names of all its previous holders. Until the 1960s these were overwhelmingly works or company teams: after that they barely featured. Looking at those trophies was like discovering a lost culture.

Chess held on for longer in state schools. Pein dates its decline – "it fell off a cliff" – to the 1980s, a decade that saw the narrowing of the curriculum and a subsequent disaffection among teachers. But it may not be too late to reverse that decline, because the memory of the benefits and pleasures of chess lingers. "When I talk to headteachers," says Pein, "they often say: 'We always had a chess club when I was at school. Why haven't we got one now?'"

But the campaign goes on in his centenary year, with support from all over the world. Leading US mathematician calls for 'hullabaloo in the UK' over the decision.

The government has given an initial rebuff to the campaign for a pardon for Alan Turing, the brilliant British 'father of the computer' whose career ended in tragedy after a gross indecency conviction at a time when gay sex was against the law.

Signatures are gathering on an e-petition for a pardon but the justice minister Lord McNally used the precedent argument to discourage the notion in the House of Lords.

Asked by the Liberal Democrat Lord Sharkey whether a pardon would be considered, to mark this year's centenary of Turing's birth which is the subject of international scientific celebrations, he told peers:

The question of granting a posthumous pardon to Mr Turing was considered by the previous Government in 2009.

As a result of the previous campaign, the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued an unequivocal posthumous apology to Mr Turing on behalf of the Government, describing his treatment as "horrifying" and "utterly unfair". Mr Brown said the country owed him a huge debt. This apology was also shown at the end of the Channel 4 documentary celebrating Mr Turing's life and achievements which was broadcast on 21 November 2011.

A posthumous pardon was not considered appropriate as Alan Turing was properly convicted of what at the time was a criminal offence. He would have known that his offence was against the law and that he would be prosecuted.
It is tragic that Alan Turing was convicted of an offence which now seems both cruel and absurd-particularly poignant given his outstanding contribution to the war effort. However, the law at the time required a prosecution and, as such, long-standing policy has been to accept that such convictions took place and, rather than trying to alter the historical context and to put right what cannot be put right, ensure instead that we never again return to those times.

Turing suffered twice-over during the episode in 1952 which was followed by his death from cyanide poisoning two years later. His crucial wartime role at the code-breaking centre of Bletchley Park could not be disclosed to anyone, including his colleagues at Manchester university where he effectively built the first modern computer.

You can read more about his work in the Guardian Northerner's previous post on the campaign here. The website for the Alan Turing Year is here.

Professor Barry Cooper of Leeds University, a leading mathematician who is chairing the centenary celebrations said:

This is very disappointing – but we are regarding it as only an initial attempt to kick controversy into the long grass. Turing had an absolutely exceptional mind and we can only surmise what progress the UK lost through his tragic death. It would be a precedent but a welcome one, for all those lesser-known people who suffered similar disgrace and unhappiness at a time very different from our own.

Cooper said that protests were coming in from all over the world, including one from the leading American mathematician Dennis Hejhal which deplored the government's use of precedent to defend the decision. In a message to Cooper, Hejhal uses maths to good effect:

i see that the House of Lords rejected the
pardon Feb 6 on what are formal grounds.

if law is X on date D, and you knowingly
break law X on date D, then you cannot be
pardoned (no matter how wrong or flawed
law X is).

the real reason is OBVIOUS. they do not
want thousands of old men saying pardon us
too.

i hope there is an appropriate hullabaloo
in the UK.

In his 2009 public apology, Gordon Brown said:

Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can't put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him.

So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan's work I am very proud to say: we're sorry, you deserved so much better.

The e-petition can be signed here.

Schools minister Nick Gibb says literacy problems are still 'heavily orientated towards poorest'

Poor neighbourhoods in England are still beset by Victorian-era levels of illiteracy, the schools minister has claimed.

In a speech on reading, Nick Gibb said that despite two centuries of technological and social revolution, there were "still shadows of Charles Dickens's world in our own".

He said that, just as in Victorian times, literacy problems were still "heavily orientated towards the poorest in our communities".

Speaking at Stockwell Park high school in south London, Gibb said the coalition was trying to tackle this by expecting primary schools to teach children to read through phonics – a method that breaks words into sounds.

Ministers have also introduced a reading test for six-year-olds that requires them to accurately spot 30 words. Those unable to do so will be given extra help.

Gibb said he was considering issuing all children with a library card when they started school and a map of where their local library was – an idea proposed to him by the children's author Michael Rosen.

But he warned that the education system often had too low expectations of children and needed to stretch pupils more. Teachers settled for a "good enough" standard of reading in many cases, he said.

"The challenge for schools today is to be more ambitious, ask whether the 'expected level' is actually good enough," he said. "We need to raise our sights beyond OK.

"By the end of primary school, we want children to be able to read fluently, to interpret a book's meaning and to be able to enjoy more complex books by the likes of [Michael] Morpurgo and [Roald] Dahl."

Gibb said every school leaver should have read at least one Dickens novel.

He admitted that the exam system was partly to blame because it required pupils to study only four or five texts at GCSE. "Even when young people do wish to read, the exam system does not encourage them," he said.

In exams, more than 90% of questions on novels relate to three books: Of Mice and Men, Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird.

He claimed children in England were "falling out of love" with reading. A widely respected study of 65 developed nations ranked the UK at 47th for the number of children who read for pleasure. Some 40% of pupils did not read for pleasure, compared with 10% in Kazakhstan and Albania.

"We are being out-educated and it's become abundantly clear that we need to think long and hard about whether the expected levels of reading we demanded in the past are still good enough," he said.

Last year, four out of five 11-year-olds reached the level expected of them in reading (level four). The proportion appears to be rising year-on-year. However, the proportion reaching level five – a standard beyond what is expected – has remained stagnant at 29% for the last decade.

Stephen Twigg, Labour's shadow education secretary, criticised the government for making one-to-one tuition optional in schools. Teachers can now decide whether they want to use their reduced funds to give struggling children one-to-one reading help. Twigg said 9,000 fewer children received the help as a result.

If children are stressed in early years education, we should look to the circumstances of their parents, not the 'nappy curriculum'

In an open letter to the Daily Telegraph yesterday, academics and other interested parties were castigating the "nappy curriculum", a set of requirements for pre-school children that author Philip Pullman and others see as standing in the way of "spontaneous play". Meanwhile, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers has reported a marked increase in children not being potty trained before they start school. The world appears to be pulling in two different directions – with far more expected of children at school, and far fewer demands made at home.

Actually, I think both stories reflect the same trend: a belief that school can do absolutely everything for a child that originates in policy but feeds into parental expectation.

The fixation with early years learning – held by the coalition and the Labour government before it – is an attempt to solve the inequality that successive studies have shown to be locked in by the age of five. If only government, with children's centres, targets and curricula, could intervene, with equally high expectations of everybody, then inequality would be eradicated. That was the plan, anyway. Opponents now counter that this constant monitoring ruins children's peace of mind. I disagree with both, and this isn't evidence-based (in fairness, neither is any of the policy, or if it is, only by the most tangential reading of the evidence). Pre-school kids may be given weekly homework and a book to take home, and, to an adult, that sounds like a big ask. But a kid would no more interpret this as pressure than they would being asked to eat broccoli or put their own shoes on. Reading a book is far less onerous than the harassment of the "please" and "thank you" agenda. You are constantly hassling your children; that's what childhood is, and always has been.

If they are stressed, it's because their parents are stressed; they can no more be separated from the emotional temperature of their household than they can be "lifted out of poverty" while their parents are still in it. Oh, which reminds me, if their parents are stressed, it's most probably because of the contraction of household budgets. Don't follow the curriculum looking for answers; follow the money.

The Unilad site may have closed down, but the 'lad' phenomenon is alive and kicking on campuses everywhere, writes student Rachel Aroesti

Outrage over the suggestion – posted on a student website – that rape was acceptable as long as the "lad" involved said "surprise" closed the site last week. The "lad" phenomenon, which has pervaded university life for years, is newly inescapable on campuses everywhere thanks to such sites as Unilad.

Founded in 2010, Unilad claims to have more than 8,000 visits a day and more than 75,000 Facebook fans. Other sites, Truelad and Toplad, receive hundreds of "lad" stories each week from their users, such as "Saw a LAD on the train texting a girl on his phone – her contact name was "Met on Friday – big tits" titswithnonameLAD".

To be against the "lad" lifestyle is to be against humour, a good time and possibly even the entire student ethos itself. And the reason for this, the lad-catch-22? It's all one big joke. Not only in the sense that it shouldn't be taken seriously, but also because, for Durham lads anyway, the whole thing is swathed in so much irony that it's categorically impossible to make out if this "banter" is satirical or genuine. It's no coincidence that the extreme voice of lad found its home in the journalism of Unilad. Lad culture started in lads mags like Nuts (whose tag line is, suitably, "When You Really Need Something Funny").

At Durham we have our own Daily Mail-Nuts hybrid, Durham One, which is the only major rival to Durham's official student newspaper. Sexual politics features heavily, as does general "banter" such as comparing the Arab spring to a college bar crawl. The point of this journalism isn't to express any closely held beliefs about women or anything else – instead it's an exercise in courting controversy, being inventive with your taboos, and ultimately being able to call anyone who finds it offensive "stupid" for not appreciating the complex irony involved.

It's frustrating that "lad" culture has managed to make it difficult to condemn misogynist views, especially when it is laying claim to huge swathes of the university experience. It's both harmless and fatal, real and fictional, and that's why it's so difficult know whether to laugh or cry.

The writer is a student at Durham University.

Researchers found children were likely to have educational development impaired if families had multiple social issues

More than a quarter of children in the UK are not reaching their potential at school because of poor living conditions and unwell parents, a study has found.

Researchers from the University of London's Institute of Education and the University of Sussex analysed the intellectual development of 18,000 children between the ages of nine months and five years.

They found that children were likely to have stunted intellectual development if they were exposed to two or more disadvantages, such as having a parent who suffered from depression, and living in an overcrowded home.

Some 28% of the children they studied came from families that faced two or more disadvantages. In most cases, these children had a considerably reduced vocabulary or behaved worse than their peers.

In their study, multiple risk factors in young children's development, the academics highlight 10 situations that can impair a child's development. These include living in an overcrowded home; having a teenage mother; coming from a family with poor basic skills or a history of drug or alcohol abuse.

Some 30% of the children analysed in the study came from families facing one of these disadvantages, but it was only when children faced at least two disadvantages that their development was impaired. Some 41% of the children did not face any of the disadvantages the academics listed.

The researchers found that Bangladeshi children were most likely to be exposed to multiple family problems. Almost half – 48% – came from families that faced two or more disadvantages, compared to 20% of children of Indian heritage.

Professor Shirley Dex, one of the authors of the study, said politicians should concentrate on individual disadvantages, rather than "clusters of disadvantage". She said: "Any combination of disadvantages only represents a small proportion of families, so if you have a targeted policy that addresses parental depression, excessive alcohol consumption and a lack of basic skills, we might only get to a small proportion of children."

In December, David Cameron announced that he expected each large local authority to appoint troubleshooters to address the problems facing chaotic families. The scheme is formally voluntary, but if a family refuses to co-operate, councils already have the powers to evict tenants, take children into care or issue antisocial behaviour orders.

The study will be published by the Institute of Education's Centre for Longitudinal Studies.

Researchers says self-feeding from the start of weaning may help avoid weight problems later

Babies may know best when it comes to their future health, according to researchers who found infants who have more choice over what they eat may be less overweight than their spoon-fed counterparts.

Allowing toddlers to feed theSmselves from a selection of finger foods from the start of weaning rather than being fed purées may help them regulate their intake, suggests the small study at Nottingham University.

Babies who self-fed with solids were also more likely to prefer carbohydrates than spoon-fed babies, who tended to favour sweet things, said researchers Ellen Townsend and Nicola Pitchfork in a paper in the journal BMJ Open.

They compared the diets of 92 infants who were following "baby-led" feeding with those of 63 spoon-fed children. More children in the spoon-fed group were overweight or obese than those in the baby-led group.

The finding was not explained by differences in birth weight, parental weight, or socioeconomic factors, which could influence a child's body mass index (BMI). Parents filled in questionnaires on how their children, aged between 20 and 78 months. had been weaned, including how often they ate certain foods.

They noted their child's preference for 151 foods in categories such as carbohydrates, proteins, fruit, savoury snacks, dairy and "whole meals" such as lasagne. Foods were rated from 1, where the baby "loves it", to five, where the baby "hates it".

An analysis of BMI scores in the full spoon-fed group and 63 of the baby-led group found eight of the first group were obese and two overweight, according to NHS categories based on their BMI. By contrast, none of those eating finger foods were obese, although nine were overweight. Three were underweight.

"Our study suggests that baby-led weaning has a positive impact on the liking for foods that form the building blocks of healthy nutrition, such as carbohydrates," the authors said.

"This has implications for combating the well documented rise of obesity in contemporary societies."

The researchers added: "Children weaned using the baby-led method are more likely to encounter carbohydrates in their whole food format earlier than spoon-fed children as these foods are ideal early finger foods (eg toast and pitta breads) so age of introduction may impact on behaviour …

"Presenting carbohydrates to infants in their whole food format, such as toast, rather than a puréed form may highlight awareness of perceptual features (such as texture) that is masked when food is puréed," they said. Previous research had shown that food presentation significantly influences food preferences.

"It is also possible that carbohydrates are easier to masticate compared to some other foods such as meat (which may be easier to eat when puréed and spoon-fed)."

The study's authors recognised possible limitations – it relied on self-report by parents and was small, but they believed it was the first study of its type. Further research could include whether similar findings held for babies born prematurely or with specific health difficulties.

"In particular, a study is needed that includes a greater proportion of children who have been formula and bottle fed in order to compare the relative impacts of weaning method and milk feeding practices …"

The mating call of an extinct bush-cricket has been reconstructed, using the microscopic wing features of a fossil

Education's ex-top civil servant 'never had a difficult relationship' with Michael Gove, he says. And in fact, when he speaks, his phraseology sounds eerily similar to that of the secretary of state, says Peter Wilby

It is surprising to learn that Sir David Bell is still only 52. He has been chief education officer of Newcastle, chief executive of Bedfordshire county council, head of Ofsted and, most recently, permanent secretary at the Department for Education. Now he is vice-chancellor of the University of Reading and can, as he puts it, "call 'house!' on the bingo card of educational jobs", which isn't bad for a man who started as a primary school teacher in his native Glasgow. He got most of his jobs at ridiculously early ages: a deputy headship at 26, a headship at 29, chief executive at 36. He doesn't think he's Reading's youngest vice-chancellor, but he must be the first who trained as a primary teacher.

If you ask how he got these jobs, people will say it's because he's good at running things. They can quote, for example, from a "capability review" on the education department carried out by the Cabinet Office during Bell's tenure: he was "visible, decisive, engaging and inspiring". Or Ofsted's verdict on Newcastle in 1999: that a "remarkable improvement" in its performance "to a large extent results from" Bell's appointment four years previously. He did so well as permanent secretary that he was at one stage tipped for cabinet secretary.

But other people are good at running things, and even Bell has mishaps. At the education department, for example, he accepted a measure of responsibility when Michael Gove, the secretary of state, left himself open to legal challenge over axeing school building projects and, on his watch at Ofsted, the inspectorate was berated for issuing a number of flawed reports.

So perhaps it is Bell's authoritative manner that has taken him so far. Everything he says sounds balanced and measured – "I am extreme in my moderation," he explains – and the certainty and confidence probably derive (though he is no longer a churchgoer himself) from his Scottish Protestant background. Estelle Morris, a former Labour education secretary, describes him as "one of the calmest men I've ever met".

The manners are impeccable. In his office at Reading, with its panoramic views over the university's Whiteknights Park, he greets me with the firmest of handshakes, warmly recalls our previous encounters, introduces me to his personal assistants, and regularly drops my Christian name into his answers. You admire the smooth functioning as you might admire a Rolls-Royce. I learn from the university's communications officer that, while undergraduate applications for next autumn are down 7% generally, Reading's are up 10%. This cannot have anything to do with Bell, who has been in post just four weeks, but you can't help feeling that, when he appears on the scene, things inevitably go well.

At Ofsted, he was often sharply outspoken, criticising the Labour government for turning down the Tomlinson report's recommendation to scrap A-levels and GCSEs and lamenting the effects of "the target culture" on schools. Permanent secretaries, however, aren't allowed to express controversial opinions in public, even after they've left the job. So reports of tensions between him and Gove have never been publicly confirmed. Bell has always been described as "close to New Labour", though nobody would ever be rude enough to call him a crony. When he left the education department at Christmas, newspapers reported "a difficult relationship" with Gove. "Here's a knighthood, good references, off you go," was one account of his departure.

Bell is having none of it. "I never had a difficult relationship. I told the secretary of state in the summer of 2010 that I didn't expect to do a full parliament, and expected to be away around the end of 2011. That's exactly what happened."

He has no quarrel with either free schools or Gove's rapid expansion of academies. "I have always believed that if you maximise the independence of schools you have a better chance of securing progress. Academies are not a huge step from local management of schools. They are a logical continuation of policies to increase levels of school autonomy." Pushing the Academies Act through parliament as soon as he came to office was "a brilliant decision" by Gove. Free schools are "a good addition to the system" that "will have a galvanising effect". As for suggestions that the creation of these schools, outside the local authority system and wholly dependent on Whitehall, amounts to a power-grab, "that's a caricature – the secretary of state won't be taking every micro-decision about schools from Cornwall to Cumbria". Gove's reforms haven't caused the same "brouhaha" as the health reforms, Bell points out. "That's because they haven't been imposed systemwide. It's not been a top-down reform in which every school has to become an academy."

He agrees, though, that accountability is still an issue that hasn't quite been resolved and that the future of LEAs is uncertain. "It's a question of whether schools think the local authority is providing the right kind of services. Local authorities have to find a way to work with their schools that will continue to make them relevant. That's the way it should be. The idea that the local authority should have power just because it's the local authority is one that most people in the education system would now challenge."

On academies, free schools and the possibility of allowing for-profit providers to run schools (to which he has "no principled objection" and which he thinks will probably happen eventually), Bell sometimes uses almost exactly the words and phrases Gove uses, albeit without the tendentious political rhetoric. This may suggest, to some, that Bell hasn't lost the habit of echoing his master's voice. More likely, it shows that Gove listened to his permanent secretary's advice.

Bell's pitch-perfect understanding of how a Whitehall mandarin should conduct himself is all the more remarkable given that his background is a world away from the public school and Oxbridge training traditionally associated with the role. His grandfather was a guard on the Flying Scotsman and his father started as a purser on the Clyde steamers, later rising to white-collar status in British Rail's property division. As a child, Bell says, he was more interested in football than reading and schoolwork, but he went to a fledgling Glasgow comprehensive where bright young teachers inspired him to aim at a teaching career. He took history and philosophy at Glasgow University, living at home until he wed his childhood sweetheart (they are still married, with two daughters who went to state schools), and then trained as a teacher at the city's Jordanhill College.

When he started teaching in a Glasgow primary school, he says, "I thought I'd died and gone to heaven". Then somebody pointed out a "slightly wacky" advertisement for a deputy head in Essex. "It was written in terms of an exciting opportunity in a great school in an era long before heads normally marketed their schools." He "clicked instantly" with the head, who was very committed to the topic-based approach. So the head was what would now be called a trendy? "He was very much ahead of his time in recognising that an integrated curriculum also needed a commitment to basic literacy and numeracy." He went on to a primary headship, also in Essex, but left after two years to join Newcastle town hall.

He became the chief inspector in 2002. The most important part of his job was not being Chris Woodhead, who had left two years earlier to the sound of popping champagne corks in staffrooms across the land. In Newcastle, Bell enthusiastically supported a model of school self-evaluation developed by the National Union of Teachers. This was reflected in his approach at Ofsted, which was far less confrontational and judgmental than Woodhead's. True, he was the first chief inspector to declare that "satisfactory" wasn't good enough. But in a lecture in 2003 on the persistence of the attainment gap between socio-economic classes – which, he admits, is now as wide as it ever was – he said that "schools with large numbers of low-attaining pupils are not necessarily unsuccessful schools". "Under him, Ofsted was as good as it got," says John Bangs, the NUT's former education officer, now visiting professor at the London University Institute of Education.

Bangs was less enamoured of Bell's period at the education department, arguing that he should have done more to resolve conflicts over teachers' contracts and working conditions. But even among critics, Bell has no real enemies and almost everybody is impressed by his hard work, his diplomatic skills and his speed in devouring documents. In his zeal for disinterested public service, he is one of an increasingly rare breed, and we should expect him now to emerge as an incisive spokesman for universities. I point out that his career trajectory through state school teaching and local government will be impossible to repeat in future. "You're absolutely right," he says. "The career I chose to follow in the 1980s – I wouldn't have that option now. Local government was a good grounding for lots of people who came into central government. Where are the next generation of national leaders coming from?" It is the nearest he comes to expressing regret about the actions of the government he has just served.

Government policy, which means universities will rely solely only on A-level grades to choose students, will simply privilege the already privileged, says Peter Scott

A long time ago, I remember having lunch with a vice-chancellor, (who had better remain unnamed). Suddenly he made a dramatic gesture, sweeping off the table what he contemptuously called the "tail" of less well-qualified students. That was his plan for success. As a result, his university shrank in size – and ambition.

I found it a chilling gesture at the time. Just the week before, I had interviewed Karl Popper, the Austrian-born philosopher, then in the last years of his life. One thing stuck, and sticks, in my mind about Popper, author of the famous book The Open Society And Its Enemies (mischievously glossed by some of his critics, in recognition of his well-known "difficult" manner, as The Open Society By One of Its Enemies). Popper told me why he had deserted his youthful Marxism.

He had witnessed a street brawl between extreme right and left in Vienna in the 1920s, a routine occurrence then. He had suddenly thought: here are people ready to kill and die for an idea – but what if that idea proves to be wrong? Their crimes would have been committed or their lives lost for nothing.

The vice-chancellor I had invited to lunch was also prepared to sacrifice flesh-and-blood individuals for an idea: better-qualified students in the mass. No one was actually going to die as a result. But their hopes of a university education and a better life were going to die as they were swept away with the crumbs.

I still find his attitude chilling because up and down England his successors are now behaving, or being forced to behave, in the same totalitarian way – a harsh word but a fair one. They are sifting the wheat – students with AAB grades at A-level – from the chaff – those who missed their grades or never had the opportunities and resources to aspire so high in the first place.

That is the inevitable effect of the government's decision to allow universities to recruit as many AAB students as they like, while sharply constraining the overall number of students. Vice-chancellors and admission tutors now have to lure AAB students away from other universities with bursaries and scholarships, or bribe them to stay. They are operating on the principle, to paraphrase Mr Micawber, AAB "result happiness"; AAC "result misery".

There are two fundamental objections to this policy – one educational and the second ethical. The first is that universities have always chosen students according to their future potential, not past performance. Of course, A-level grades are important evidence of potential. But they should never be treated as decisive evidence, even in an age of mass higher education when computer-generated offers are almost inevitable.

To rely on A-level grades alone is, in effect, further to privilege the already privileged, to give disproportionate rewards to those whose way in life has been smooth. The correlation between school performance and social advantage is too plain to deny. For years universities have attempted, feebly perhaps, to level the playing field by making differential offers. Now, on the fiat of David Willetts, they are no longer so free to do so.

To rely on A-level grades also means those choosing students can no longer take into account character (surely beloved of Conservatives?) or experience of life or other less-academic attributes that enliven a university community. Goodbye to well-rounded people. We are all swots now. So why waste time interviewing candidates?

The ethical objection to the government's AAB apartheid takes me back to Popper on the Viennese streets 80 years ago. The arguments for widening participation, and for (genuinely) fair access, are usually seen as rooted in ideology of the kind that Popper disapproved of ("social engineering" is the standard put-down). That is only partly true, although unlike Popper I would not disavow collective action to secure social justice. The argument is also about individuals. First, is it fair to offer students an enticement, in the shape of a generous bursary or an attractive fee waiver, in the expectation that they will get AABs, only to withdraw it if they slip a grade (and since when have A-level examiners been infallible?).

But it goes deeper still. The vice-chancellor who swept the "tail" into oblivion from that restaurant table, and the vice-chancellors now struggling to "manage" their AAB entrants, are behaving in the same way as the zealots of right and left who battled in the streets. They are putting an idea, an abstraction, a policy construct, before the lives of real people who are born, live, love and are bound to die.

Peter Scott is professor of higher education studies at the Institute of Education

Big businesses should not be criticised for using state money to train staff, says former quango chief

When Simon Waugh said he was stepping down as chief executive of the National Apprenticeship Service last month, on the same day that Geoff Russell, the head of its parent organisation, the Skills Funding Agency, announced his retirement, it naturally raised eyebrows.

Over the last six months, the NAS has come under increasing scrutiny for failing to act on the problem of apprenticeship providers offering really short apprenticeships, when the minimum recommended is around a year. Some providers, like the De Vere Hotel Group, had been delivering qualifications in 12 weeks or less.

The NAS and the SFA have also been criticised for giving public money to big businesses such as Morrisons and Asda to train existing employees, in some cases, generating big profits for private companies delivering training on their behalf.

News that the heads of both these organisations (two of the most senior jobs in vocational education) were stepping down fuelled speculation in the sector that the two had jumped before being pushed – a situation that wasn't helped by the way the announcement was handled. While Waugh says the dual announcement was "coincidence", an SFA press officer told Education Guardian it was planned that way.

Today Waugh is keen to set the record straight. His decision to leave was purely motivated by a need to spend time with his family after the death of his four children's mother at the end of last year, he explains.

He is annoyed about the pressure he has faced to explain the reasons for his departure. "So I have to explain to journalists something which is unbelievably personal to me and my family," he says. "What a terrible world we live in."

But he is keen to give his analysis of the apprenticeships landscape, and problems that he thinks have been blown out of proportion. "There is a really small percentage of programmes that are poor quality and I have been all over it for many months. Inevitably as you grow, there are going to be providers that are not doing things the way they should – and we were going to spend more and more time ensuring the quality of every programme."

Steps have been taken already by way of a new set of standards introduced last April. The Specification of Apprenticeship Standards for England (Sase) stipulates that every apprentice should receive up to 280 hours of guided learning (time in education and training, away from their usual duties) each year and should, in theory, prevent abuse of the system. Under new government measures due to be introduced in August, all apprenticeships for 16- to 18-year-olds must last at least a year, and NAS is currently reviewing whether similar rules could be applied to older learners.

The NAS has neither the budget nor the manpower to keep track of what every learner is up to, says Waugh. Staffing has been cut by 25% in the last six months, he says. And because funding for apprenticeships is allocated to colleges or training companies, which may then sub-contract to other providers, news of "immoral, illegal or inappropriate" behaviour can take months to reach the organisation.

It is over 40 minutes into an hour-long interview before Waugh concedes that the NAS could have done any more, that "there's stuff we need to fix, do better".

He admits he underestimated what a political hot potato apprenticeships were. "I am a bloody idiot for being naive; I didn't quite realise," he says.

Waugh does not accept that NAS is wrong to work with big businesses such as McDonald's and Morrisons. What critics fails to recognise, he argues, is that these companies are not just taking handouts from the government to subsidise staff training. The "anti-big business" argument ignores the fact that these companies give people a chance to develop basic literacy and numeracy, which has wider benefits for society – and they do it on company time, says Waugh.

That might be so, but is it right to call these training programmes apprenticeships? Can an 18-year-old checkout operator be compared with, say, trainee stonemasons who might spend years learning their craft? He dismisses such questions as "snobbish".

Some media coverage, he says, has focused on companies investing in apprenticeships to help solve unemployment. This idea is a "big fallacy", says Waugh. "Apprenticeships are not about unemployment. These are real jobs that exist anyway and this is about training people and giving them the best foundation they will ever have in their lives."

Following the case of the De Vere Hotel Group, which last year was found to be advertising more than 700 12- to 16-week apprenticeships, more than 40 short-duration programmes are under review.

While the NAS has said it will close down any providers found to be abusing the system, Waugh says some don't necessarily realise they are doing anything wrong, and with guidance, can turn things around.

The scrutiny and criticisms of the last six months have hit the NAS hard. This week, which is National Apprenticeship Week, sees the introduction of a new marketing campaign – known as "New Era for Apprenticeships" – that will attempt to "reposition" the organisation and ensure that learners, employers and training providers are more aware of their rights and responsibilities. The poster campaign, based around the slogan "apprenticeships deliver", will target employers, young people and their parents, via advertising on public transport, direct mail and social media.

Figures from the National Audit Office published last week suggest that while apprenticeships have grown by 140% in the last five years, the majority of jobs have gone to the over-25s, suggesting that a growing number of existing workers are being trained under the scheme. One in five apprenticeship programmes were completed in less than six months.

But Waugh is keen to stress that he is leaving the organisation in a strong position. "I tell you, if there were real issues in apprenticeships … if I thought there were really serious, systemic problems here, I wouldn't walk away."

Michael Rosen has some questions for the education secretary

My, aren't you busy! If you're not busying about with Suffolk selling off a primary school, you're busying about in Haringey turning a school that doesn't want it, into an academy. I'm a parent of two school-age children – and several older ones – and like you, I visit a lot of schools. Imagine my surprise to hear that the new curriculum we're all waiting for is going to be delayed by a whole year.

I have to admit some confusion here. Under the last government we became very used to guidelines flying out of their ears – and ours. We were utterly curriculummed. And then your government, showing its libertarian side, announced that you were doing away with all that micro-management – you were going to leave it to the experts – the teachers! Of course, that was only partly the case, because it wasn't long before you set up a curriculum review which, excuse my yawn, felt like something that's been hitting teachers, parents and children for the whole of my lifetime.

As a child, I can remember the house being full of talks of "reports" – and indeed the shelves being full of them a year or so later – Plowden, Bullock, Crowther, Swann – excuse me if I've muddled them. And then when your party were in power last time and the supremely confident Sir Kenneth Baker was in your chair, again – more reports: Cox and Kingman – and didn't Mr Cox get another stab at it? Then there was the aborted LINC report (at a cost of some £20m, I heard), and lo, we had the "strategies" which would solve everything, but mysteriously were abolished after that 10-year experiment – not forgetting the Rose report and the Rose report 2.

Then in you came with your new broom, and whaddyaknow – another "review". In fact, I was honoured to have been asked to present a word or two about books and reading, and was interested to hear that the word "from on high" was that the new national curriculum would be very "bare bones" stuff, pedagogy wouldn't get a mention, though I was asked if I was in favour of a recommended list of authors. You won't be surprised to know that I said no. Either Cox or Kingman (or both) tried that one before and it got booted out when most living authors said that they didn't want to be on the list. And then, surely, my eyebrows weren't the only eyebrows that lifted when you said how important it was to read Dryden. Really? Do you read Dryden? Really? Honestly?

I digress.

Given that the word from "on high" was that the curriculum in English was going to be so slim, could I ask you why it will take another year to produce? How long does it take to write a slim curriculum? (No, that's not a question from one of the verbal reasoning tests that seem to be back in vogue.)

There's a bit of an anomaly though, isn't there? This curriculum will only apply in England and only in schools working within local authorities. So central government is going to lay down a compulsory curriculum for the schools that it's trying to turn into schools where the curriculum won't apply – academies, free schools and indeed any other kinds of schools you might invent.

I'm sure you've got very good reasons for all this.

Yours sincerely,

Michael Rosen

Michael Rosen's letters will appear monthly

Prison philosophy: the kind of conversation you can't find anywhere else

"So, I can do quantum physics after all?"

"You certainly can."

"That is excellent."

Casey's face is a picture of delight. "I am so grateful that you made that happen." Mary the OU organiser beams back at him. Casey has two more units to do before he graduates, and I feel as though I have been pulled along with him through most of it. In fact, he has infected the philosophy class with some much-needed scientific rigour; a couple of the chaps were so seduced that they started science degrees themselves.

Once Mary has gone, I get the full blast. "Listen," he says, "what's metaphysics?" "You know that. We've done that." "Yeah, yeah, but I need to get it absolutely straight in my head." The morning flies by in a flurry of deontology and Kant.

One of the orderlies comes in on some errand and starts to tell us about his hard time. Casey jumps on him and even though I'm used to Casey, I find it a bit intense. "Stop fuckin whingeing. You're doing just fine. You're not being raped while you're out trying to find firewood so you can cook for your kids who're starving in some fly-blown shithole." And that's just the overture. The other guy is not so much offended as baffled and slinks off. "And the food," Casey tells me, "the food is just fine. Maybe there could be more of it, but it's just fine. They cook a lot of it themselves now." "I thought they gave you sandwiches?" "I love fuckin sandwiches. I buy nuts and fruit from the canteen." "Like Yogi Bear?" "Like Yogi fuckin Bear. There are guys buying candy and crisps. You know how much crisps cost?" I shake my head. Casey lifts one cheek from his chair and lets out a long rolling fart. "Maybe I'm taking too much of the vegetarian and bean options."

This makes me think of how little complaining I have encountered over the years. (Except for the quite legitimate complaints about Casey's farts.) Perhaps it has something to do with philosophy or at least the kind of man who came to the class. Colin even went blind during his sentence without expecting any sympathy. "I'll do my bird like anybody else."

We find our way back to metaphysics and, just to make the point by way of contrast, I tell him about AJ Ayer and the Verification Principle. We both fall in love with the Verification Principle for its sheer energy and cheek. Somehow I find myself talking about post-structuralism; maybe because we have been thinking about meaning.

Where else in the world shall I find a conversation like this one? There are even universities proposing to close down their philosophy departments. Just imagine that: a university where you can do business or sports studies, but not philosophy. It really is hard to believe, isn't it?

Our three hours have flown by. Casey picks up his bundle of books and I walk with him to the gate. We bump into Ian, the maths teacher. "You still all right for Monday, Casey?" "Sure am." "What's happening Monday?" I ask. "Casey teaches maths for me. Well, arithmetic actually." "Do you trust him?" "Whaddya mean?" says Casey, outraged. "Well, doesn't he yell at people, make them stand in the corner, clip their ears when they get their tables wrong? What does he do if they lose their homework?" Ian looks baffled: "No," he says, "he's very gentle, actually."

Charles Dickens would have been 200 years old on Tuesday 7 February. To mark the bicentenary, the Guardian Teacher Network has materials to help you bring his work to life for children

Charles Dickens's Characters in Pictures is a guide to some of the most vivid personalities in Dickens's novels. Created by the Guardian, the resource contains illustrations of characters including the Artful Dodger and Ebenezer Scrooge, along with extracts about them from Dickens's work. It provides inspiration for activities including role play, descriptive writing and costume design.

What the Dickens? is a website for students and teachers containing creative-writing lesson plans, activity sheets and an outline for a Dickens-themed assembly. There are also short videos from children's authors celebrating the work of Dickens and an interactive story-writing competition open to 9- to 14-year-olds.

The British Council has produced a Dickens-themed education pack featuring activities for primary and secondary pupils. Among them is a lesson plan that encourages students to capture the sights and sounds of their local area in an extended piece of creative writing. The organisation has also created a collection of Template Projects with teaching ideas such as using cliff-hangers and atmospheric descriptions of the weather in pieces of writing. The resource includes handy extracts from a range of Dickens's novels including Great Expectations, Bleak House and Oliver Twist.

Dickens in Context is a fascinating resource that uses original source material from the British Library to explore the social, cultural and political context in which Dickens was writing.

The website features literary manuscripts, workhouse menus and newspaper articles, along with videos of the actor Simon Callow reading extracts from some of Dickens's best-known works.

Pupils can find out more about the world Dickens lived in with the English/history lesson Victorian Times . Suitable for 11- to 14-year-olds, it uses photographs and an Education Guardian article to highlight the divide between rich and poor that influenced so much of Dickens's writing. Similar themes are covered in Hard Times and the Author, a reading comprehension task suitable for 16- to 18-year-olds. Pupils can find out about Dickens's childhood, his work as an author, and his belief in social reform. They can then test their understanding in a quiz.

For more information about Dickens's bicentenary, visit the Guardian's dedicated website Charles Dickens at 200. It features a series of podcasts inspired by Dickens's fondness for walking around London recording everyday details of Victorian city life. Use the podcasts to inspire pupils to go on a walk around their own local area, capturing familiar sights and sounds using sketch books and digital cameras.

• The Guardian Teacher Network has more than 100,000 pages of lesson plans and interactive materials. To see and share for yourself go to teachers.guardian.co.uk. There are also hundreds of jobs on the site and schools can advertise for free.

Archaeologists reveal a new way of viewing Stonehenge using Google Earth software

Millions of people have used Google Earth's geo-modelling software to take a tour of the moon, Mars, foreign countries, or – let's be honest – to compare their homes with those of their neighbours. But now a new project developed by Bournemouth University academics is giving surfers access to a virtual prehistoric landscape: Stonehenge.

The World Heritage site near Salisbury is now more accessible than ever, archaeologists claim, thanks to Google's Under-the-Earth: Seeing Beneath Stonehenge project. Their last few years of findings, combined with the search giant's technology, allows surfers to visit the Neolithic village of Durrington Walls, to scout around prehistoric houses, to see reconstructions of Bluestonehenge at the end of the Stonehenge Avenue and to explore the great timber monument called the Southern Circle. The sites look as they would have appeared more than 4,000 years ago – and all from the comfort of your desk.

The project was inspired by public responses to Bournemouth academics' own digs at Stonehenge, according to Kate Welham, head of archaeology at the university. "When we were in the field, our excavations were visited by thousands of members of the public," she explains.

So the Bournemouth archaeologists decided to use their field data together with that gathered by academics from the universities of Sheffield, Manchester, Bristol, Southampton and London. It was all part of the six-year-long Stonehenge Riverside Project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which involved digging more than 60 trenches. Running from 2003 to 2009, it was one of the largest research excavations ever run in Europe, involving over 150 students, volunteers and professional at the same time. "And we wanted to bring all our digital data together, including the pictures and reconstructions of the monuments we found," Welham adds. "We wanted to make our discoveries even more accessible and put the exciting archaeological findings into a virtual environment so that even if people couldn't visit Stonehenge, they could fly around it from their living room."

The aim is for site users to feel as if they're involved in Stonehenge fieldwork, but they can at least avoid its major drawbacks. "Fieldwork is hard work," says Welham, "and it's safe to say we kept the local bakery in business, probably managing to eat the weight of the stones in ice cream and pasties!"

Through the site, "you're not just looking at the monument, but seeing Stonehenge within its wider prehistoric landscape," Welham adds. The Riverside project included discoveries that changed archaeologists' thoughts about Stonehenge, including finds such as a new stone circle at the end of the Avenue and the houses in a Neolithic Village at Durrington Walls.

The software allows users to see where archaeologists excavated those new houses in the landscape, and includes photos and details of what they found in each of their trenches, as well as reconstructions. "In many places we have put in 360-degree panoramas that you can zoom in and out of so that you get a real feeling of being in the landscape," says Welham. "It means the hard work of our archaeology students, who worked with us to gather the research, can be seen by millions around the world."

The academics want their Google Under-the-Earth project to become an important historical tool. "It could be the start of a whole new layer in Google Earth showing the excavations and finds of the world's greatest archaeological sites," says Welham. "It could include details of centuries' worth of excavations, as well as technical data from geophysical and remote sensing surveys gathered in the last 20 years. I'm currently looking at the underground findings in Rapa Nui (Easter Island) – it's a place that holds a fascination for many people, but being so remote, visiting is a serious expedition. It would be wonderful to do a similar type of project with the results of our new research."

As for the audience, so far history teachers have been particularly interested in the Under the Earth site. "It's a great way to engage their pupils with the past in a really interesting and visual context," says Welham.

But interest goes far wider. "Our research shows that the majority of people downloading the application seem to have no specific interest in archaeology or history, but just want to learn more about the past and enjoy the Stonehenge landscape." Downloads aren't just in the UK either; there is interest in the US, Portugal, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Turkey, Spain, Australia, Korea and the Philippines.

Still, the site might be taking people closer to – and deeper underneath – the site than ever before, but it doesn't solve its mysteries. The age-old question as to whether it was a temple for sun worship, a burial site, healing centre or enormous calendar remain unanswered – as does the issue as to how our predecessors moved the enormous stones. "People always ask me what I think the true Stonehenge story is, but this is the great thing about the application," says Welham, cunningly dodging the question. "You can download it, take a look at the monument and landscape – and decide for yourself."

• Download the application from blogs.bournemouth.ac.uk/seeing-beneath-stonehenge

If you want your statues clean (and your pigeons healthy), you just need to make them of bronze laced with arsenic

As the heavens inevitably cover every mountain peak with snow, so do pigeons unstoppably deposit a protective white layer atop every outdoor statue – or so people believed. Yukio Hirose shocked and delighted the world by disproving one of these two supposedly eternal truths. He used arsenic to do it.

Chemistry provides a way to communicate certain messages to birds. Yukio Hirose figured this out after he noticed that something, some mysterious who-knows-what, had consistently attracted the attention of one particular group of pigeons.

In the Kenroku garden in the city of Kanazawa, Japan, stands a statue of the legendary hero Yamato Takeru no Mikoto. There are many things to admire about the statue, but, as a scientist, Professor Hirose was fascinated by how pristine the figure is. Birds rarely visit it, and seldom bestow the kind of personal gifts they often lavish on statuary.

The statue is old, and the historical records hold few technical details of its manufacture. There was no obvious reason why it should stand cleanly removed from its fellows in the vast, international populace of statues.

Hirose analysed a small sample of the metal. Its composition turns out to be unusual. The alloy contains copper and lead, which are not uncommon in statues – but also another element that seems very out of place. The statue's old bronze is laced with arsenic.

Arsenic by itself, of course, is famed as a poison. But when arsenic is bound up in an alloy of lead and copper, is it still somehow able to act poisonously or repellently on creatures that come near it? The answer to that question was not at all clear, and so Hirose did some experiments.

He carefully prepared some new bronze, with a chemical composition very like that in the statue. He forged sheets of this metal, and allowed birds to come and pay their customary kind of courtesy visit.

This was a starkly revealing experiment. Birds consistently declined to spend time on the metal sheets, or even to come near them. Thus, concluded Hirose, the statue's secret power was no longer a secret. It was simply a matter of chemistry.

Since that time he has been conducting further experiments. His hope – shared by millions of people who love statues (or at least love spending time near statues) – is that this discovery will change the world. He is developing a technology that, if perfected, will give humanity a simple way to protect its statues from pigeons, crows and other winged would-be loiterers. And to do so in a way that will not cause harm to the birds.

• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize

Ros Asquith, Lines cartoon

Channel 4 Education combines Ken Loach, Fresh Meat, The Sims and TOWIE into an interesting new story-telling experiment

Video games have been toying with the notion of 'emergent narratives' for many years. Stories that arise from the combination of player actions and the unpredictable behaviours of AI characters are a common element in 'open world' titles like Fallout, Far Cry and Dwarf Fortress. But can these techniques be used to create new forms of TV and movie entertainment?

Channel 4 Education certainly thinks so – it has just launched a new online drama named SuperMes, about a shy loner moving into a shared house with three lively, but rather challenging strangers. The series uses virtual actors and settings from popular PC game The Sims, a sort of interactive soap opera which has sold over 150 million copies since its launch in 2000.

But this wasn't a case of simply hijacking the character models and moving them around like automatons to act out pre-set story. Instead, developer Somethin' Else programmed the game's AI characters with a set of disparate behaviours and characteristics and then let them loose, filming the resulting interactions and building a narrative around them. The team hired indie games coder Robin Burkinshaw (who previously made his own Sims drama, Alice and Kev) to effectively 'direct' the action by playing the simulation, but he kept his interactions to a minimum, allowing the characters to decide on their own courses of action.

"This is not machinima," says producer Sean Coleman, referring to the burgeoning artform in which game engines and characters are used to act out narrative stories. "The scripts always followed gameplay and never dictated what should happen. The basic rules we set were never to recreate anything that hadn't happened and never to force the characters into situations their in-game wishes wouldn't put them in.

"We spent a number of weeks working out the personality traits that would work best to give us the most interesting characters, the most dramatic conflicts and the most quirky entertainment. The game is very sophisticated in the grey areas that it provides - the kind of ambiguities of personality that make really fascinating characters, and we were constantly surprised by our Sims. Like the time the two boys decided to go skinny-dipping. Nothing we had done told them to do that."

In effect, SuperMes is a convergence of game design and traditional story-telling – it is an experiment in allowing computer programmed characters to create their own plotlines on the fly. There are certainly parallels to be found, as Coleman points out, "There are elements of Dogme, Ken Loach and TOWIE in this project. It was always vital for us that we made a genuine collaboration between the film-makers and the AI of the game, and that's what we did."

The Ken Loach comparison is, perhaps, the most interesting. Like Mike Leigh, the veteran director often uses improvisation to discover and enrich elements of each scene, with a script following afterwards – and this is essentially the formula behind SuperMes; except the actors are replaced by artificially intelligent virtual beings.

Fascinatingly, the Somethin' Else team talks about the similarities between AI algorithms and emotions – both are sets of systems that, when combined with different agents, can lead to unpredictable and dramatic outcomes. "We tried to create internal conflicts," explains Coleman. "Clare was shy and a loner, but her life goal was to be super popular. Because of her shy trait, she doesn't like being among strangers, and finds it difficult to talk to people. If Anita then talks about herself to Clare, the combination of Clare's discomfort with strangers and her hot-headedness would make her angrier with Anita's self-obsessed blathering. The idea was to look at archetypal sitcom characters, and try to arrange the traits we gave our Sims to create similar characters, who would rub each other up in all possible ways."

The results are surprisingly watchable, touching and at times really funny. The morbidly self-conscious Clare loafs about the house, often sitting alone in the garden contemplating the narcissism of household attention-seeker Anita, while slacker Robert and musician Ryan mess about, eventually forming a quite heart-warming relationship. Meanwhile, a jokey voice over from Waterloo Road actor Jason Done adds a sort of Come Dine With Me meta-narrative.

The series is a spin-off from Channel 4 Education's award-winning SuperMe project, an online social game designed to help teenagers through difficult experiences and emotions. But it also hints towards interesting new narrative experiments, in which AIs rather than scriptwriters shape future linear dramas.

"Myself and co-deviser Jo Roach came up with the phrase 'emergent drama'," says Somethin' Else's chief creative officer, Paul Bennun "Emergence is a core concept of the science of complexity—hugely sophisticated behaviours can emerge for free from simple systems interacting. It's almost like the universe wants to tell stories.

"The human mind is always looking for patterns, and is always giving personality to inanimate objects or seeing narrative even when events are random. We're using universal tendencies to tell stories, but it's through the agency of talented storytellers that we interpret the sims. We called Robin Burkinshaw our 'Sims whisperer,' because he was able to do this with such style."

Bennun compares the approach to generative music, a term popularised by Brian Eno to describe a process in which the musician enters a set of criteria into a computer and allows the software to improvise. There are various applications, such as Mixtikl and Eno's own Bloom and Trope apps for the iPhone that allow users to create music in this way.

I wonder how long it will be before soap opera writers and movie producers are using AI improvisations to create content. After all, the three act structure that governs most mainstream film releases is so intricately shaped, it is almost a computer program in itself; start combining the data from successful movies, and allowing AI characters to experiment within the resulting confines, and you have the sort of crazed hybrid of Hollywood formula and Marxist dialectics that can only result in hit romantic comedies.

Coleman is more grounded in the possibilities of emergent drama. "For me, you will always need an experienced storytelling team to guide the output to make the best programme, but in terms of making a reality-drama from a virtual environment - this was inspirational to work on. As long as games engines can create characters which surprise you as much as a real-life person, you can have fun creating stories inside them."

Frankly, anything that you can usefully compare to both Ken Loach and TOWIE is worth exploring. And if that means a future of dramas based around AI programs and improvisational avatars, so be it.

The internet is awash with people offering to write essays for students. Should you regard them as a service or a scam?

Printing two copies of a 35-page dissertation at the university library: £3.50

Wire-binding both copies: £18

Four-pack of energy drinks and a packet of biscuits to make it through deadline night: £3.49

And there you have it – the recipe for a complete dissertation comes in at under £25. But what price do you put on the sleepless nights, stressful supervisor meetings and 12-hour library stints? How much would it cost to have someone else do it for you?

Well, if you're after a first-class history dissertation written by an Oxbridge graduate and delivered in a week, according to one essay-writing company, it'll set you back a cool £3,430 – just £145 less than an entire year's standard student maintenance loan. If you can wait a bit longer and you're only after a Desmond, you can get it for just under a grand.

These prices must be out of reach for most students, but a quick online search of "essay-writing services" returns more than 31 million hits. Clearly these businesses are thriving – so where are their customers? Where are the students who are shelling out thousands of pounds for a pre-packaged essay?

The unhappy answer, I fear, is: wherever there are desperate students. Things go wrong at university – family bereavements, personal crises, simple time mismanagement – and the sheer stomach-turning, throat-constricting panic of being unable to produce an assignment on deadline leads vulnerable students down this costly path.

Now, three grand is worth a bit of customer service, right? Yet online forums are full of complaints about essays arriving peppered with spelling mistakes, arguments that don't match pre-approved propositions and – the most common grievance – results that don't match the promised grade.

One user, who goes by the forum name RippedOff, told me that when she complained about not receiving an essay on time, she was informed that the company had been unable to get in contact with her assigned writer.

"They refused to give me a refund," says RippedOff, "and said that I could claim a discount, but only off the next purchase I made with them. I didn't want to take it any further because I was worried about being found out. The essay never arrived and I was £200 out of pocket."

So the prospect of shelling out for one of these essays is already looking pretty unappealing, even before we consider the unpleasant possibility of, you know, being thrown out of university for wilful plagiarism.

The websites advertise their essays as being "100% plagiarism free!", which we can take to mean that they haven't been copied from a database, and aren't resold to future customers. But students would be very wrong if they thought this somehow put them on the right side of the rules.

By presenting someone else's work as their own they would be in breach of any plagiarism policy at any university. The papers might pass a plagiarism scan, but there's always the chance that a tutor will spot the signs of an essay that hasn't been written by its submitter – disparity in writing style, for example.

But, of course, the essays provided aren't for submitting! How could you possibly think such a thing? Because they guarantee certain grades? Because they promise to meet your deadlines? Because they're fully referenced, double-spaced and bound? Well, clearly you haven't read the small print. Because hidden away on a hard-to-find page on each of these websites is a disclaimer that says something like: our essays are intended for research purposes only.

A leading UK-based site even says that customers who order papers are implicitly confirming that using the service does not violate their university's rules. It adds that, due to the fact the essays are purely for research, that shiny guaranteed 2:1 you were promised on the home page refers only to the general standard of the essay and not your final grade. Well, aren't we glad we cleared that up?

So it's as simple as that. All you have to do is shell out a few thou, bank on your essay arriving on time, hope it's grammatically correct, ensure it makes sense, pray you don't get found out, keep it quiet from all your friends (just to be safe), and live on packet noodles for the rest of term. What could be better?

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