The pressures faced by children and teenagers now are more harsh than ever. The pressure to succeed in a failing school system, the pressure to get the best GCSE and ALEVELS, family pressures, and children who have an intrinsic mental health concern, all these pressures have increased, and the support services that would enable a child to access support have not only stayed static, but in many cases have reduced in size. Last year 800 children aged 11 and under needed treatment in a and e for injuries caused by self harm, each week there is news of another teen suicide, or an autistic child that cannot receive access to a vital service, this needs to change, and fast, before a whole generation is lost. This vital service can no longer be a Cinderella service.

This is important to copious amounts of people and due to this change all around Britain schools this has made the lives of ks4 students in a very diffucult position

The scoring of children in their first weeks on entry to their new schools: -Is Damaging for children and inappropriate practice at an important transition time -Will undermine the current methods of assessment and practice used in early years settings -Will not improve the quality of schools -Is not a reliable source of data -Will lead to a further formalisation of learning in the early years and downgrading of play -Transfers funding from school budgets to private companies -Prevents the local education authority from having an active role in overviewing and monitoring assessments in the early years across the county and places this role directly into the hands of the private assessment providers and the DFE. We call on the County Council to write to the Secretary of State for Education calling for the removal of Baseline Assessment and the retention of the existing Early Years Foundation Stage Profile in our schools. We also call on the County Council to support any school that chooses not to implement the Baseline assessment.

All children deserve the right to reach their full potential. Education should be fully accessible to all, not just those who are capable of helping schools reach target figures .

As above it will mean higher payments for students and could put off future students attending uni. Is it not illegal to change the terms and conditions of a loan after it has been taken out?

Sign this petition to ensure the public an opportunity to respond to these outrageous proposals and a full enquiry into how the council have been allowed to enforce gagging orders on council employees to prevent them from speaking out. Our children's future is at stake. I am one of many parents in the area with a child who has additional needs. The proposal to remove support within schools affects all children. There maybe as many as 5 disruptive children in a class of 22 with the teacher expecting to deliver the curriculum without any assistance. The whole system will collapse. And this is just the BEGINNING of the cuts.

Classes are being closed without consultation or preparation. This is affecting non exam classes where adult learners are developing skills and social contacts that are vital to their well being.

Hackney has its eyes on growing land values in this fast gentrifying London borough. It plans to demolish three primary schools and carve up the plots, building private homes for sale on designated education land - selling off the playgrounds and digging up the trees to build luxury flats. The new schools will be rebuilt on a fraction of the original sites, some with twice as many pupils squeezed in. The number of private luxury flats crammed in doesn’t leave room for much else. At the first proposed school, the play spaces are on the roof, in permanent shadow of the towers. The residents will be able to look right down on top of the school. As for the classrooms, there aren’t many windows. The corridors are internal, artificially lit rat-runs. The first proposed school is opposite a park, but south-facing, high-rise residential towers will block all the natural daylight. Ironically, residential towers on this site were demolished 20 years ago as a sign of progress. My son’s current school, Nightingale Primary, is not perfect. But it has dignity as a school, and room to play: There’s a grassy hill with enough bushes and trees for a game of hide and seek, plus a bee hive, kitchen garden, football pitch and three surfaced play areas, one for nursery, one for reception and one for everyone else. All of this will be sold off to build flats that likely will be sold for 'investment' - it may be that no one actually even lives there. Children spend 30 per cent of their life in school, with profound effects on their health and development. A 2007 Danish study showed that fresh air ventilation rates are linked to pupil performance. In a study of 2,111 Spanish schoolchildren, time spent in (not near) green spaces reduced behavioural and emotional problems, reducing hyperactivity and improving ADHD scores. A six-year American study on 905 Massachusetts elementary schools found pupils in schools with more ‘greenness’ scored higher in standardised tests. Chinese scientists discovered a 23 per cent reduction in shortsightedness among children who spend an additional 40 minutes in the sun. In a wealthy city such as London, there is no excuse for such poor stewardship of a land asset that, once sold, will be gone forever. With the shortage of school places, we will need education land to build on. We once battery-farmed hens until it was found to be too cruel. Are we going to battery-farm our children? Please help us stop the Hackney Learning Trust.

On 14th September the Vice Chancellor and Student Services Director at the Open University announced plans to close seven English regional centres in Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol, Birmingham, Leeds, Gateshead and London. They claim this is with the aim of putting students first and giving them a better support services experience. 500 highly qualified, experienced and dedicated staff members stand to lose their jobs or face having to compete to retain their posts at another location with all the disruption this causes. Worst of all is that their academic and student support expertise would be lost. The Open University has already closed one regional centre and transferred student services from a regional to a faculty based model. This already means that students who once could have all their support needs met in one team might now have to contact as many as four separate teams for this. Increasing reliance on online resources also leaves students floundering when they could previously speak to a student support expert as a first resort. The plans to close offices and jettison staff teams with as much as 190 years of academic and student support experience among them, for new, inexperienced staff working in call centre conditions are only likely to further reduce the quality of service students can expect

There are so many unfortunate families out there who struggle to finance healthy, nutritious meals for their children let alone finance any food at all. A daily free school dinner could be the difference between a child surviving and starving to death. Just think how much pressure this will take off the parent who is struggling, worrying, preying for a bit of help, All children deserve a healthy, nutritious diet not just the smaller generation or children who come from more fortunate back grounds. We have homeless shelters and open kitchens for adults and such like so why shouldn't we be giving back to the children too? Children are vulnerable and should not be taken for granted they deserve the option!

The existing school funding model is unfair. The ten best funded areas in England will receive an average grant of £6,297 per pupil this year, compared to an average of just £4,208 per pupil in the ten most poorly funded areas. It means that schools around the country that are similar can get very different budgets, and children with the same needs can receive very different levels of financial support depending on where they go to school. Gloucestershire (including Cheltenham of course) is one of the worst-funded authorities in the country and is a member of F40, a group made up of poorly funded local authorities and has been making the case for a fairer funding system. Ministers have recognised the problem and promised to address it. We welcome this, together with the Government's confirmation that the additional £390 million awarded in 2015/16 as a “down payment” towards fairer funding will be included in the funding baseline for future years. We are now looking to the Government to deliver a truly fair funding settlement. At a time of spending restraint it is more important than ever that funding is allocated based on need. F40 has come up with a formula which would see the funding cake shared much more fairly. This has received a positive response from funding experts at the Department for Education. The f40 proposals would: • introduce a new national formula, based on a clear rationale and geared towards improving educational standards across the country; • include core entitlement at a pupil level, reflecting different needs and costs at various key stages; • use factors to reflect pupil level needs beyond the core entitlement, including deprivation and special educational needs, and reflect the needs of small schools that are necessary in a local authority’s structure; and • continue to use Dedicated Schools Grant, with blocks for mainstream schools, high needs and early years. Local authorities would be free to move funding between the blocks. We believe this formula can help deliver a solution. We want the children in our schools to continue to have a broad range of subjects to study, good resources to use, well maintained buildings, reasonably sized classes and excellent pastoral support. Fairer funding is integral to all of this, and we urge the Government to deliver it.

The country is groaning under the weight of its obesity problem, with numbers of diet related diseases reaching epidemic proportions. The impact on the physical and mental well being of the population and the practical and financial cost to the NHS is an increasing concern. Removing the A 'level will further erode the status of food as a subject, it will become a vocational, craft option and uptake at GCSE by academic students will fall. It will be difficult to inspire the next generation of dieticians, nutritionists, food scientists and teachers. Trainee teachers will avoid specialising in a subject which lacks the job satisfaction and rigour of teaching sixth form and will become science teachers instead. Teaching hours and budgets will fall and there will be a shortage of specialist teachers to show children how to cook healthy, nutritious meals. The population will continue to turn to ready prepared convenience food and the spiral of obesity will continue completely unchecked. The government's response is that other routes exist for students wanting to pursue a career in catering - that is absolutely true - however these vocational courses do not provide a route for academic students through to university. They also say that Food Technology is not fit for purpose and again they are correct! Food technology was created 24 years ago to shoehorn food into the new Design & Technology suite, focusing on food as a material alongside paper, textiles and wood to design and make products for a profit. The sooner food is removed from Technology and celebrated for the multifaceted subject that it is, the better! A rigorous A ‘level which explores how to manipulate the physical and nutritional functions of food to create healthy dishes for a range of people would be invaluable for inspiring the next generation of nutritionists, dieticians and food teachers. It would also ensure there will be fully qualified food teachers ready to teach the next generation how and what to cook!