The labour party has broken its 1997 election promise to increase the share of the nation’s income spent on education, reveals an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) study. Spending on primary and secondary schools remained well below the average of other developed countries four years after Tony Blair came to power (defining "education, education, education" as Labour’s top three priorities), according to an international think tank.

The United States, Italy, Belgium and France all spent more per student on primary and secondary schools in 2001, the latest year for which figures are available. During the last election, Labour denied charges that it had failed to increase the proportion of national income spent on education, a key manifesto pledge the party repeated for its second term.

Prime minister Blair: broken pledge?

France

Calm has reigned in most french schools since the controversial law banning conspicuous religious signs in public establishments came into force at the start of the new academic year in September.

Education minister Francois Fillon says that only 635 pupils turned up at the beginning of term wearing Muslim headscarves, compared to 1,500 during the whole of last year. Only 101 refused to remove their scarves, most of them in Strasburg, Lille and Creteil, just outside Paris. "Secularism has won, because the expected difficulties did not appear," Fillon told Le Parisien.

Muslim groups who oppose the law had all said before the return to school that the new rules must be obeyed. They were keeping a low profile while the French hostages in Iraq, journalists Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot, remained captive.

A hotline for Muslim girls set up in July in Alsace has refused to disclose the number of calls it has received so as not to jeopardise the lives of the hostages. The kidnappers demanded initially that France repeal the religious signs legislation.

But the Union of French Muslim Organisations (UOIF) said it is upset that some headteachers insist that pupils remove all head coverings. Pointing out that the rules allow discreet religious signs, UOIF president Lahj Thami Breze says he hopes for a gesture from the French government in return for the Muslim community’s solidarity over the hostages. If schools do not lift their ban on all head coverings, Thami Breze says he will take the case to the European Court of Justice.

On its part the government says the law will be reviewed at the end of the school year, but Hanifa Cherifi the education ministry official monitoring its application, insists that if bandannas or other items were worn as religious substitutes for the headscarf, they will be banned.

United States

In late september harvard university announced that its endowment has passed the $20 billion mark rising to $22.6 billion (Rs.103,900 crore) for the year ended June 30. This is 25 times larger than that of the best endowed UK university and larger than the annual education outlay of India (Rs.90,000 crore — Centre plus states).

The world’s largest academic investment fund provides this US institution with an annual income of £630 million (Rs.5,355 crore). Harvard’s latest figures show that its endowment has grown by more than a fifth compared with the previous year. In the year before, the fund grew by more than 12 percent. Universities tend to allocate 4-5 percent of their endowment funds each year for spending.

Harvard vista: extraordinary corpus growth

Moves to reinforce a ban on all formal breaks except lunchtime in one US city’s primary schools have left local teachers fuming. The law reflects a broader trend sweeping schools in the US towards dropping playtime from timetables to cram students for high-stakes tests.

Education chiefs told primary school headteachers in Tacoma, near Seattle, late September that "with time becoming more precious than money these days… there are to be no unscheduled daily recesses… we need to reclaim as much time as possible for instruction. Lunch breaks can include outdoor playtime, but should never exceed 40 minutes." Nursery teachers are allowed to "engage in well-organised and supervised developmentally appropriate gross motor activities for one 15-minute period per day".

The memo reiterates a policy first announced in 1997, amid reports that some local schools were ignoring it. But it has left many staff incensed, according to Gayle Nakayama, president of the local teachers’ union, the Tacoma Education Association.

Tacoma is not alone. Four in ten US local education authorities have shortened breaks, eliminated them outright or are considering plans to do so, says Dr. Rhonda Clements, president of the American Association for the Child’s Rights to Play.

This trend reflects the pressure schools face under the academic accountability regime established by the Bush administration’s No child Left Behind Act. It penalises them for missing test-based performance targets, and similar local initiatives, says Georgianna Duarte, professor of early childhood development at the University of Texas. But eliminating breaks may be counterproductive warns Prof. Duarte, who says children are less receptive to instruction if they are not allowed to take breathers.

At Tacoma’s Whittier Elementary, whose use of breaks helped spark the official memo, teacher Rachel Lovejoy says her six-year-olds are often "cranky" without playtime. Ironically, Whittier boasts Tacoma’s best mathematics and writing test scores. Playtime does not take away from academic learning, but is part of it, says Lovejoy.

But breaks can be distracting, says Patti Holmgren, of Tacoma’s education authority. "Time on task produces results, and every minute matters. But, we’re not chaining pupils to desks," she adds saying staff are free to allow time-outs if they feel children’s concentration wilting. Bucking the trend, Michigan, Connecticut and Virginia recently enforced breaks in their schools. Partly driving this is concern about mounting childhood obesity. The proportion of overweight adolescents in the US tripled from 5 percent in 1980 to 15 percent in 2000, with inactivity cited as a major cause.

US primary schools have the world’s longest teaching hours — 1,139 hours a year compared with 617 in Japan, for instance — according to Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) data released in September.

Russia

A numb Russia observed two days of mourning in early September for the hundreds of victims of the Beslan terrorist attack, while desperate families continued their search for those still missing in grief-stricken Beslan neighbouring Chechnya. Wailing women crowded around the coffins of children, parents, grandparents and teachers prior to the 120 burials in the town cemetery and adjoining fields. Passing trains sounded their horns in a mark of respect for the dead.

Grieving Beslan women: understatement criticism

Iraq

The ambush in september of a university lecturer in Mosul by gunmen as she was driving to work has created turmoil in the academic community. Inam Addul-Munim Younis was the head of the translation department at Mosul University’s College of Arts.

According to the Iraqi Union of University Lecturers, more than 250 academics have been killed since the American occupation began. Among the victims are a number of senior academic figures, including a university president and several deans.

Iraqis cannot explain the motives for the assassinations, which target a high proportion of faculty members from humanities subjects. "There is no pattern to these killings," says Sahil al-Sinawi, a geologist, who was formerly at Baghdad University. "We are used to threats against Iraqi scientists, but why kill someone working in languages?"

One explanation may be that the country’s lawlessness allows the settling of old scores. But the lecturers’ union claims insurgents are systematically assassinating members of the country’s intellectual elite as part of their general campaign to destabilise the interim government.

A common accusation in Iraq is that the Israeli secret service is targeting scientists in an attempt to prevent the country’s re-emergence as a regional scientific power. During the 1960s and 1970s, Iraq’s scientific research programme was the most advanced in the Arab world. But there has been no evidence to back these claims and Israel has denied the allegations.

Many Iraqi academics have concluded that life in their home country is too dangerous. US-based nuclear physicist Imad Khadduri says he receives several letters a week from fellow Iraqi scientists asking about jobs.

Many Iraqi academics have lost their positions through the vigorous programme of de-Ba’athification carried out by the former Coalition Provisional Authority. But Khadduri says that under the Saddam regime, Ba’ath party membership was in essence a condition of employment, adding that "these people were not torturers or executioners".

There is a widespread feeling among Iraqi academics that they are witnessing a deliberate attempt to destroy intellectual life in Iraq. According to Dr. Sinawi, the assassinations, compounded by academic dismissals, will lead to a "disruption of higher education in Iraq for years to come. This will dramatically affect the standard of teaching and research for generations".

United Kingdom

The number of foreign students entering the UK fell last year as more visa applications were rejected and higher charges were imposed. The drop is a big blow to UK universities dependent on revenues from the lucrative overseas students market. The figures have come to light just weeks after Ivor Crewe, president of Universities UK, said that foreign students are "what makes it possible for the academic enterprise to continue".

The number of people from outside the European Union arriving in the UK on student visas fell by 14 percent to 318,630 in 2003, home office statistics show. According to UK Visas, the joint foreign office-home office agency which processes applications, 52,520 requests for student visas (almost 30 percent of the total) were refused in 2002-03, a rise of 13,647 over the previous year.

Foreign students in Blighty: growing visa hurdle

Canada

When sadra dean was appointed principal of an inner-city government school with a terrible academic record and a stack of disciplinary problems, she did not jump for joy. "I admit my heart sank a little," she recalls.

But in four years Dean turned things around at South Simcoe School in Oshawa, Ontario by working with business and local community leaders. Her initiative earned the school a national award for excellence in business and education partnerships and has become a nationally-approved school strategy. "When our kids were picked up in the shopping mall for causing trouble," recalls Dean, "we asked local businesses for their help. We weren’t looking for money. We wanted their time."

Local business people were enlisted to arrange fests, K-Mart workers volunteered to tend the school garden. One local department store manager offered his own office so a disruptive student, suffering the affects of abuse, could be taught three times a week. St. John’s Ambulance taught a babysitting course to the students while other business people came in and read to the children.

Says Dean: "Kodak gave the kids free disposable cameras, then blew the pictures up to poster size and displayed them across the town. It meant a lot to the kids to see their work hanging up in stores around the town. They felt like they were an important part of the community."

Although South Simcoe School closed in 1998, the story of Dean’s inspirational community programme is charted in her book, Hearts & Minds: A Public School Miracle (Viking Books). "It’s about recognising that a school’s problems are the community’s problems too," she says.