Cribsheet 30.03.11

The review of the early years curriculum is out today - and its author Dame Clare Tickell is calling for a radical scaling back of targets for under-fives. Speaking on the Today programme this morning, she said: "We had enormous feedback from people during the review - 3,300 responses. What came back is that practitioners felt a lot of time was taken up filling in boxes and not enough with the children. Much of this work isn't actually in the early years goals, but it is the way it has been interpreted. "What we have tried to do is make it slimmer and more simple. We have reduced the number of goals from 69 to 17 by clustering them." Attention will now be paid to three main areas: physical development, social interaction, and language and communication skills. Here's an interview with Tickell from @NurseryWorld . I wonder how these twins would be rated. More education news from the Guardian • Simon Jenkins is causing quite a ruckus with his call for universities to break their addiction to state cash and go independent. "The long road to scholastic subservience to the state began under Margaret Thatcher in 1988 and is approaching denouement. So far the only fixed point in the decline has been the gutless, whining, leaderless cowardice of university vice-chancellors and their boards. If a future historian wishes to chart the demise of the British university, this is the moment to start." • Virginia Tech university will have to pay a £34,000 fine for waiting too long to notify students during a 2007 shooting rampage, the US department of education has announced. The university was slow to respond to the worst mass shooting in modern American history, when student Cho Seung-hui shot and killed 32 students and members of staff, then himself. • There's been a fall-off in the number of children doing ballet , according to The Royal Academy of Dance which has set and marked hundreds of thousands of ballet exams over 90 years. It's spotted an 11.5% drop in exam registrations in the last two years - and it blames the economy. • Teach First is going to place teachers in primary classrooms for the first time this September. The charity is known for recruiting and training top graduates to work as teachers in England's most challenging schools. • Truancy has reached record levels in primary schools , we reported yesterday, triggering a defiant response from parents defending their right to take their offspring on holiday in term time. Here's sjb500 : "Was it Hitler who said society's needs come before the individual's needs? This is a classic case where 'society' imposes rules/laws to deal with problem cases at the margins while the individual is left unable to make better informed choices. I would say that a family trip for a few days for any young child is probably a better use of their time than yet another forced day in school where the teachers just plant them in front of yet more TV." Education news from around the web • Nir Rosen, the academic who made remarks on Twitter about a TV reporter sexually assaulted in Egypt, has resigned from the LSE , two days after being offered a job there, the BBC reports. His appointment caused outrage because he'd said CBS's Lara Logan would "become a martyr and glorified" and was "probably just groped" during an attack by a 200-strong mob in Cairo. The LSE won't confirm whether his decision to quit was as a result of reaction to his comments. • Wildlife presenter Kate Humble says walks in the country should be compulsory for UK schoolchildren. She tells the Radio Times that if children enjoy the countryside, they'll be more likely to protect it in the future. It's "great for your brain and great for your soul and great for your bum". • Any attempt by the government to siphon off a percentage of student places and reallocate them to universities offering the lowest fees would drive down quality and lead to larger class sizes, the THE reports Bedforshire vice-chancellor Les Ebdon as telling a cross-party group of MPs. Ebdon said the proposal - mooted by David Willetts - reminded him of the flawed system imposed on the UK's polytechnics in the late 1980s. • The Local Schools Network says Gove got his sums wrong on the EMA Find us on the Guardian website EducationGuardian.co.uk All today's EducationGuardian stories Follow us on Twitter and Facebook EducationGuardian on Twitter Judy Friedberg on Twitter Jeevan Vasagar on Twitter Jessica Shepherd on Twitter Claire Phipps on Twitter EducationGuardian on Facebook EducationGuardian resources The Guardian University Guide 2011 The Guardian Postgraduate Guide 2011 School league tables The world's top 100 universities From Guardian Professional The Higher Education Network for university professionals Free online classroom resources on the Teacher Network Job vacancies in education More about Cribsheet Sign up to get Cribsheet as a daily email To advertise in the Cribsheet email, contact Sunita Gordon on 0203 353 2447 or email [email protected] Subscribe to get Cribsheet as an RSS feed Interested in social policy too? 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