However there is a good case to be made for showing it to children approaching the age of 10
Posted in General on 19. Oct, 2010
However, there is a good case to be made for showing it to children approaching the age of 10 or 11, who will soon be in secondary schools.”The video will be backed by guidance making it clear drug dealing should rank with bullying and violence on the list of breaches of discipline for which pupils should be permanently excluded even for a first offence.Meanwhile one of the country’s most senior police chiefs yesterday warned officers not to act as drug counsellors or give moral advice in schools because they lack credibility with children.Deputy Assistant Commissioner Michael Fuller, head of Scotland Yard’s drugs policy unit, told The Independent: “I think the emphasis has been too heavy in schools.”I think the police role ought to be limited We are not qualified to be teachers. We should be an expert resource about the criminal consequences.”. Since a scathing report revealed six years ago that the British Museum did not employ a single accountant, a giant question mark has hovered over any discussion of its finances and governance. It has an annual budget of £45m; £36m comes from government grants and it must raise the difference itself.Every museum and gallery is now accustomed to raising sponsorship for exhibitions and hauling in the benefactors for important developments. It shelved plans for an £80m annexe and said cutting the number of exhibitions and opening hours for permanent collections were options.It launched a review of the finances. Details of the review emerged yesterday in an interview given by Christopher Jones, the acting accounting officer, to the respected scholarly journal The Art Newspaper.The need for savings of £3m a year announced last autumn has now doubled to £6m because the predicted deficit has risen to £6.5m by 2004-05.A museum spokesman said that taking into account possible increases in inflation and changes to factors such as national insurance, it was a “realistic” figure “rather than just addressing the lowest possible figure. We must have an operating margin.”The museum, which will celebrate its 250th anniversary next year, has long been seen as less forward-looking than many of its rivals.
Until very recently it still had a typing pool and a ladies’ shoe allowance. But it has undoubtedly shaken up its act since the damning criticisms of the way its finances were controlled in 1996.Terry Adams, of the Public and Commercial Services Union, which represents about 500 of the staff, said it was the Government, not the museum, that had to act.”This Government has raised the profile of cultural activities but it has done so on the cheap. It must intervene to secure the museum’s future and full and proper access to its national treasures.”. The British Museum is facing a growing financial crisis that will see an unprecedented programme of compulsory redundancies and gallery closures as it struggles with a £6.5m black hole in its accounts. This would make a mockery of the museum management’s long-running support for free admission to ensure the widest public access to its collection.The museum’s purchasing budget is to be cut by 80 per cent to £100,000 a year, a sum that would buy only the tiniest items in today’s art market. Only a decade or so ago, it had £1.4m to spend on acquisitions each year.Compulsory redundancies are now expected alongside recruitment restrictions, normal staff turnover and voluntary redundancies.The museum first warned it would have to make cuts in January after a surprise drop in visitor numbers last year from 5.6 million to 4.6 million compounded problems caused by a decade of declining government grants.However, its own assessment now suggests the deficit could be as high as £6.5m by 2004-05, instead of the £5m originally assumed. The latest estimates predict a deficit of £3.4m for this financial year, worse than the earlier estimate of £3m.Curators from all 10 of the departments handling the collections will be included in an extensive redundancy programme, dealing a serious blow to the museum’s scholarship.Terry Adams, of the Public and Commercial Services Union, said the Government should face its responsibilities.
He said: “A fraction of the money thrown away on the Dome would keep the British Museum going into the next millennium. The future of institutions like the British Museum has come to depend on how many cups of coffee they sell.”. Levels of child care vary widely across the country, according to postcode, income and employment status, a report found yesterday. Day-nursery places varied from 68 to 120 per 1,000, pre-school playgroups from 40 to 170, and out-of-school clubs from 57 to 210. In 1997 there was one childcare place for every nine children under the age of eight Now there is one for every seven.
But in the past year, the number of places rose by only 2 per cent.The Daycare Trust said the Government’s national childcare strategy, launched four years ago, needed reform and sustained public funding to provide child care for all in a network of new centres.British parents pay the highest childcare bills in Europe – typically £120 a week or £6,200 a year on a nursery place for a two-year-old – and fees have gone up 10 per cent in the past year.One in five children grows up in a workless household, and many women are forced to leave jobs because of childcare problems, the report says.. Froukje, a heroin addict in Amsterdam for 19 years, took a long look at the pictures of Rachel Whitear’s bloated and blackened body, bent double by the craving for smack that sent her to a grim and premature death. Rachel, a bright and promising former psychology undergraduate before trying heroin, was dead before she reached the top of it.Froukje told the Holcrofts that she managed both her addiction and a job with the help of therapy available at 48 hours’ notice – the standard waiting time in the Netherlands.She said: “We’re much better off We have [heroin substitute] methadone programmes. You don’t have to wait.”I think in the UK you have to wait nine months before you can get any help That’s unthinkable for us to have to wait that long. So must we.”The Holcrofts found themselves thrust into the public spotlight three months ago after Rachel lost her battle against what she called her “rage” in grotesque circumstances in Exmouth on 10 May 2000.A day after breaking up with the boyfriend who police believed got her hooked on heroin at the age of 19 and telling her parents that she was coming home, she went to buy one last dose of heroin.After beginning to wean herself off the drug, her tolerance was unusually low. Fate would have it that the heroin in the paper wrap she bought was unusually pure.