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Labour leader Ed Miliband tells David Cameron he risks making NHS reform "his poll tax" - in noisy Commons clashes over the health bill.

After councils and care units, now schools are being encouraged to imitate the department store's stakeholder structure

Once upon a time, we knew three things about John Lewis. One: it's a very nice, very middle-class department store. Two: it owns Waitrose, that very nice, very middle-class supermarket. Three: it is, or claims to be, never knowingly undersold.

These days, we can add a fourth: never knowingly under-referenced within plans to reform the welfare state. In 2010, London's Lambeth council announced an intention to remould itself according to the "John Lewis model". Last June, David Cameron unveiled plans to turn parts of the public sector into "John Lewis-style" mutuals. This week, a rightwing thinktank suggested turning state schools into John Lewis-like companies. A planned free school in Suffolk will be a John Lewis-style partnership, while an NHS hospital in Cambridgeshire and a care unit in Swindon already claim to operate along those lines. Even Nick Clegg has talked about making other firms in the private sector operate a bit more like John Lewis.

The John Lewis business model gives each employee part-ownership of the company, a share of its annual profits, and a say in how it is run. In theory, it makes employees more invested – literally – in their work, and so heightens both productivity and profits. At least, that's how it works at John Lewis itself. Critics argue that the right's proposals either only pay lip service to the scheme on which they are based – or are simply a way of making privatisation seem fluffier. This week's plans could encourage stakeholders (teachers, pupils) to work harder. On the flipside, they could also lead to the outsourcing of a school's management structures, and thereby make teachers less accountable. Suffolk's Breckland Free School has already outsourced its management to a private firm, and won't be overseen directly by the parents who set it up.

Lambeth's John Lewis council promised much – community involvement in exchange for council tax rebates – but has been criticised for playing an active role in privatisation. Only last week the council sold off a community-run arts centre to developers. And what of the Swindon care unit? In the words of cabinet office minister Francis Maude: "It's a mutual where there's no financial incentive. They will own it, but with no profit share or anything, no financial upside. They will have to take out 30% of their cost over the next four years and they are really excited about it." In other words, it's a John Lewis partnership, but without most of the rewards. Unless you count swingeing cuts as a good thing.

Nick Clegg's ideas seem the most appropriate interpretation of the John Lewis model: they're about making capitalist structures fairer. But proposals to turn public services into John Lewis-style firms seems slightly disingenuous. After all, the NHS – which gives citizens both a say in its organisation (at the ballot box) and a piece of its resources (in the surgery) – might already be the biggest John Lewis model going.

• Free schools
• John Lewis

Patrick Kingsley
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Two of Baby Peter's social workers committed a "serious error of judgement" during an incident which saw him "disappear" for 12 days, a tribunal hears.

La web de Antonia Ortega es fruto del esfuerzo de una madre con un hijo de necesidades educativas especiales que, consciente de que es la persona que más puede ayudar a su hijo, ha dedicado muchas horas a la elaboración de diferentes programas para el desarrollo de las capacidades básicas que tiene su hijo y cualquier niño de Educac

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A new study comparing chromosomes in humans and rhesus monkeys suggests genetic decay of the male sex chromosome has all but ended.

Pinchad en la imagen y veréis los vídeos. Me han encantado, aunque yo, al oírme, me he asustado. ¡Santo Cielo, qué vozarrón!

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How the time of day can increase the risk of dying from an irregular heartbeat has been identified by researchers.

Sunderland is best-known in business circles for its Japanese links via Nissan, but it's also renewing its own version of the special relationship

Northern England's links with the United States, which include the gift to the world of Wrigley's chewing gum, have been mightily emphasised today in Sunderland.

The city on the Wear has its own special Friendship Agreement with Washington DC, the only non-capital city in the world to do so. An uneven match? Not at all. Without Sunderland and area, there might never have been George Washington.

Hence the ceremonies at his family's old home, Washington Old Hall, which is very much worth a visit. While the British Embassy in Washington hosted a reception to mark the renewal of of the agreement, local people got together at the Wearside end to do their bit as well.

Encouragingly, for those who expect such things to be the preserve of people my age, the programme was much enlivened by young people. David Crone, chair of Sunderland youth parliament, read the American declaration of independence (the model for northern England's forthcoming breakaway), Lauren Waine of Monkwearmouth school sang the American national anthem and Martyn Foster from Broadway junior school read Martin Luther's eloquent speech, I have a dream.

Pupils from George Washington primary school joined in as well, before the Mayor of Sunderland – let's hope it becomes a Lord Mayoralty soon, now that the place is a city – Coun Norma Wright concluded proceedings.

There is a practical point to all the fun and games (and useful history). Contemporary Sunderland is famous for its links with Japan, through the Nissan plant, but are many American business connections as well.

United States firms account for one of the biggest shares of local inward investment, such as the Lear Corporation which is launching a new production plant at Rainton Bridge, creating 300 jobs. The TRW Automotive company already employs the same number at its steering systems plant, which was opened in 1989.

Looking the other way, the Sunderland firm SaleCycle, which recovers abandoned shopping trolleys online, has a sales office on the edge of Washington DC. At the small business level, Phil Vickery, one of Wearside's glass artists who cluster round the National Glass Centre, has found the Friendship Agreement more than just a twinning symbol.

He told the Old Hall get-together:

We need to keep doing this to form long-term relationships with US buyers. I have made strong contacts and captured opportunities that have led to friendships and being able to sell directly to the US market. Without this help it would be just about impossible for people like me to break into the US market.

Dominic Edmunds, founder and managing director of SaleCycle said:

We have recruited US staff, opened our office and generated sales directly into the US market. The good relationship which Sunderland has established with Washington DC was instrumental in all of this. Without the city council's connections it would have been much more difficult and taken far longer to achieve.

And Paul Willson, plant controller at TRW was happy too, that:

The Friendship Agreement builds the relationship, confidence and the possibility of investments between our two cities.

There's a way to go in the north east so far as jobs are concerned, as no one needs telling. But today has helped.

• Sunderland
• Washington DC
• The National Trust
• University of Sunderland

Martin Wainwright
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Is it better for us to sleep in four-hour chunks?

Latest data shows 25% of 21-year-olds who left university with a degree in 2011 were unemployed compared with 26% of 16-year-olds with GCSEs

Graduates leaving university found it harder to get jobs in 2011 than students finishing A-level courses, as youth unemployment hit its highest level since the 1980s, official data shows.

In 2011, 20% of 18-year-olds who left school with A-levels were unemployed compared with 25% of 21-year-olds who left university with a degree, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics. Graduate unemployment rates were almost on a par with those for people leaving school with just GCSEs, with 26% of 16-year-olds with these qualifications out of work.

But the ONS figures show it was easier for older graduates to find work: at age 24 only 5% of degree holders were unemployed compared with 7% of those who finished their education after A-levels and 13% of those with only GCSEs.

Charlie Ball, deputy director of research at the Higher Education Careers Services Unit, said the figures were "absolutely correct, but give a misleading impression", as the cohort of people leaving with A-levels was smaller than the number graduating.

He said the graduate jobs market had "hardly returned to its state pre-recession", but most of those leaving university were likely to get jobs within six months.

"Although the number of young people out of work is historically high, the graduate unemployment rate in this recession has not reached the levels it did in the 1980s or 1990s," he said.

Research by investment firm Skandia suggests graduates still earn a high premium over the course of their career once they do find work. It says a graduate leaving university today should earn an average of £1.6m over a working career of 45 years compared to £1m for an 18-year-old entering the workforce and retiring 48 years later. A 16-year-old working 49.5 years will typically earn £783,964 over their career.

Although the prospects for graduates may not be as gloomy as they first appear, the ONS figures make grim reading for young job seekers.

The ONS said unemployment for those aged 16 to 24 stood at just over 1m in the last quarter of 2011, the highest number since 1986/87. This represented one in seven (or 14.2%) of this age group and is the highest rate of youth unemployment since 1984/85. Of these, 307,000 were full-time students actively looking for work alongside their studies.

London was the region with the highest youth unemployment rate, with 24% of economically active 16- to 24-year-olds unemployed from July 2010 to June 2011. However, the ONS said this was a result of the number of students in the capital, some of who were looking to work. When students are discounted, the highest proportion of youth unemployment was in the north-east at 15%.

The TUC's general secretary, Brendan Barber, said the figures showed the importance of higher qualifications in helping young people into work. But he added: "With ministers putting up fresh barriers to higher education by hiking tuition fees and scrapping the EMA, the scar of mass joblessness that is hitting today's youngsters could follow some of them into their late 20s or even 30s.

"The government's cut-price work experience scheme is woefully ill-equipped to deal with the scale of our jobs crisis. Young people need tailored support and experience of proper paid jobs to give them the best possible chance of moving into work."

Recently, some large firms have stepped up their recruitment of school leavers to attract bright students put off by the cost of going to university.

All of the UK's "big four" accountancy firms, which between them recruit several thousand graduates each year, have established degree-equivalent school-leaver training programmes, including Ernst & Young which launches its programme in the autumn.

Stephen Isherwood, head of graduate recruitment at Ernst & Young, said the company had already recruited 30 of the 60 school leavers it planned to take on from hundreds of applications.

"There is a sense that the mantra of the last few years that everything is about university is not necessarily right, and that A-level students should really be thinking about what they want to do and whether that means going to university, and making sure they get the best deal for themselves."

• Job hunting
• Graduate careers
• Work & careers
• Higher education
• A-levels
• Schools

Hilary Osborne
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Esa era la pregunta con que me recibían en el módulo 10. Sí, y a lo largo de tres años que llevo viniendo, os he traído ropa, telas, hilos, dibujos, pero sobretodo os daba mi amor, mi comprensión, y mi aliento para que pudierais levantaros de ese hoyo en el que  (por lo que fuera) habíais caído. Llegó un momento en el que so no era el ¿que me trae? parece que ya no tenía nada que hacer. pero un

Beyond the superficial novelty of a show hosted by an African-American professor, MSNBC is serious about intellectual debate

In Wesley Morris's recent piece about the changing fashion preferences of NBA athletes, he writes:

"In the same way that there are people who never thought they'd see a black American president, there are also people who never thought they'd see a black basketball star dressed like a nerd."

Sports icons like Kevin Durant and LeBron James call attention to widespread changes among a generation of black Americans who embrace a nerdier personal style. But style is not the same as substance, and Dr Melissa Harris-Perry's new politics show on MSNBC now unabashedly brings the content of nerddom to a massive viewing audience.

When Harris-Perry, a political scientist, used the word "nerdland" (now a Twitter hashtag for the show) to describe the show, she was not implying a racially segregated nerdland reserved for black people. In fact, two of Harris-Perry's first three guests were white men, including Edward Cox, chairman of the New York Republican state committee. But because contemporary black nerddom is wrongly understood by many as a recent historical development, black intellectuals like Harris-Perry engaging in and moderating intellectual exchange may seem new and peculiar to many viewers.

Though she speaks to multiple audiences and cultivates broad conversations that do not start and end with race, Harris-Perry is acutely aware of the ways in which racism and sexism mark her as exceptional in the contemporary landscape of political punditry. In her debut last Saturday, she displayed this awareness in a self-effacing manner, beginning the show "with what I was hoping would feel like a counterintuitive thesis for the start of MSNBC's sort of 'liberal African-American girl show,' which is, I actually want a strong Republican party." Harris-Perry's most recent book focuses on public perceptions and stereotypes of black American women, as well as women's responses to the way they are represented. She knows she is not a novelty act, and she joins small but distinguished cohort of professional black female television hosts, which includes Soledad O'Brien and Gwen Ifill. But as Brian Stelter points out, Harris-Perry is the only tenured professor in the United States to host such a show. The program's uniqueness is its mission to bring the academy to the public, and "stuffy professor" is not among the bevy of race-, class- and gender-dependent stereotypes black women routinely deal with.

It is precisely on this front, at the splaying boundary between the academy and the public sphere, that the Melissa Harris-Perry Show matters most, as it speaks to pressing controversies in the debate over ethnic studies and access to higher education more broadly. Activist and author Tim Wise explains the folly and shame of the state of Arizona's recent ban on ethnic studies, a judicial decision that disfigures American history, exacerbates racism, and suffocates intellectual freedom. Like Harris-Perry, scholars in ethnic studies and African-American studies regularly hold appointments in multiple departments, as researchers ask and answer questions that require cross-disciplinary connections and yield bountiful intellectual rewards. Nowhere is this truth more clear than in the career of professor of African-American literature Ruth J Simmons, who served as president of both Smith College and Brown University. Ethnic studies do not just teach about race and ethnicity; they teach how to think and exchange ideas, skills that serve all students quite well, no matter their specific interests.

In addition to the ethnic studies controversy, MSNBC's foray into nerdland comes at a time of heated debate about the purpose and promise of higher education in the United States. Panic hovers over American colleges and universities, as skyrocketing costs of tuition, state budget crunches, and flippant anxieties about the value of the humanities writ large clutter the public sphere. Distorted discussions about educational utility and elitism pollute the most basic questions of access, as Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum recently accused president Obama of "hubris" and "snobbery" after Obama expressed his hope that every American child attend college.

On the other hand, new advances in online learning and programs like iTunes U and Ted talks are making both the credentials and content of higher education more accessible than they have ever been. The Harris-Perry show will not solve the deeply-rooted inequities that restrict access to higher education for so many Americans. But it does represent MSNBC's recognition that the public thirsts for earnest intellectual discussion, driven by data and evidence and facilitated by trained professionals. All members of the academy, regardless of discipline or political preference, should recognize the value of the Harris-Perry show, as its host explicitly acknowledges the different skill sets and demands of academic research and public intellectualism.

It is doubtful that shouting matches between passionate and opinionated pundits will disappear from politics news shows, and perhaps those spectacles have their place. Harris-Perry herself was recently drawn into in a well-publicized row with fellow professor Cornel West – a conflict that stemmed from the researchers' differing evaluations of President Obama and, as Dr Mark Sawyer carefully explains, regrettably deteriorated into personal attacks. If the first Melissa Harris-Perry show is any indication, its host will not silence or insult those with whom she disagrees, including fellow nerds. The conflict and crescendo of intellectual exchange are intrinsic to academic work, and the hope is that this new space will provide civility and empiricism where discourtesy and conjecture usually reside. If this comes to pass, the Harris-Perry show will succeed in demonstrating that academics are more than elitists who produce indecipherable research only for each other.

Nerdland is home to rugged terrain and occasionally stormy weather, but its air is sweet, its sky is vast, and its borders are open to all.

• MSNBC
• US television
• Race issues
• Higher education
• United States
• US politics

Michael P Jeffries
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My good friend Ian King, who has died of cancer aged 57, made significant contributions to the national student union movement. Over the past 35 years there has rarely been a strategic move that has not benefited from his wise counsel and assistance. He was one of those responsible for creating one of the first effective central purchasing organisations for unions, which eventually became NUS Services Ltd (NUSSL). He was among the first managers to promote those unions offering activities that would supplement students' work on their degrees – known as student development activities. He was a prime mover in the increased professionalism of union staff.

Ian started his involvement in unions while he was an undergraduate at Stirling University. He went on to serve as general manager of the unions of York St John University, the Polytechnic of Wales (now the University of Glamorgan) and Manchester Polytechnic (now Manchester Metropolitan University). In 1987 he was appointed general manager at Birmingham University Guild of Students, where he enjoyed 10 happy, satisfying and innovative years.

He was often consulted on important NUS issues by union officers who respected his opinion and could be sure of his integrity, confidentiality and availability. In 1997 he was appointed chief executive at NUSSL, responsible for a £60m annual purchasing budget. As with all his other posts, he introduced rapid change, increasing NUSSL's effectiveness and making it more accessible to its members.

Eleven years ago, Ian was diagnosed with a brain tumour. He faced this with courage, fortitude and humour. He was determined that his activities would not be restricted and carried on working until 2010, despite ill-health. He continued with his many interests, mainly travel, sport and the arts. He was a keen cricket fan and a supporter of the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Ian gained most joy in the development of people, whether students and staff.

He is survived by his wife, Becky, whom he married in 1975, and his daughter, Amy.

• Student politics
• Higher education
• Students

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My friend and colleague Brian Shefton, who has died aged 92, was a distinguished scholar of Greek and Etruscan archaeology. One of his most significant achievements was a collection of Greek and Etruscan artefacts which he established in 1956 when he was given a grant of £25 to purchase three Greek pots. The collection expanded to include nearly 1,000 objects, many of which can now be seen at the Great North Museum: Hancock, in Newcastle upon Tyne. Brian also built up an important collection of books on Greek and Etruscan archaeology, which make up the Shefton collection in the library at Newcastle University.

Brian was born in Cologne, the son of Isidor Scheftelowitz, professor of Sanskrit at Cologne University, and his wife, Frieda. In 1933 the family moved to Britain to escape Nazi oppression. Brian thrived in Britain and, after military service during which he changed his name to Shefton, he graduated from Oriel College, Oxford, in 1947. He then spent three years travelling in Greece before taking up a lectureship at Exeter University.

In 1955 he arrived at King's College in Durham (now Newcastle University) as a lecturer in Greek archaeology and ancient history. He remained there for the rest of his career, becoming professor of Greek art and archaeology in 1979. To Brian, the archaeology collection and library holdings at Newcastle were his greatest achievements.

His scholarship was truly international. He was an enthusiastic traveller with an extensive network of colleagues and friends. He attended international conferences frequently, and also received prestigious fellowships and honours, including an honorary doctorate from Cologne University and the British Academy's Kenyon medal.

His enthusiasm for his discipline stayed with him until the end. He spoke at a conference in Basle, Switzerland, on Etruscan archaeology in October 2011 and continued to work on research projects. He was an incredibly generous scholar who always had time for others. His irrepressible energy and curiosity were an inspiration to all those who knew him.

Brian is survived by his wife, Jutta, whom he married in 1960, and his daughter, Penny.

• Archaeology
• Newcastle University

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En este nuevo año enseñaré el curso de geografía y es por ello que recomiendo a mis alumnos y, al público en general ingresar al Banco de preguntas de geografía, donde Carpeta Pedagógica publica preguntas tipo examen de admisión pa

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David Cameron and Ed Miliband have clashed in the House of Commons over the Government's plans to reform the NHS in England.

Maravilloso trabajo realizado por Salomè Recio Caride, una seño de Infantil de Murcia.Espero que os guste y le saqueis el mayor partido posible.Por mi parte, ya he empezado hoy a contar el cuento de la Letra A: LA ARAÑA ANA. A los peques les ha encantado y ya me piden que les cuente otro, eso ha de ser mañana.

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After Cambridge-educated doctor Melanie Spooner died from anorexia, her family are seeking to change the way people with eating disorders are treated.

New figures show 21-year-old university graduate as likely to be unemployed as 16-year-old with one GCSE.