Simon Hughes said universities had “failed miserably” to attract more state school pupils
Deputy Liberal Democrat leader Simon Hughes has said his party remains committed to axing tuition fees.
Mr Hughes, the government’s Advocate for Access to Education, told the BBC he hoped fees would be ended in England “but not this side of an election”.
The Lib Dems pledged to phase out fees before last year’s election and its MPs were split when the coalition opted to raise them to £9,000 earlier this year.
More than 20 Lib Dem MPs voted against the plan while Mr Hughes abstained.
The 28 Lib Dem MPs, including leader Nick Clegg, who supported the plan were heavily criticised by opponents of fees because all Lib Dem MPs signed a pre-election pledge not to raise fees during this Parliament.
Mr Hughes said told Daily Politics: “I’ve never been happy with the policy. Our policy as a party is to get rid of tuition fees. I hope it will still be delivered – but not this side of an election.”
He also reiterated that universities may not be allowed to charge up to £9,000 – the maximum allowed under the new rules.
“If they don’t come to an agreement with the office under the new rules, the office has said they can’t go above £6,000”
Simon Hughes
He insisted the Office of Fair Access did have the power to stop universities if they do not prove they have taken steps to widen access to students from less wealthy backgrounds.
“If they don’t come to an agreement with the office under the new rules, the office has said they can’t go above £6,000”, he said.
A number of top universities, including Oxford, Durham and Imperial College, have confirmed they want to charge £9,000 from 2012 while others have suggested they will follow suit.
He urged some of the universities concerned to “think twice” about charging £9,000 as it was “completely unjustified” and many degrees did not cost that much to offer.
Ministers have indicated that universities allowed to charge the maximum fee will have to allocate £900 of that income on access for poorer students.
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Steven McElwee said the blaze was terrifying
Police are investigating two suspected arson attacks in an east Belfast street.
In the latest incident, a house at St Leonard’s Crescent was almost destroyed in a blaze.
Stephen McElwee was asleep in bed on Tuesday night when his home went up in flames. His neighbours raised the alarm and he was able to escape unhurt.
But, he said, he has lost almost everything he owns.
“It was terrifying. I didn’t believe it until I saw the flames. There had been another arson attack eight days ago,” he said.
“It is an easy target. The house is completely gutted. It might have to be pulled down. That hurts. I like living here and I am not going to move out for them.”
Mr McElwee said he had not slept in the two nights since the blaze.
Residents on the street want alleygates installed to cut off access to the backs of their homes.
But they have been told that there is no money to pay for them and if they want them, they will have to find the cost, estimated at between £8,000 and £9,000, themselves.
Police said initial investigations suggested that something may have been thrown at Mr McElwee’s house and that an oil tank went on fire.
They have appealed for information.
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Jim Swire said Moussa Koussa was a man who knew “everything” about the Libyan regime
The Libyan Foreign Minister’s defection was a “great day” for families of those killed in the Lockerbie bombing, according to one victim’s father.
Jim Swire, who lost his daughter Flora, said Moussa Koussa was at the heart of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s government and “could tell us everything”.
A total of 270 people died when Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie in December 1998.
Mr Swire said the relatives of those who died “should be rejoicing”.
Mr Koussa arrived in London on Wednesday saying he was no longer willing to represent the Libyan leader’s regime internationally.
“Koussa was at the centre of Gaddafi’s inner circle,” Mr Swire said.
“This is a guy who knows everything.
“I think this is a fantastic day for those who seek the truth about Lockerbie.”
Mr Swire, who met Mr Koussa during a visit to Libya in 1998, said he was “extremely frightening – more frightening than Gaddafi himself”.
He said: “He was clearly running things.
“If Libya was involved in Lockerbie, he can tell us how they carried out the atrocity and why.
“I would be appalled if by now the Scottish police are not in England interviewing Mr Koussa – it is a great day for us.”
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India has a diverse population of a billion-plus people
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India has added 181 million new people to its population over the last decade, according to the results of the 2011 census.
India’s population is now 1.21bn, which is bigger than the combined populations of the US, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
India launched the latest census exercise last year.
Some 2.5 million officials visited households in about 7,000 towns and 600,000 villages.
The population was classified according to gender, religion, education and occupation.
The exercise, conducted every 10 years, faces big challenges, not least India’s vast area and diversity of cultures.
Census officials also have to contend with high levels of illiteracy and millions of homeless people – as well as insurgencies by Maoists and other rebels which have left large parts of the country unsafe.
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Daniel Morgan’s family said they had been “lied to, fobbed off, bullied and degraded” by Met officers
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Scotland Yard has apologised to the family of a private detective killed in south-east London in 1987 for a corrupt investigation into his death.
Daniel Morgan, 37, was found with an axe in his head in Sydenham but nobody has ever been convicted of murder.
Metropolitan Police (Met) acting commissioner Tim Godwin has admitted there were “failings” by officers. The entire legal case collapsed last month.
Mr Morgan’s family has called for a full judicial inquiry.
This was “urgently required”, his relatives said in a statement.
“Through two decades and more of public protests, meetings with police officers at the highest ranks, lobbying of politicians and pleas to the media, we have found ourselves lied to, fobbed off, bullied, degraded and let down time and time again.
“What we have been required to endure has been nothing short of torture.”
Mr Morgan, a father-of-two from Monmouthshire, was found with an axe in his skull in the car park outside the Golden Lion pub.
Five people were arrested in 2008 but two, including a former detective accused of perverting the course of justice, were discharged when several supergrasses were discredited.
This month the Crown Prosecution Service dropped the case against the other three people – Mr Morgan’s former business partner, Jonathan Rees, and brothers Garry and Glenn Vian.
The cost of the five police inquiries and subsequent legal hearings has been estimated at about £30m.
The case has become one of Britain’s longest unsolved murders.
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Roland Buerk reports from Oirase, where a sea wall proved decisive in protecting citizens from the tsunami that devastated Japan’s north east coast.
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Barack Obama and Enda Kenny discussed the Irish visit at the White House on St Patrick’s Day
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US President Barack Obama will not cross the border into Northern Ireland when he visits the Republic of Ireland, the Irish prime minister has said.
Enda Kenny said diplomatic protocol ruled out such border hopping.
President Obama would have to visit London first, before setting foot in Northern Ireland.
A large US delegation is expected to arrive in the Republic of Ireland at the end of May.
The date is just before Mr Obama travels to London for an official visit.
Mr Obama announced on St Patrick’s Day at a meeting with Mr Kenny in the White House, that he would like to visit his ancestors’ birthplace in Moneygall, County Offaly.
First Minister Peter Robinson and Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness had raised the possibility of a visit to Northern Ireland with Mr Kenny.
But he said: “The problem actually is that the president, under existing protocol, is not allowed to go to Northern Ireland without first having to go to Britain.
“So if President Obama were to decide to go close to the border, actually from a protocol perspective, he is expected to go to London before he would go to Northern Ireland.”
Although no official date has been announced, Mr Obama is expected to be in Ireland from Sunday 22 May to Tuesday 24 May.
A spokesman for the Foreign Office in London confirmed that for state visits, protocol dictates that a foreign leader must travel to London first, before visiting other areas of the UK.
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Two UK retailers, Mothercare and Laura Ashley, report falling sales, adding to worries about the strength of the retail sector.
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The new league tables are based on last year’s exams
Thousands of teenagers in England had no chance of getting the new English Baccalaureate in their GCSEs, official data shows.
At 175 state schools, not one pupil was entered for all five of the subjects counted in the new measure.
Education Secretary Michael Gove says the Bacc is an “aspirational measure” which will drive up standards.
But head teachers complain it was brought in after pupils sat their GCSEs last year.
The government has just published additional league tables data which allows parents to see how individual schools are doing on all 84 GCSE subjects.
This is an update to the secondary school league tables released in January.
The English Bacc was brought in by the coalition government.
It is not a qualification in its own right, but is a measure of how many children get a good GCSE (A* to C grade) in English, maths, two science qualifications, a modern foreign language or classical language and either history or geography.
The January league tables showed that just 16% of 16-year-olds achieved the Baccalaureate last year.
School league tables Find secondary schools in your areaEnter full postcode in England Searchor search by local authority Barking and Dagenham Barnet Barnsley Bath and North East Somerset Bedford Bexley Birmingham Blackburn with Darwen Blackpool Bolton Bournemouth Bracknell Forest Bradford Brent Brighton and Hove Bristol, City of Bromley Buckinghamshire Bury Calderdale Cambridgeshire Camden Central Bedfordshire Cheshire East Cheshire West and Chester City of London Cornwall Coventry Croydon Cumbria Darlington Derby Derbyshire Devon Doncaster Dorset Dudley Durham Ealing East Riding of Yorkshire East Sussex Enfield Essex Gateshead Gloucestershire Greenwich Hackney Halton Hammersmith and Fulham Hampshire Haringey Harrow Hartlepool Havering Herefordshire Hertfordshire Hillingdon Hounslow Isle of Wight Isles of Scilly Islington Kensington and Chelsea Kent Kingston upon Hull, City of Kingston upon Thames Kirklees Knowsley Lambeth Lancashire Leeds Leicester Leicestershire Lewisham Lincolnshire Liverpool Luton Manchester Medway Merton Middlesbrough Milton Keynes Newcastle upon Tyne Newham Norfolk North East Lincolnshire North Lincolnshire North Somerset North Tyneside North Yorkshire Northamptonshire Northumberland Nottingham Nottinghamshire Oldham Oxfordshire Peterborough Plymouth Poole Portsmouth Reading Redbridge Redcar and Cleveland Richmond upon Thames Rochdale Rotherham Rutland Salford Sandwell Sefton Sheffield Shropshire Slough Solihull Somerset South Gloucestershire South Tyneside Southampton Southend-on-Sea Southwark St. Helens Staffordshire Stockport Stockton-on-Tees Stoke-on-Trent Suffolk Sunderland Surrey Sutton Swindon Tameside Telford and Wrekin Thurrock Torbay Tower Hamlets Trafford Wakefield Walsall Waltham Forest Wandsworth Warrington Warwickshire West Berkshire West Sussex Westminster Wigan Wiltshire Windsor and Maidenhead Wirral Wokingham Wolverhampton Worcestershire YorkGo
In more than half of state secondaries (1,600), fewer than 10% of pupils gained the necessary GCSEs, and 270 of England’s state secondaries scored zero on this measure.
England is the only UK nation to publish school league tables.
The new data shows that about 25,000 16-year-olds were in the 175 schools where no pupil was entered for all five of the subjects which count towards the Bacc.
Of this 175 total, 44 were academies – schools which are state-funded but independently-run.
Academies were promoted under Labour as a way of turning around failing schools.
The coalition government is encouraging all good schools to apply for academy status.
The new data also shows the extent to which a school’s league table position is influenced by points scored by pupils who took courses which were not GCSEs, but which were counted as such. These are usually vocational subjects.
Mr Gove says under Labour too many pupils were pushed towards less academic courses to boost their school’s league table position.
He has been accused of setting “retrospective targets” for schools – but says publication of this detailed data will give parents and others information they need and “shine a light on excellence”.
“This is the next stage in our drive for greater transparency,” he said.
“More information will allow people to identify the schools that are performing well and to interrogate schools about the choices they have made.”
At 27 schools, no pupil was entered for a language counted in the Bacc; at 42 schools none was entered for the humanities component and at 33, none was entered for the science element.
Mr Gove insists the standard measure on which schools are judged – that of proportion of pupils getting five good GCSEs including English and maths will remain central to the accountability system.
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