Article One:
Help given to drugs case children
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Relatives are working with consular officials in Venezuela to bring home the four children
of a British couple detained for alleged drugs offences.
Paul Makin, 31, and his wife Laura were held on 16 February on Margarita Island
for allegedly carrying cocaine.
The four children were placed into the care of Venezuelan social services. British Embassy officials travelled to the island to ensure the children's welfare
and provide consular services to the detainees.
The children are an eight- and a seven-year-old from a former marriage of Laura Makin,
and the couple's two-year-old twins.
The Foreign Office confirmed that other family members have arrived on Margarita Island,
and are working to repatriate the four children as soon as possible.
Sought in UK
A Foreign Office spokesman said the Venezuelan authorities had done everything
in their power to assist the children.
Article Two:
I'll spell it out: if children can't read, lives are ruined
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It blunts their intelligence, narrows their perspectives and blasts their future prospects.
How often does that need to be said? Of course it is not universally true;
many children defy the system, one way or another. But the point is that the system is bad.
If the word ''institutionally'' means anything, this countryĆ¢€™s education system is
institutionally unfit for purpose.
Those who assume that I am exaggerating, as columnists do, should consider the interim
report published last week by the Cambridge Primary Review, the biggest independent inquiry
into state primary school education in England for 40 years, led by Professor Robin Alexander.
After three years of exhaustive research by his team, he says ''our argument is that
'primary school childrens'
education, and to some degree their lives, are impoverished if they have received
an education that is so fundamentally deficient''.
At last a knight in shining educational armour seems to have come galloping over the hill.
His review finds that the curriculum has been politicised, that the education department and
the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority have been excessively prescriptive in their
micro-management of schools, that their focus on ''literacy'' and numeracy and testing has squeezed
out other learning, and that children are being denied a broad and rich curriculum - with history,
geography, music, art and drama the greatest losses. Alexander insists the arts and humanities
''help to hold the line between civilisation and philistinises but ''
in these severely utilitarian and philistine time this argument
''no longer cuts much ice''
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