Parents will find it very strange if a government which has been talking about smaller class

Parents will find it very strange if a government which has been talking about smaller class sizes produces larger class sizes for certain ages.”John Bangs, assistant general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said: “There’s very little running in the idea of lecture-style groups or lecture-style lessons for older pupils.”There’s nothing wrong with a one-off lecture approach, but if the Government identifies smaller group sizes as having an impact on one group, we do not think they should build in a structure of larger class sizes.”John Dunford, general secretary of the Secondary Heads Association, said the development would be worrying in mainstream secondary education. But he added: “In post-16 education, it would be possible to have a lecture in physics for 80 people, then have 15 in a class for practicals or other physics lessons.”. Germany has suspended imports of nuclear fuel rods from Britain’s Sellafield reprocessing plant until safety concerns are cleared up. Germany has suspended imports of nuclear fuel rods from Britain’s Sellafield reprocessing plant until safety concerns are cleared up.
A German nuclear power plant was temporarily shut down last month to allow removal of four fuel rods from Sellafield after officials discovered that documents relating to them had been falsified.The Environment Ministry cited British media reports that alleged inspection reports were falsified and safety standards were deliberately ignored at the reprocessing plant in northwest England.”The import ban will remain in force until it is established beyond a doubt that all required safety standards are met at Sellafield,” the ministry said in a statement.”In addition, all doubts about the reliability of British Nuclear Fuels as the plant’s operator must be resolved before the ban can be lifted.”Environment Minister Juergen Trittin said he has asked representatives of the reprocessing plant for talks in Berlin next week.The environment minister of Lower Saxony state, where the affected Unterweser nuclear plant is located, has recommended that plant operator PreussenElektra break off business relations with British Nuclear Fuels.The British government’s nuclear safety agency has said that workers at the Sellafield plant deliberately falsified records relating to the quality of the fuel.British Nuclear Fuels said last week that its chief executive, John Taylor, would step down after the critical government into the safety scandal.Meanwhile, nuclear safety inspectors are to hold meetings with the workforce at Sellafield in a bid to rebuild confidence following their scathing report on standards at the plant, it emerged today.The Chief Inspector of Nuclear Installations, Laurence Williams, told the Commons Trade and Industry Select Committee he was aware of concerns among workers at the Cumbria plant that their jobs were being put at risk by safety regulators.He said it was vital to reassure workers that inspectors were there to ensure their well-being and that of their families, and to encourage them to come forward if they had any worries about practices at the plant.. Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Nuclear Installations admitted yesterday that he was not told of changes to the way British Nuclear Fuels assesses the safety of plutonium fuel. Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Nuclear Installations admitted yesterday that he was not told of changes to the way British Nuclear Fuels assesses the safety of plutonium fuel.
Laurence Williams, the director of the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate at the Health and Safety Executive, confirmed that BNFL had told him of the safety changes only after he had heard of them through The Independent.BNFL changed the way it measured the diameters of the thousands of fuel pellets made from mixed oxides (Mox) of uranium and plutonium intended for nuclear reactors.Instead of taking three diameter readings along the length of each cylindrical pellet to assess overall tolerance levels, it took all three near to each other in the centre.The company did this because of a manufacturing defect that sometimes made one end of the pellet thicker than another – like a flowerpot – which led an automatic laser micrometer to reject them, sources said.Mr Williams said that BNFL had confirmed that the “top, centre and bottom” diameters were all taken within a few millimetres of the middle of a pellet and that the original settings had once been wider.The inspectorate said on Monday that it was unaware of any changes to the positions at which the three diameters were recorded by the automatic laser micrometer or why BNFL should have made any changes.BNFL issued a statement yesterday denying that it had lowered safety standards to boost output of Mox fuel but confirmed that it had moved the “top” and “bottom” diameter readings of the 13mm-long pellets to within 2mm of the centre reading.”When pellets are first cast, it is quite normal for them to be ‘wheatsheaf’ or ‘plant pot’ shaped The pellets are then ground to make them cylindrical. Once a pellet has been ground, it is not ‘flowerpot shaped’,” BNFL said.”The current positions for diameter measurements were selected to ensure that pellets which were within specification were not wrongly rejected because the chamfered edge was being measured rather than the true diameter,” the company said.Mr Williams, who insisted that the change in diameter readings did not affect safety, was questioned by MPs about the ability of the inspectorate to monitor safety standards at BNFL’s troubled reprocessing plant at Sellafield, Cumbria.Mr Williams said that cost-cutting and management reorganisations at Sellafield in the early Nineties had begun to affect safety and had led to an investigation by the inspectorate in 1999, which revealed a drop in safety performance.However, despite having nuclear inspectors working full-time at Sellafield, the inspectorate was told by BNFL of a problem with falsified Mox data only after The Independent said it was going to publish an article on the scandal..

A compromise over the number of new homes to be built in the overcrowded South-east was announced yesterday as the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, sought to defuse the row over housing and the countryside. A compromise over the number of new homes to be built in the overcrowded South-east was announced yesterday as the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, sought to defuse the row over housing and the countryside.
As revealed in Saturday’s Independent, Mr Prescott wants 43,000 houses a year to be built in the south-eastern counties outside London over the next five years – more than the 33,000 figure local councils think the region can absorb without major environmental damage, but considerably less than the 55,000 recommended by his planning inspector, Professor Stephen Crow, in a controversial report last October.Furthermore, Mr Prescott told the House of Commons, the extra houses need take up no more land than local councils have already allocated, if they are designed to a greater density than at present – as most of the new housing will be for single people.Sixty per cent of the new homes should be built on urban brownfield land as opposed to greenfield land in the countryside, Mr Prescott said in a rebuff to Professor Crow’s report which had suggested 50 per cent was the maximum possible.And Mr Prescott put on the backburner Professor Crow’s suggestion for four giant new towns in the countryside at Ashford in Kent, Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire, Stansted in Essex and Crawley in Surrey. Ashford and Milton Keynes will be studied as possible sites for expansion, but no decision will be taken before the five-year review of the South-east’s housing requirements. For the immediate future, Mr Prescott said, the focus for development will be on the “Thames Gateway” area to the east of London.The new figure Mr Prescott wants of 43,000 houses a year represents a 10 per cent increase on current building rates. He coupled the announcement with the issuing of revised policy guidelines which officially kill off the old approach to housing planning, known as “predict and provide”, which simply forecast the number of households thought likely to form over a period of 20 years, and allocated land in an inflexible way.It has been replaced by a new approach known as “plan, monitor and manage” which looks at much shorter time-scales and revises targets where necessary. Crucially, it adopts the “sequential” principle by which planners must look at town centres first and then gradually move outwards when looking for housing land.Tony Burton, assistant director of the Council for the Protection of Rural England, said the initiative was “a watershed which should signal an end to sprawl”.

Graeme Bell, director of the Town and Country Planning Association, welcomed it as “an important step forward”.. For now the villagers of Great Chart, with its ragstone and tiled houses and its medieval church, can breathe again, and still look out on to green fields. But for how long?

For now the villagers of Great Chart, with its ragstone and tiled houses and its medieval church, can breathe again, and still look out on to green fields. But for how long?
The picturesque Kentish village lies just outside Ashford, the market town that is one of the expansion points for housing in the overcrowded South-east, and the fate it faces sooner or later is to be surrounded by new estates of executive homes.Three months ago it looked as though its future was sealed when Professor Stephen Crow, a senior planner appointed by the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, to scrutinise the housing plans of all the South-east’s local authorities, decided development needed to be boosted and picked Ashford as one of four sites for massive greenfield expansion. (The others were Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire, Stanstedin Essex and Crawley on the Surrey-Sussex border).His APLEs, as Professor Crow called them (areas of plan-led expansion), were in effect to be new towns in the countryside, and Ashford would have seen its population explode from 50,000 to 150,000.Mr Prescott, aware of the political sensitivities of pouring concrete over woods, fields and streams, has decided otherwise.