Daily Safeguarding Update

Facebook launches newsletter service

Facebook is launching a new service today, called Bulletin, that allows writers to publish free and paid newsletters that can be posted to the web, sent to subscribers’ inboxes, and shared across Facebook.
Facebook says it won’t take a fee from writers “at launch,” and writers retain full ownership of their work and subscriber list.
The new platform is “focused on empowering independent writers, helping them reach new audiences and power their businesses,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a live audio call discussing the launch.
Facebook has signed up renowned online writers Malcolm Gladwell, Tan France, and Erin Andrews, among others, to cover a range of topics, from sports and finance to science and medicine.
Bulletin is a direct answer to the growing popularity of Substack and other newsletter products, used by several major writers, including Glenn Greenwald and Anne Helen Petersen, and the company has been courting talent with guaranteed payment.
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A teacher who asked a pupil to be his girlfriend has been permanently banned from the profession.
Wayne Howe, 63, was found to have failed to maintain appropriate professional boundaries and be guilty of unacceptable professional conduct by a panel of the Teaching Regulation Agency.
He was found to have told a pupil that he liked her and asked her if she wanted to be his girlfriend once she left school.
Although he admitted to the allegations to some extent, the panel found him to blame the victim, called Pupil A in the report, by saying that he had “read it all wrong”.
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County councils in England are warning of a £1.3bn special educational needs deficit which threatens to derail their finances and undermine the capacity to support recovery efforts after the pandemic.
They say the total deficit is set to increase eightfold in just five years as a result of “an explosion” in the number of children requiring additional support, and they warn they are facing “a financial cliff edge”
A survey by the County Councils Network (CCN) and the Society of County Treasurers shows the combined deficit for 40 authorities has gone up from £134m in 2018-19 to a projected £1.3bn in 2022-23.
The CCN calls for an injection of additional funding in the forthcoming spending review to help bring deficits down to a manageable level. 
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According to a report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, employer discrimination is holding back second-generation African, Caribbean, and Asian people in the jobs market even though they tend to be more highly educated.
People of that background whose parents emigrated to Britain were far more likely to get a university degree than their white British peers, but they faced much higher unemployment rates overall.
However, the report also showed that once in employment, they tended to be more upwardly mobile and were more likely to be in professional or managerial jobs.
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