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March 4, 2024

Met Police return lost mobile phone to schoolgirl’s family three years after she took her life 

  • An inquest found the former deputy head teacher told boys to delete their Snapchat messages on their phones at an assembly after a 14-year-old girl took her own life.
  • She died in March 2021, after being bullied on Snapchat by peers about a TikTok video she made.
  • Her father has praised the Online Safety Act, which aims to protect users from harmful content online.
  • For more, please visit the Independent website.

Calls for inquiry after refugee children made to guess who got foster care in ‘game’ 

  • The Home Office launched an internal inquiry, after a game was disclosed in a report, which found that unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in the UK were made to play a game to guess who would be next to be placed in foster care.
  • The Home Office says it has launched an investigation.
  • Border inspection also found that in four hotels where children were being housed, there was no guarantee staff had been given regular disclosure and barring clearances.
  • For more, please visit The Guardian website.

The following stories may be regionalised

School meals: Welsh government admits failing to follow law 

  • The Welsh government has admitted it stopped providing free school meals during the holidays unlawfully.
  • Two families and a legal charity claimed the government did not consider the rights of children.
  • The Welsh government will pay the legal costs but maintains they cannot afford to reintroduce the meals.
  • For more, please visit the BBC News website.

Disadvantaged pupils further behind in maths since Covid, English study finds 

  • The attainment gap in maths for disadvantaged primary school pupils in England has grown from 6.9 months to 8.7 months since the pandemic.
  • The study also looked at numbers of pupils eligible for free school meals for at least 80% of their time in school, which it classed as “persistently disadvantaged”.
  • The proportion of pupils eligible for free school meals has grown from 8.9% pre-pandemic to 13.3% in 2022-23.
  • For more, please visit The Guardian website.