Pupils to be separated from devices for entire school day from September after trial of ‘digital pause’ scheme

France is to tighten its ban on the use of mobile phones in middle schools, making pupils at the ages of 11 to 15 shut away their devices in a locker or pouch at the start of the day and access them again only as they are leaving.

The education minister told the senate she wanted children to be fully separated from their phones throughout the school day in all French middle schools from September.

Head of National Education Union calls for statutory ban on phones in schools and social media ban for under-16s

Almost all schools in England have banned mobile phone use by pupils, according to the first national survey conducted, as the leader of the largest teaching union called for a statutory ban owing to the “damaging impact� on young people.

The national survey, ordered by Rachel de Souza, the children’s commissioner for England, showed that headteachers have swiftly instituted bans on smartphone use during school hours. The survey of more than 15,000 schools found that 99.8% of primary schools and 90% of secondary schools have some form of ban.

More schools also reducing spending on trips, IT, extracurricular activities and GCSE subject choices

Half of secondary schools in England have been forced to cut staff this year due to financial pressures that are pushing many “towards breaking point�, according to polling.

As well as cuts to teaching and support personnel, there has been a marked increase in the proportion of secondary school leaders having to reduce subject choice at GCSE to save money, while extracurricular activities, school trips and investment in IT have also been hit.

We cannot be neutral with respect to fake news, misinformation or outright lies

In western academia, everything began with philosophy. Ever since, especially since the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution of the 17th century, there has been a long, centrifugal process, with discipline after discipline making its distinctive contribution and marking out its methods and its domain of inquiry. Raphael’s painting The School of Athens displays this perfectly, with the two great philosophers Plato and Aristotle in the centre. Yet even here, Raphael points at the specialisation of knowledge that is about to explode. Plato points upwards, symbolising his interest in the timelessness of metaphysics. Aristotle gestures downwards, emphasising his interest in the empirical.

Today, at university, students and researchers focus on a single sub-branch of, say, modal logic, labour economics or organic chemistry. Knowledge has accumulated and fragmented. Renaissance men (or women) are almost nonexistent.

Andrew Graham is a political economist, former master of Balliol College, Oxford and former director of the Scott Trust

It’s the school holidays and the whole family is having a ball – except poor Cinders, stuck indoors revising

I’ve often heard parents describing exam season as like going into a war, or an incredibly harsh winter, for the entire family. Not just the person taking the GCSEs or A-levels, but the whole lot of you have to start having early nights, gird your loins, and get used to mood swings and anxiety attacks. It’s sort of true, but it also depends quite a lot on the personality of the exam-taker. Some of them want to be tested on the groyne height of a beach in Hastings and practise talking about the climate crisis in French; others want you to butt out completely and leave them to it. Both approaches seem pretty reasonable to me.

I’d forgotten one thing – the terrible guilt. Maybe it’s because the Easter holidays weren’t sunny last year, or maybe it’s because the youngest is my favourite (I am joking), but the guilt is just hideous. It’s like having a little Cinderella in the house, except I’m not the audience – I’m the evil stepmother. Fancy going to the beach, or to a party? What about a lovely lie-in, and then some re-runs of The Office? What about a ball – you know there are some great balls on? Everyone can do exactly as they wish, except Cinders upstairs, who’s trying to memorise the whole of Great Expectations, while the rest of us – even the people who did the same text last year – sit around going: “Is that the one about the orphanage and the porridge?�

California Institute of Integral Studies, located in San Francisco, will welcome its first undergrad class this August

The home of the Summer of Love will soon house the first undergraduate program in psychedelic studies.

The California Institute of Integral Studies – a non-profit university founded in 1968 and located in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood – will welcome its first class of undergrads to its Bachelor of Science in Psychedelic Studies program this August. The program’s launch symbolizes the renewed attention hallucinogens like MDMA and psilocybin have received in recent years as a growing body of evidence suggests they may be powerful treatments for psychiatric conditions, like PTSD and treatment-resistant depression.

Universities with policies similar to University of Sussex, which received £585,000 fine last month, will be contacted

England’s higher education regulator has said it is writing to institutions that have transgender equality policies similar to the University of Sussex, which was handed a record £585,000 fine last month for failing to uphold freedom of speech.

The Office for Students (OfS) said it would not yet name the vice-chancellors being contacted, “but we will be writing to a handful of providers where we have identified that they have – on the face of it – similar policies in this area to Sussex�.

Raising standards, including safety, should be at the heart of Labour’s plans for preschool

Figures showing a steep increase in the number of safety incidents involving children at nurseries in England are a reminder that the government-funded expansion of early years education needs to be monitored closely. The increased entitlement to free places, which was announced by the last government and is being rolled out gradually, is hugely welcome. Bridget Phillipson’s decision to prioritise new nurseries in the north and Midlands in the first round of funding was a good one.

High-quality preschool settings are a crucial foundation for future learning. They are particularly important at a time of rising concern about young children’s development – with growing numbers arriving in reception classes unable to feed themselves or go to the toilet. Currently, early learning opportunities are not evenly or fairly distributed – partly because providers rely on income from fees as well as public funding. The 4,000 new state nursery places that are due to come on stream by September should provide a boost to preschoolers in poorer parts of the country.

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Hospital waiting lists among worst in UK and children with special needs waiting a year for support, report finds

Northern Ireland’s public services, including hospitals, schools and police, are being “crippled� by lack of funding, impinging on the quality of life for many people, a report by a cross-party parliamentary committee has concluded.

The Northern Ireland select committee found patients waiting more than 12 hours to be seen in accident and emergency departments and mental health needs 40% greater than anywhere else in the UK. Hospital waiting lists are among the worst in the country.

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Harvard weighs costs of standing up to president as other elite schools, such as Princeton, signal they won’t concede

The day after the Trump administration announced a review of $9bn in federal contracts and grants with Harvard University due to what it claimed was the university’s failure to combat antisemitism on campus, the university’s president, Alan Garber, sent an email to the Harvard community titled: Our resolve.

“When we saw the Garber statement’s subject line, everybody thought: ‘Oh, great, Harvard’s going to stand up!� said Jane Sujen Bock, a board member of the Coalition for a Diverse Harvard, a group of alumni founded in 2016 amid a legal battle over affirmative action.

Many say absence is due to England’s mainstream schools being unable to meet needs of neurodivergent pupils

• Anna Maxwell Martin calls for end to ‘cruel, idiotic’ fines for school absence

• Record 170,000 children missed at least half of classes in 2024

The latest figures from the Department for Education suggest school absence is at a record high in England, with more than 170,000 children being “severely absent� and missing for at least half their lessons last year.

In 2023-24, the number of those who were “persistently absent� and missed 10% or more of their school sessions, was about 1.49 million, which is about one in five pupils. However, the overall absence rate decreased from 7.4% the previous year to 7.1%.

Claire Aubin’s podcast This Guy Sucked explores the viler actions of ‘great men’ for a more holistic view of history

When the historian Claire Aubin gets together with her colleagues for drinks after a conference or academic meetup, the conversation always ends up one way. “We’re all sitting around a table, talking about our most hated historical figure,� she said. For Aubin, it’s Henry Ford, an ardent antisemite whom Hitler called “an inspiration�. She believes being a hater can aid in scholarship: “Disliking someone or having a problem with their historical legacy is worth talking about, and brings more people into learning about history.�

That’s why Aubin, who spent last year lecturing in the history department at UC Davis and San Francisco State University and is about to begin a full-time postdoctoral fellowship at Yale, started This Guy Sucked, a history podcast about terrible men. In each episode, Aubin speaks to a historian about their biggest villain, from Ford and Voltaire to Plato and Jerry Lee Lewis.

Funding schools to set up nurseries works. Why spend more on older children, when we know spending earlier is most effective?

Despite the rampaging rogue state across the Atlantic, around the cabinet table ministers push on with their plans. Too often ignored in all this sound and fury, there is some good news. This week Bridget Phillipson awarded the first 300 primary schools funding to set up nurseries that will add up to 4,000 places by the end of September. In the great dash for growth, growth, growth the OBR predicted an extra 0.2% of GDP due to the provision of free nursery hours for under twos, which are now coming on stream.

Nurseries may lack the glamour of mighty infrastructure projects, but the growth effect is immediate, letting more parents work, or work more hours. But the overriding motive of Labour’s early years push is to drive life chances of children whose future is too often determined long before they reach primary school.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

Trustees aren’t academics – and they’re often political wolves in sheep’s clothing. We need reform to save the American university as we know it

Late on Friday evening, the trustees of Columbia University announced that its interim president, Katrina Armstrong, was leaving her post.

Six days earlier, she had convened an emergency meeting with 75 faculty members after the university had cravenly surrendered to the demands of the Trump administration in the hopes of recovering $400m in federal grants and contracts. The president and her staff called their predicament “heartbreaking� and sought to reassure faculty that academic freedom and departmental autonomy remained intact.

The threat of council bankruptcies should focus minds on the need for a failing system to be reformed

The financial threat hanging over English councils, as a result of the last government’s decision to mask special needs overspending with an accounting ruse, is made plain in a Guardian investigation that used freedom of information requests to dig into their accounts. How ministers plan to deal with the £5.2bn debt that will reappear on balance sheets in a year – having been temporarily hidden by the Conservatives – is unknown. But doing nothing is not an option.

The alarming mismatch between the steeply rising need for special education and the budgets allocated to pay for it is one of the biggest challenges facing the government – with at least 18 councils at risk of insolvency. For families caught in the middle, the consequences can be devastating. Children waiting years for autism and other assessments, or for suitable placements, have their lives placed on hold. A system of grants that was meant to support councils to redesign services, and reduce spending, has mostly failed.

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Both parties are responsible for the mess facing Columbia and other institutions. It’s time for their leaders to take a stand

Donald Trump is trying to cow higher education institutions into submission using the power of the purse. The administration has withheld $400m in federal funds from Columbia University and has vowed to remove even more if its demands are not met.

Columbia has an endowment of $14.8bn and an annual operating budget of $6.6bn. The cuts amount to roughly 6% of its annual budget – a non-trivial share. In order to keep it, Columbia was instructed to adopt a number of illiberal measures: it must put its Middle East, South Asia and Africa Studies department into academic receivership; change its admissions policies to reduce admits of people from those regions and admit more Jewish students; and grant campus police more power to surveil, detain and remove people from campus without following the usual due process. It must accept permanently heightened restrictions on campus protest and speech and comply with unlawful federal orders to arrest and expel green card holders who have committed no crime, such as Mahmoud Khalil.

Musa al-Gharbi is a sociologist in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. His book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, is out now with Princeton University Press. He is a Guardian US columnist