Secondary school

Latest news on secondary school

Man accused of high school fire

A 26-year-old man is arrested in connection with a fire that closed a Highland secondary school.

Philip Pullman attacks school's 'philistine' plan to close library

A secondary school will become a "byword for philistinism and ignorance" if it presses ahead with a plan that will effectively close its library the bestselling author Philip Pullman has warned.

BNP membership list posted online by former 'hardliner'

The entire membership list of the British National party has been posted on the internet, identifying thousands of people as secret supporters of the far right and exposing many to the risk of dismissal from work, disciplinary action or vilification.The BNP leader, Nick Griffin, claimed today that he knew the identity of the person who published the list, describing him as a "hardliner" senior employee who left the party last year."He didn't like the direction the party was going and broke away, taking the list with him," Griffin told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.Around 13,500 names and home addresses were posted on a website on Monday evening.As well as names and addresses, the list includes the home and mobile phone numbers and personal email addresses of BNP members. It is thought the list may include lapsed members of the party and the names and addresses of people who have expressed an interest in joining the party, but have not signed up. Many of the members' occupations are listed, revealing a small number of police, two solicitors, four ministers of religion, at least one doctor and a number of primary and secondary school teachers.A BNP spokesman, Simon Darby, said: "If we find out the name of the person who published this list it will turn out to be one of the most foolish things they have done in their life." Griffin insisted this did not represent a threat of violence but the reality that the person faced prison for breaching a high court injunction. The BNP leader admitted the party was relying on the Human Rights Act, based on EU legislation, which it opposes, to try to protect the privacy of its members. He said he had no problem with publication of members' occupations but listing their names and addresses represented "a nasty piece of intimidation on behalf of the Labour regime".However, Griffin welcomed the publicity the story had garnered for the party, saying the list showed the perception of the average BNP member as a "skinhead oik" was "simply not true".Last night, Darby said the police had been called in to investigate the data security breach. Describing the posting as "malevolent and spiteful", he said: "This isn't a question of us mislaying the information, this is theft."The BNP list includes the names and ages of children who have become members of the party after a parent has taken out a family membership, and several people who have joined the party at the age of 16.Against the name of a woman said to be a serving police officer and living on the Wirral, Merseyside, is the note: "Discretion required re employment concerns - police officer", along with the names and ages of a number of her children.Other notes against the names of individuals include: "Discretion requested (employment concerns), government employee, IT consultant" and "activist (discretion requested), teacher (secondary school)".The BNP is known to go to considerable lengths to conceal the identities of members. Membership lists are held on computer spreadsheets, usually by an official based in York. He sends limited lists to local organisers as encrypted attachments to emails that can be accessed only by officials who have been given a password.The BNP conceded that very few people would have had access to its full membership list. The party said the list was not up to date, featuring no members who had signed up since late 2007, and included the names of people who had never been members of the party. The party said it had obtained an injunction this year at the high court in Manchester to prevent the misuse of its membership list.Griffin confirmed on the party's website that much of the list was genuine, and that it contained data stored at some point between November 30 and December 2 2007. "This latest attack is not really directed against our own people, who are already tough-minded and know that nothing ever comes of this sort of bluster, so much as against the thousands of [members of the UK Independence party] who are thinking of joining us."It probably will frighten some of them, but it's water off a duck's back to the stout hearts of the British National party."Last night, internet chat rooms frequented by British supporters of the far right were buzzing with anger, indignation and considerable alarm. One typical posting said: "The most shocking thing is some of the comments by the names! God help anyone who is in the army, the prison service, health care, a police officer or a teacher."It is thought the information commissioner, who enforces the Data Protection Act, may investigate the matter, looking not only at the posting of the list but at the amount of information the BNP has been storing about its members.A spokesperson for the Information Commissioner's Office said: "Following media reports that the personal details of BNP members have been incorrectly disclosed, we will be contacting the party to establish the full facts. We will then decide what action, if any, is appropriate."We encourage all organisations to alert the Information Commissioner's Office if they discover a security breach has occurred."The membership list reveals that the BNP has a handful of members in Australia, one in Oman and around 17 living in the United States. Some of the members' hobbies are listed. One gives her occupation as "holistic therapist" and her pastimes as "metaphysics, cartoon drawing". Another lists his hobbies as "fantail doves, koi carp, gardening".There are one or two insights into reasons that people have left the party. Against the name of one lapsed member from Gillingham, Kent, is the note: "Objects to being told he shouldn't wear a bomber jacket."? Additional reporting Duncan Campbell and Paul LewisThe far rightFreedom of informationComputer securityRace issuesPoliceguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Bullies returned to the classroom

Only 80 children have been expelled from secondary school for bullying in the past year prompting complaints that the problem is not being taken seriously enough.

Shock road tactics for children

Secondary school pupils are being shown "haunting" images as part of a road safety campaign.

School plans unveiled to parents

People in East Durham see how three secondary schools might look following a multi-million pound re-build.

Tijuana streets flow with the blood of rival drug cartels

When the balaclava-clad paramilitary police officer pulled back a blanket covering the corpse, a group of women wailed, shielding their babies' eyes. The security guard, whose body had been left outside the 4/9 Minimart in Villa Foresta on the edge of Tijuana, had been shot repeatedly at point-blank range with what appeared to be a semi-automatic weapon, his face and chest grated by gunfire into something more like a raw carcass on a hook. This was body number six last Monday night, and the sixth of what would become a total of 15 people murdered during less than 72 hours in this frontier city that acts as a portal from Mexico to California and vice versa. This is the front line in the 'narco-war' - savage, sanguine and sudden - that drug cartels are waging between each other and with the authorities. The war has claimed some 2,700 lives this year, and more than 6,000 since December 2006, when President Felipe Calderón launched Mexico's first serious offensive against the cartels who have traded for decades under a measure of government protection.The battle has been fought mainly along the 2,100-mile border between the United States and Mexico, the world's busiest frontier. As the body count has increased, so has the brutality of the killing. Corpses have been found severely tortured or decapitated, castrated, dipped in sulphuric acid or with their tongues cut out. Dr Hiram Muñoz, chief forensic medical expert assigned to the homicide department in Tijuana, told The Observer how 'each different mutilation leaves a clear message. They have become a kind of folk tradition. If the tongue is cut out, it means they talked too much. A man who sneaked on someone else has his finger cut off and maybe put in his mouth. If you are castrated, you may have slept with the woman of another man. Decapitation is another thing: it is simply a statement of power, a warning to all. The difference is that in normal times the dead were "disappeared" or dumped in the desert. Now, they are displayed for all to see.' Last month 13 bodies with their tongues cut out were found across the road from the Valentín Gómez Farías secondary school. The principal, Miguel Angel González Tovar, said: 'It was terrifying, the children were terrified, the staff were terrified. And now we had to suspend some classes after this last warning. They gave me CCTV, but that does not work. They gave me an alarm button, but that is broken. We try to teach here, but we cannot be isolated from what is going on outside.' The illustrated project on the wall of one classroom was about global warming and gave guidance on what to do in a flood or hurricane. The new army-imposed chief of police in Tijuana, Lieutenant-Colonel Julián Leyzaola, talks of 'social terrorism' by the narcos, referring specifically to a threat last Tuesday that, if Marines did not leave town, the narco gangs would kidnap and kill schoolchildren. 'All I can do is to increase a police profile in the community and schools, calm people down to avert the kind of social psychosis the narcos want to generate, physical presence to reassure people and intelligence to fight the criminals themselves', said Leyzaola. The war has also struck deep into the heart of Mexico, with macabre executions as far south as Chiapas. The magazine Proceso published a cover photograph of the country's entire political and military leadership under the headline 'Impotence', and concluded that 'the narco is now a national structure'. The leading campaigner against the drug cartels in Tijuana, Victor Clark Alfaro, talked last week about 'a war against society itself, at every level of life, school and community, with violence on the streets and even more sinister movements behind that violence, to create psychosis in society, and criminalise the economy'. The war has also spread into the US, with 135 arrests last month in a swoop against Mexican cartel operatives. The appalling and escalating level of violence is not only a response to Mexico's tardy counter-offensive against the drug gangs, but a symptom of fragmentation among the drug cartels themselves. Last week's bloodbath in Tijuana - taking the year's death toll for this city towards 600 - followed the arrest last Saturday of Eduardo Arellano Félix, known better by his 'nom de narco' El Doctor - the last remaining fugitive of five brothers who ran Mexico's oldest, but now severely damaged, cartel. On Wednesday, the US State Department lodged a request for Arellano's extradition for trial in the United States, where he has been among the most wanted drug traffickers. That dramatic swoop on a Saturday afternoon targeted an Art Deco mansion in the upscale Misiones del Pedregal suburb. A deafening salvo of fire was aimed at the villa in what was presumed to be yet another shoot-out. The next day it was shown to have been the taking of Mexico's second most wanted drug lord into custody. He arrived - white-bearded and apparently dazed - for his ritual handcuffed appearance for television to join one of his surviving brothers, Javier, in the high-security Altiplano jail. Authorities on both sides of the border hailed the arrest as a triumph, the US Drug Enforcement Administration calling it the 'final demise' of the cartel founded by Mexico's first drug lord, Angel Félix Gallardo, but run by the Arellano brothers since he was jailed in 1989. Others were slower to celebrate. The state of Baja California's new public prosecutor, Rommel Moreno Manjarrez said: 'We hope to be seeing the fall of the Arellano cartel. But we have no illusions that one cartel's misfortune is another's opportunity, and that rivals will be watching this situation in their own way. We are trying to see how this will play out and to battle against whatever moves are made. 'We have had a serious problem of police corruption in the past, but are trying to purge this corruption from our forces, and are now able to fight this battle seriously, with the DEA helping in many ways, and with backing from our own government, which is different from the old political situation.' Cocaine trafficking from South America into the US (and much of Europe), and trafficking in Mexican-produced heroin and methamphetamine, became a Mexican near-monopoly during the 1990s, operated by four cartels, each controlling one of four main 'plazas', or routes into the US. The Texan sector belonged to the 'Gulf cartel' and its military wing, Los Zetas, comprised of former crack Mexican troops. A central passage through Ciudad Juárez was terrain dominated by the Juárez cartel and the giant plaza between Tijuana and California by the Arellano brothers and their sister Eneida who, the authorities presume, will assume command of the clan. But a fourth, unspecified, central-western plaza was run by the Alianza de Sangre (Alliance of Blood), or Sinaloa cartel, from the Pacific state of that name, way south of the border, where most of the other big traffickers also originate. This cartel was founded and is led by Joaquín 'El Chapo' Guzmán, who split from Gallardo to rival him, was jailed in 1993, but dramatically escaped in 2001 and is now a fugitive and something of a narco folk hero. Guzmán used the 2006 government offensive to lay claim to the entire border. The war that rages in Tijuana is largely between his rebels and those loyal to the Arellano family. Moreno says that an alliance forged in jail between the Sinaloa and Juárez cartels is also 'entirely finished', generating further chaos, and Sinaloa is taking on the Gulf cartel's Zetos with a trained army of its own, Los Negros (the Men in Black). Amid the carnage, a journey with three young women from the police forensic team is a harrowing experience. On the outskirts of Tijuana, another corpse has been found, visible by the green light of a petrol station. The windscreen of the victim's Ford Explorer (with California plates) is pitted with three bullet holes, and he seems to have made a run into the street, followed by 25 further shots. The scene of the next slaughter is the 9/4 minimart in Villa Foresta, where a blanket covers the remains of the security guard, with two more dead inside. There is wild sobbing from the women as the bullet-sprayed body outside is revealed, and those inside the store are brought out on stretchers and loaded into the white forensic department truck now carrying five dead bodies. The shop, it seems, was a stash for drugs being loaded for export in two presumed clavos (nails - the word used here for a car carrying drugs) intended to join the 65,000 that cross from Tijuana into San Diego every day, which the police in time tow away. Meanwhile heavy-set men arrive to look on from a slight distance, embracing each other in a way that suggests burdensome comradeship and solace, but little sadness. Tijuana's residents are struggling, with a remarkable degree of success, to lead a normal life. A recent study among local drug addicts shows an increase from 5,000 outlets and crack houses in 2004 to 20,000 now, and an estimated 200,000 young people in a burgeoning city of three million seriously addicted to hard drugs. Friday's newspapers reported yet another vast haul by the American authorities of 90lb of cocaine, crossing Tijuana's border to San Diego in a car driven by a Mexican burro, or mule. But the city teems with effervescent life for all the 'psychosis' the narcos wreak. The crowds of American tourists have vanished from the famous Avenida Revolución, so the souvenir business is in trouble. And with the formerly flashy narcos now lying low, Tijuana's famous brothels and strip clubs are empty of all but the worst types, the girls gyrating mainly with one another. But like every other bar, the Sótano Suizo pub was heaving last Sunday (while Eduardo Félix Arellano was airborne, handcuffed), for the climactic football match of the season Mexicans call 'El Clásico' between Club América of Mexico City and Chivas of Guadalajara. The teams unleash attack after attack in a tremendous game-to-the-death with Chivas winning 2-1.On Friday, slightly surreally given the week's murders, celebrations were being prepared for yesterday's Day of the Dead, an ancient rite inherited from Mexican tradition, entwining Roman Catholicism with Aztec lore of the 'Black Sun', which illuminates the underworld.The borderland remains a strong, exciting and potent place, in which the vast majority of people live and strive honestly. This frontier is too often defined, as Professor Tony Payan of El Paso university points out in an excellent book on the borderline, not by the people who live, flock to and work here, but by whatever is polemically useful to Washington. From there, argues Payan, successive administrations have illogically and disastrously entwined their failed border 'war on drugs' with the entirely separate 'wars' on undocumented immigration and terrorism. There is a strong sense that the region is paying the price for other people's greed. 'We are,' says Eligio Montes, police commander of Rosarito Beach, south of Tijuana, 'a cultural sandwich here on the border. And now we're squeezed between narcos from Sinaloa and Americans taking drugs.' My companion reporter, Jorge Fregosa, ends another rollercoaster drive on Thursday (to catch the army remove hand grenades from a blue plastic bin in a side street) by saying: 'This is my city, my country and that is my flag' - and he opens the sunroof the better to see it fly, defiantly vast, with its eagle, cactus, snake and legend, in the breeze and in America's face, at the border. 'And every time they kill someone,' says Fregosa, who has seen that happen hundreds of times this year, 'it hurts me. because it hurts the place I love. The border pays the price, and now we are paying a higher price than ever.'War on drugsDecember 2006A new federal police force is created to tackle drugs cartels; thousands of troops are deployed as part of a major anti-drug trafficking drive.2008 Drug-related killings soar. Murders linked to organised crime leap to almost 1,400 in first five months of year.MayAttorney-General Eduardo Medina Mora says that the number of murders linked to organised crime had risen by 50 per cent, with thousands of people having been killed in the 18 months since President Felipe Calderón took office and declared war on drugs cartels - 450 of the dead were police, soldiers or lawyers. AugustAs the murders continue, hundreds of thousands turn out for marches throughout Mexico to protest against the wave of kidnappings and killings.MexicoDrugs tradeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Coaching chance for Cov kids

COVENTRY Schools hold an Under-14s open coaching evening next Tuesday (November 4) which players from the city's secondary schools are invited to attend through nomination by their school PE staff. During the session players will work in groups and be looked after by coaches, including some from the Coventry club squad. Players will be assessed by the coaches and Coventry Schools staff,