Up to 1,000 under-performing primary schools face closure or conversion into academies under a dramatic new government blitz aimed at raising standards in schools.

Prison should be a place to teach offenders not to revert back to crime and help them integrate back into society, but it's not doing the job.

Doctors treating the Pakistani girl who was shot in the head by Taliban gunmen have unveiled how close she came to dying, detailing how the bullet that struck her failed to penetrate her skull.

Asperger’s Syndrome, sometimes called “mind blindness”, lies at the milder end of the conditions known as autism spectrum disorders.

The new system of phonics angers me as much as it did when it was first introduced.

Q. I'm off to Bulgaria for some end- of-season sunshine. What currency should I take? Should I also take one of those pre-paid currency cards? Andrea Dawes

The songs of romance that make up Lianne La Havas' debut album have earned her critical acclaim and a Mercury nod. But, she tells Gillian Orr, her route to the top was no fairytale

Kids don't think reading is cool and only three in ten read on their own initiative. But who wants to be "cool" anyway?

If you ask me...

Imagine the wisecracks and paranoia of Woody Allen, the tape-recorders and monologues of Samuel Beckett, the surrealism of N F Simpson…and that would give you some idea (a very inflated one) of this hour-long show based on short stories by Jonathan Safran Foer.

Anyone who knows anything about prisons will suspect a link between criminal behaviour and illiteracy. I'm a keen student of the work of Noel "Razor" Smith, armed robber-turned-writer and public speaker. He has been in and out of prison all his life. There is no doubt that he found liberation through language. And again and again in his accounts of prison life, we find that a large proportion of his fellow inmates cannot read or write.

As with quite a lot of things these days I first read about the death of Robert Hughes on Twitter. I'd love to know what the old bruiser thought of this new medium and to hear how wittily he might encapsulate its follies. I have a suspicion that he would disapprove. But in one sense it did him proud when it came to instant commemoration.

Outlook Leave it to the Office for Budgetary Responsibility (OBR) to throw a black cloud over the end of a soggy week.