Nearly 100,000 candidates who are scrambling for a UK university place are set to miss out because they are "not strong enough".

A record number of students are eligible for clearing compared to the same time last year.

For the past decade or so there has been endless debate about whether we should move to a system whereby A-level candidates apply to universities after receiving their results.

A dramatic shift in higher-education provision with middle-ranking universities struggling to survive is predicted today by the head of one of the country's biggest exam boards.

The £9,000 annual fees being introduced by many universities may change the face of higher education far more radically than has yet been envisaged. Not only could it persuade many more school-leavers, especially from poorer families, to stay at home and combine study with paid work. It could also leave some universities struggling, as students choose a more American-style route. They might, for instance, opt for a cheaper foundation course at a local college, before moving on to a better-known university to complete a degree.

About Britain

The clearing process for students who fail to make their grades this summer will be "the most frantic and stressful in living memory", it has been claimed.

It is 50 years ago today that Berliners awoke to find their city divided by a wall, which became higher, more forbidding and more murderous by the year.

The Metropolitan Police have launched dawn raids against suspected looters.

From time to time, a new book arrives which catches its moment in an almost uncanny grip. Set in the middle of the last decade, the latest novel by South London writer Alex Wheatle has an all-too-obvious connection to this week's blazing headlines. At one point, a grieving teenager voices her scorn and fury at the mayhem unleashed by a junior gangster who has shot her boyfriend in error after a nightclub assassination struck the wrong target: "he's probably boasting to his crew right now... He's probably writing about it on his fucking MySpace page... What is wrong with these idiots? Don't they have parents who bring them up right? I bet he's got a pic of him on his site doing some bullshit macho pose. His bredrens are probably saying, yeah, you're a soldier. A fucking soldier! Is that all they live for? To be called a soldier by their wasteman crew?"

Theresa May made clear she would not back down over her plans, but political pressure for a rethink will now grow

A return to London from the Continent, as David Cameron would surely attest, comes with a rude shock that has to do not just with the summary transition from countryside or small town to metropolis – or even, this week, with the switch from apparent Gallic tranquillity to the reality of mayhem, but with something more fundamental, rooted in the general pace of life.

British troops in Afghanistan have seized explosives which would have made 300 bombs over the past four months, the military's top officer in the country said today.