Thousands of five-year-olds are arriving at school with too limited a vocabulary to take part in lessons, a senior government adviser revealed today.

A council is facing a test case legal action over plans to set up two Roman Catholic schools in its borough without considering alternative providers.

Today is either a red-letter day or a world of pain for parents around the country with children in year six of primary school. For it is the day when they receive notification of which secondary school their child has got into.

This week, the rivalry between Boris Johnson and David Cameron was exposed again as the mayor called for an end to police cuts in the wake of the riots.

The Berkshire town of Maidenhead has long lived in the shadow of its more glitzy neighbour, Windsor, home to Eton College and the Royal Family's favourite castle.

The school told officials it had 110 expressions of interest from parents for the 120 places on offer in the first year

Johann Hari's professional reputation has been subjected to trial by Twitter. Here he explains what the affair has taught him

As the 'Independent' writer embarks on a new feud, Tom Peck finds out if the years have mellowed her other great enmities

We've started attacking people in wheelchairs. We have, according to Scope, got 37 per cent better at abusing the disabled

Former war correspondent and erstwhile independent MP Martin Bell, a man so squeaky clean that he hasn't changed his suit in at least 15 years, is to release a book of autobiographical poetry. The collection of "light and dark" verse, due to be published in December, will take the same name as a novel by – who else? – Ernest Hemingway: For Whom The Bell Tolls. Neil Hamilton, against whom Bell stood at the 1997 election, once described his rival as, "A pompous, humourless man... in love with his own ego." But then, that was Neil Hamilton. So don't take his word for it.

They have proved to be among the Government's most controversial innovations. Beginning a three-part series, Richard Garner goes behind the scenes at the first parent-led secondary, which will open its doors to pupils in September

Parents who help to set up free schools could be given guaranteed places for their children under reforms to the admissions code being considered by ministers.

A couple of years ago, Steve Waters stole a march on his fellow dramatists with The Contingency Plan, a double-bill of plays about global warming.

A few passages in this 'new Shakespeare' sound suspiciously 18th-century, but more often its flow is credibly Jacobean