One thing neither side of the debate often comment on is that student loans will, in most cases, not be the only debt that a young person leaves university with. I went to university in the first wave of tuition fees in the late 90’s and took out the full student loan (a measly £3000 or so at the time I seem to remember) to pay them and some of my rent for the year. Still, despite working for a year before university to save money, I found myself applying for a credit card along with an overdraft on my student back account before I’d even got my loan.

Why? Because we seem to forget that as well as paying fees students actually have to live somewhere during term time, travel to lectures and eat. Increases to tuition fees and the loans to cover them cancel each other out in the short term, putting off that worry until they are earning, but they are still left with the same outgoings, rent, bills, food, travel, as everyone else just with limited options to earn money because of their studies and no access to any benefits normally available to those on low incomes.

It’s hardly a surprise that most students have to acquire other kinds of debt in order to meet these day to day expenses. I wouldn’t even say it is a poor choice on their part, given the options. To me it seemed perfectly logical that I’d have to accept putting my food shopping on my new credit card during term time and hope I could get enough work in the summer holidays to pay it off then. Of course, I never quite did.

Of course the big difference with this kind of debt is that you don’t have that breathing room after university that the income based student loan gives you. Repayments on overdrafts and store cards carry on regardless and if you haven’t been lucky enough to fine a decent job straight away that is where problems can really start.

I’m not in any way against the principle of credit. Far from it, I’ve certainly had plenty of cards and loans myself over the years. However, I think it is important to remember that this kind of consumer credit plays a big part in the way students finance their time at university and we should not kid ourselves that the low rate student loans are the only thing they have to worry about.

[Note: This post is brought to you by Lloyds TSB]

Sleeping it off (Photo credit: Namibnat)

As adults we all appreciate the benefits of a deep uninterrupted nights sleep. It is also quite apparent when we don’t have enough quality sleep due to young children, stress and illness. Adults are irritable, moody and snappy when they are tired and children are the same.

A tired child can be a handful for parents and teachers to deal with, but the bottom line is, they are suffering too. As parents it is our job to ensure kids have an established bedtime routine to make the most of a quality sleep, night after night.

A kid’s bedroom needs to be quiet and comfortable. TV’s and games consoles should never be in the room they sleep in. The bed needs to be of good quality with a decent mattress that supports their growing bodies through the night. Many parents opt for a memory foam mattress to make their child comfortable in the night.

A firm bedtime routine means going to bed and waking up at around the same time each day, even on weekends. This allows the body clock to set itself without having to re-set every Monday after a child has stayed up late on a weekend. Older children will find it easier to readjust their body clock but for small kids, this needs to be set and adhered to as much as possible.

A tired child will be on the back-foot at school unless their parents see the importance of sleep and how much it can affect the child’s ability to take in information, to store information and to behave well in class.

For a healthy happy child who enjoys their schooldays and learns well, make sure sleep is top of the agenda every single night.

[Disclosure: This is a sponsored post]

Related articles

• Sleep Solutions For Children (time4sleep.co.uk)
• 5 Sleepy Rituals for Tired Parents (awesomelyawake.com)

Recently, lots of important and influential people have been trying to define what a marriage is. What does it mean to be married? Why do we want to do it? Why is it important?

Many people feel it’s about love, most people consider it to be a long term commitment, plenty prioritise faithfulness and monogamy, a few think it’s mainly about children and some talk about the stability it brings to society.

Conflicting views

Of course, the Church and organisations with odd names like The Coalition for Marriage are currently using their definition based around tradition and children as the basis for their assertion that marriage must involve a man and a woman. The Government on the other hand maintain marriage is about love and commitment and that’s why it should be available to same sex couples.

Choices

Personally I think both sides are overstepping their roles by trying to define the inner workings of a marriage. Surely we all know that everyone’s marriage is different and we define it for ourselves as we go along. That’s not to say that things like love, commitment, faithfulness, children aren’t important parts of many marriages, maybe even most marriages, but they don’t have to be. Those are choices we make.

A marriage has certain legal implications. As far as I can tell they mainly relate to money, taxation, benefits and inheritance rights plus a bit about parental rights like being able to register the birth of your child without your wife being there and being able to change your name without any additional paperwork. Anything beyond that is a matter for the couple to decide for themselves.

That’s why I think we need to remove this silly distinction between a civil marriage and a civil partnership. Not because a same sex marriage would be exactly the same as my opposite sex marriage but because it would probably be completely different, just like everyone else’s marriage.

I had to do a fortnight of work experience when I was 15. At the time I was planning on studying law so I found a firm of solicitors that would take me. I spent quite a lot of the time I was with them making tea, answering the phone, photocopying and filing but in between these riveting tasks I also got to accompany a solicitor on two trips to the Magistrates Court and go with one of the partners when they were appearing in the County Court. I also got to sit in on quite a few interviews with clients and the solicitors were all really happy to chat to me afterwards and answer any questions I had.

They obviously didn’t give me a job at the end of it but I got some experience of a field I wanted to work in, something I could put on my uni applications, some interesting things to talk about in my interviews and a reference I could use while looking for jobs while still in school. In exchange for the time they took to organise it the company got some help with their admin. I’d consider that a pretty fair trade. In fact if anything I got the better deal.

So if that’s a good example of work experience being of benefit to both parties how does this scheme compare?

On the plus side they are saying that roughly 50% of people are offered a job at the end of the period of work experience which is an undeniably impressive success rate. It might also go some way to addressing employer’s concerns about employing someone that is currently unemployed if they can demonstrate they reliably turned up for work everyday for eight weeks.

Most of the companies that I’ve heard are taking part are in retail or fast food so possibly not the areas of most people’s career dreams but both have a variety of corporate and customer service roles and significant opportunities for progression so if people are going to get experience of the different aspects of how these companies run it could be a genuinely interesting opportunity to learn about possible careers.

So young people have an interesting few weeks, prove they can be valuable reliable team members and hopefully get a job at the end. On that basis (and given that people will continue to receive their benefits while on the placement) doing some actual work like stacking some shelves or manning a checkout while they are there doesn’t seem unreasonable, does it? It’s certainly far from slavery as one girl has claimed.

But will that ideal scenario actually be what happens? Will participants get that well thought out programme of experience in different departments or will they just be shoved into a uniform and put to work for free with the minimal amount of training? Will this opportunity be given to those motivated young people who are just lacking work experience or will it be used to weed out those that job centre staff don’t think are really trying to find a job with the hope that they won’t manage to complete the placement so their benefits can then be stopped?

Until there is more clarity around who can be involved, how ‘compulsory’ it will be and what the penalties will be for failure I’m not sure that this programme can possibly be fair.

Related articles

• Joan Smith: You try working in a cake shop, Mr Cameron… (independent.co.uk)

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Yesterday both the Royal College of Nurses and the Royal College of Midwives joined with many other NHS staff, including Doctors and Managers, in stating their outright opposition to the governments plans for the Health Service in England.

Peter Carter, general secretary of the RCN, which represents 410,000 nurses, midwives, support workers and students, said:

The consequences of the bill may be entirely different from the principles which were originally set out

and Cathy Warwick, of the RCM, said:

The government has failed to present sufficient evidence that its proposals are necessary. They have failed to present evidence that the upheaval will result in an improvement in services to the people of England

According to BBC News:

Both unions also expressed concerns that the changes were compromising the ability of the NHS to make the £20bn of savings it has been asked to make by 2015

So did Lansley take on board the concerns of these health care professionals with years of experience at the sharp end of medicine? No, he and any other Conservative MP the media got hold of spent the day saying that Nurses and Midwives didn’t really mind the changes, they were just selfishly blocking these vital reforms to protect their pensions.

So lets get this straight. We’re supposed to buy the line that Nurses and Midwives don’t care about their patients and protecting the services they have devoted their careers to. The government, however, despite their ideological drive to roll back public services and the fact that some of them have close personal links to the private companies that will most benefit from these changes are in fact soley concerned with patient welfare. Which bright spark in the Comms department came up with that line?

The NHS is no stranger to change. Governments of both colours have constantly tweaked the funding arrangements, targets and priorities and staff take the changes on board, negotiate with the government about any problems they come across and then just get on with it. This is exactly what everyone in the NHS has been trying to do for the last 18 months. Clinical and managerial staff, even the ones who know they will likely be made redundant at the end of it, have been desperately trying to make these changes work all while continuing to run hospitals and GP surgeries as if it’s business as usual. The difference this time is that the Government is so arrogant that when staff raise real issues that will affect patient care their response is to call those staff selfish and carry on regardless.

There are undeniably still things about the NHS that need to be changed and improved but when you have to decide how to do it you should listen to the people who have a vested interest in making it succeed not those who will benefit from seeing it fail.

Image by stumayhew via Flickr

So it looks like there is going to be a referendum to decide if Scotland should become independent of the rest of the UK. The SNP are planning on Autumn 2014. Polls suggest there is significant support for the split although not a majority but I assume the SNP will be hoping to use the time to capitalise on the bad feeling that Tory spending cuts will inevitably generate in the meantime so it’s hard to say what the result might be.

The response of the ‘man on the steet’ in England seems to be something akin to a teenager being dumped. ‘Fine! Never liked you anyway. Let’s see how you get on with out me!’ which, of course, just strengthens support for Scotland leaving.

I, on the other hand, think the whole thing is rather depressing. When did it become impossible to be part of a country with anyone other than people you share thousands of years of history with? Why should our differences mean we have to separate? If we carry on like this we’ll end up being half a dozen different countries. Cornwall has a unique cultural heritage and even its own language but they still seem to be able to put up with the English. Londoners regularly demonstrate their sense of superiority to the rest of us and would be doing amazing well economically on their own but they’re not demanding independence. Sure, lots of Scots don’t like the English but does that mean we can’t continue coexisting with devolved powers under one country?

I can see that there might be cause to review the practicalities of devolution, who gets to vote on what and what money goes where. Obviously it’s important that everyone (well, as many people as possible) feels that the system is fair. I’m not suggesting that, should they vote for independence, we should mobilise the army and take them back by force but maybe we could just try to get along rather than winding each other up. Stroppy talk of not letting them keep the pound, for example, is not helpful. Perhaps instead we should be saying that Scotland has been a valued part of the country for hundreds of years and we hope it remains so for hundreds more. You know, like grown ups.

Related articles

• Scotland referendum: Q&A (telegraph.co.uk)

Image by Rubber Dragon via Flickr

As it stands at the moment, if you are lucky enough to be allocated a council house it’s yours for life. They can even be handed down to your children. The idea, of course, being to provide council tenants with long term security. But, with so many people desperately in need waiting years to get a property, is the house for life principle sustainable?

As a general rule I’m not in favour of changes that seek to erode part of the protection offered by the welfare state but surely if your circumstances change for the better and you become more able to support yourself you would expect to see a reduction in the benefits you receive even if one of them was your council house.

I’m not suggesting you throw people out at a moments notice but it seems fair to review tenants circumstances periodically, say every five years, and if their need for council housing is no longer as great (maybe they were now in well paid work or all their kids had left home) they could be supported to find alternative accommodation and their council house reallocated to whoever needed it most.

This was proposed by Cameron back in 2010 (although the government have been pretty quiet on this since) and it’s not often you’ll find me agreeing with him on welfare reform. I realise this is controversial but with council houses such a scarce resource and many people, especially young families, unable to find decent accommodation don’t we need to consider it?

Am I being unfair? Is this right more fundamental than I realise? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

I went to a state school, a good one. I did well, passed all my exams and got to a good university. I always assumed my kids would go to a state school but now we have to pick a school for E I’m not so sure.

I was pregnant with E when we moved into this house in the middle of a big city to be close to work. The plan was we’d be here for three years or so, do up the house and then sell up and move out of town before E started school. Then the economy inconsiderately went into meltdown and now we’ll probably not be able to move for years. So suddenly schools have become an issue.

I was a bit worried as we do not live in an affluent area of the city and the schools don’t have great reputations but when I looked into it there was one primary school a couple of miles away that was getting pretty good results, another closer that wasn’t too bad either and worst comes to worst there was our local school which had pretty poor results but not awful. I was sure E would be ok for a few years.

Last year one of my neighbours put down these three schools as their first three choices for their daughter for last september. They went to the open days and filled in all the forms on time so as they live two doors away and like us have no other children in school I thought this might be a good indication of where E might get into. Imagine their surprise when not only did they not get their first choice but they didn’t get any of the schools they had listed. Their daughter was given a place several miles away in a pretty terrible area at a school they hadn’t even considered.

They tried to stay calm, told themselves it probably wasn’t all that bad and went to find out more about the school…and came back in tears. Apparently it was even worse than they expected. I won’t list all the issues they had but there were a lot of them not least of which was that the percentage of kids getting the expected level in their SATs was barely making it into double figures. They mulled it over for a couple of days and in the end they quickly sold their house and moved to another part of the city where they could get her into a school they were happy with.

So this leaves me with a conundrum. E’s nursery is attached to a really lovely private boys junior school. That wasn’t why we picked it (it was just the closest nice nursery to my office) but it does mean the we are guaranteed a place if we want it. I know E would be very happy there. Most of his friends will be staying on (the girls move over to a school up the road), its small, has impressive sports and music facilities and great academic results. Most importantly if I work full time, pay off our debts a bit slower and we cut right back on luxuries we can just about afford it.

But a private school just doesn’t sit comfortably with me. It’s not that I have a moral objection to them existing but my slightly left of centre politics is worried by the exodus of average middle class families from the state sector in areas like this. It feels like ‘rats leaving a sinking ship’ rather than trying to help to improve standards in our local schools. And anyway, aren’t private schools full of really posh people? Don’t they give kids a bit of a rose tinted view of real life? Should I be worried about it being too focussed on academics to the detriment of other areas?

Having said that I couldn’t send E to the school my neighbours were offered, there’s no way we could sell the house and move somewhere with better schools and I can’t see that we’re in a position to in any way ‘help’ our local schools so do I really have a choice?

What would you do? Should we be worried by the trend towards private education for middle class families? Can we actually do anything to help schools that don’t appear to be doing well? I realise this could be a contentious issue and I really hope I haven’t offended anyone. I’d love to hear your comments on this.

Now my employer tells me not only must I work at least an extra five years and get less when I retire, which obviously I’m not happy about but at least I can plan for this over the next 30 years, but the kicker for me is I must now pay in 10% of my salary if I want to stay in the scheme. Like many of my colleagues in their 20′s and 30′s with young kids in full time childcare I was already struggling to pay 6.5% of my gross salary every month. 10% is just not an option and I would have to pull out of the scheme. So for me this debate is not about how big a pension I can get. It’s about whether I can get one at all. To add insult to injury even though my employed wants to change the terms of my contract without my agreement I can’t get any of the money back that I have already paid in or transfer it to a private pension fund so it is essentially worthless. Does that sound fair?

Now before you remind me that savings have to be made I should point out that we have already accepted a pay freeze which, with inflation at over 5%, is essentially a pay cut, there will be hundreds of thousands of job losses over the next couple of years and the public sector has been making efficiency savings in many areas. We are not getting off lightly. These pension changes will not help in any way with the short term belt tightening that we all accept needs to happen. They just mean that in a few years time as the economy and stock prices begin to improve and unemployment is once again under control all public sector workers will be stuck either with no pension at all or one whose benefits don’t justify their cost.

It is also important to remember that had successive governments invested our contributions rather than spending them (as private sector pensions have been required to do since all the pension scandals of the recent decades) there would be more than enough to make the payments they committed to. If a private company used their pension pot to buy new equipment or pay wages because they were running out of cash they would be breaking the law. If my employer is the government that made these laws surely I should get the same protection.

Most of us have not joined the public sector for the money. We care about what we do and often put up with quite a bit of abuse to try and do a good job but the government can’t rely on our good will to keep us in line while they attack our ability to plan for our future and provide for our family. If all of these changes go through even the most committed public servant will be questioning whether they should be looking elsewhere for work.

There will be two outcomes. Firstly, many of us will find work in the private sector which will make it harder for those already looking for work and have a deflationary effect on your wages because we’ll be cheaper to employ. Secondarily, working in the public sector will be so unattractive that these important services will be run mainly by the people who can’t get a better job. For me that is a truly scary thought.

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There has been a lot of discussion about the proposal that women should be allowed to opt for a C-section even when their doctor doesn’t feel there is any medical reason for it. As with so much that is written about the NHS, I fear this may all be a fuss about nothing. I’ve had a look at the detail of the new NICE (National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence) guidance and not much will really change.

Before I go on I feel I should state my own position on the matter. I’ve had both an emergency C-section and a ‘natural’ (for want of a better word) birth. I don’t have any kind of ideological preference for one or the other. I don’t think my natural birth was a huge achievement and my C-section was not a quick and easy option. Neither were a walk in the park but both got the job done. Neither has impacted on how I ‘bonded’ with my babies and, although I was initially disappointed to have needed a C-section, neither have affected the way I feel about myself. There were certainly pros and cons to each. If I have another baby I’ll make my choice as the situation unfolds, weighing up my own feelings and the advice of my doctor.

I don’t think anyone wants to see C-sections becoming the norm mainly because it is not the easy option women may have been led to believe by TV dramas and of course there is the issue of cost. C-sections cost significantly more than natural births and when maternity services struggle to maintain enough midwives and NICU incubators it is difficult to justify funding for a procedure that is not strictly necessary.

However if you read the NICE guidance (you can find all 275 pages of it here and the relevant bit is page 97-104) they are not proposing that you can just stroll in and demand a C-section because it seems like a good idea. It recognises that the main reasons for requesting a C-section are a lack of good information about both birth options or a traumatic previous birth experience. Just to be clear here is some of the relevant chapter that sets out what should happen:

When a woman requests a CS the first response should be to determine the reason for the request and the factors that are contributing to the request. This can then be followed by the provision of information comparing the risks and benefits of planned CS and vaginal birth.

When a woman requests a CS because she has anxiety about childbirth, offer referral to a healthcare professional with expertise in providing perinatal mental health support to help her address her anxiety in a supportive manner.

For all women requesting a CS, if after discussion and offer of support (including perinatal mental health support for women with anxiety about childbirth), a vaginal birth is still not an acceptable option, offer a planned CS.

An obstetrician has the right to decline a woman‟s request for a CS. If this happens, they should refer the woman to an NHS obstetrician in the same unit who will carry out the CS.

essentially, it proposes providing accurate information and, if appropriate, mental health support in an effort to find a solution that both the woman and doctor is happy with but if after that the woman still wants a C-section then that should be arranged. It seems to me entirely reasonable to try and solve whatever the problem is but if that isn’t possible then the final choice should be the woman’s. I sure that this is probably what already happens unofficially in many hospitals and I really can’t see it leading to a significant increase in the number of C-sections.

It is similar to current arrangements that allow some patients with an extreme phobia of dental work to have their procedure carried out under general anaesthetic because even though it is not medically necessary and carries a small increased risk this is outweighed by how traumatic they would otherwise find it.

My only slight reservation is that if the evidence (both in terms of safety and the 2 day and 3 month post birth satisfaction rates) for both procedures is similar, as the NICE document shows, might it not be a good idea to focus on improving the safety and experience of vaginal birth (better facilities, one to one midwife care, improved access to pain relief etc) rather than just accepting that people will be traumatised by their experience and will therefore want a C-section?

Related articles

• All women to be given right to caesarean (telegraph.co.uk)