‘Will the kids eat or not?’ In Keir Starmer’s constituency, families struggle with poverty

Alongside prosperity in Holborn and St Pancras are thousands of households for whom lifting the two-child benefit cap could mean an end to hunger

The two-child benefit cap: what is it, does it work and how much would it cost to scrap it?

It’s been one of Cat Onyac’s better days. Her two children are concentrating on their crochet project, sitting in the sunshine at HvH Arts in north London. And they’ve eaten. “All the children get a hot meal,” she says.

The family is at a summer scheme for children in Camden on the edge of Keir Starmer’s constituency, and food is just as important as learning photography, painting or music.

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School worker jailed for sexually abusing autistic boy aged under 16

Acasia Welburn pleaded guilty to three charges of sexual activity with child by person in a position of trust

A school worker has been jailed for sexually abusing an autistic boy who was under 16 at the time, police said.

Acasia Welburn, now 26, had been working at a school in North Yorkshire in a “trusted care position” when she abused the child.

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NSW boys home grounds to be explored after possible ‘clandestine’ human burial sites revealed

Government move to engage archaeological specialists comes after ‘suspicious’ locations identified at Kinchela Aboriginal institution

The New South Wales government will engage a specialist to explore the site of a notorious boys home where locations “consistent with clandestine human burials” have been found using ground-penetrating radar.

In September, Guardian Australia revealed there are at least nine “suspicious” sites of possible graves on the grounds of Kinchela Aboriginal Boys Training Home, one of the most violent and abusive institutions of the stolen generations era.

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Discovery of poliovirus in Gaza ‘incredibly alarming’, Unicef executive director says

Exclusive: Territory is ‘one of the most, if not the most dangerous place to be a child right now’, Catherine Russell says, and ‘we desperately need this conflict to end’

The “incredibly alarming” discovery of the poliovirus in Gaza only adds to the besieged territory’s status as one of “the most dangerous places to be a child right now”, the head of the UN children’s agency has warned.

The executive director of Unicef, Catherine Russell, said during a visit to Australia that Gaza was increasingly lawless.

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Overhaul UK benefits to tackle child poverty, charities urge

Report warns of crisis of poverty and mental health which ‘casts a shadow’ over young people’s wellbeing

Ministers have been urged to reform the benefits system to tackle child poverty, after a report found it to be a major cause of mental illness that “casts a shadow” over young people’s wellbeing.

The report, by the Centre for Mental Health, Save the Children UK and the Children and Young People’s Mental Health Coalition, found that the number of children living in poverty in the UK had increased to 4.3 million, while one in five children and young people aged between eight and 24 had a diagnosable mental health problem.

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Rock star Stevie Van Zandt in plea for more arts and music in English schools

Exclusive: E Street Band and Sopranos star visits south London to see his TeachRock programme in action

Legendary guitarist and Sopranos star Stevie Van Zandt has made an impassioned plea for more arts and music in England’s schools as a way of engaging disaffected young people during a visit to south London.

It was a last day of term like no other for pupils at Beckmead College – a school for students aged 14-19 with social, emotional and mental health needs – when the E Street Band member turned up, dressed like a rock star in purple velvet, winkle picker boots and trademark bandana.

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Labour MP calls two-child benefit cap ‘heinous’ in latest call to scrap policy

Keir Starmer under pressure to scrap limit as more than dozen MPs thought to support king’s speech amendment

Keir Starmer has come under further pressure to scrap the two-child benefit limit after another of his backbench MPs described the policy as “heinous”.

Writing in The Sunday Times, Canterbury MP Rosie Duffield said the cap, which came into effect under then-chancellor George Osborne in 2017, was “sinister and overtly sexist” and had been the main reason driving her to stand for parliament.

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Labour makes working-class children key to schools reform

Minister pledges more sports and drama in curriculum review as row deepens over two-child benefit cap

• Interview Labour’s Bridget Phillipson: ‘I will help working-class pupils defy the odds to succeed’

Expanding opportunities for working-class children by broadening the school curriculum to include more sport, drama, art and music alongside core academic subjects will be top priorities for the Labour government, the new education secretary says today.

In her first newspaper interview since being appointed to the cabinet by Keir Starmer, Bridget Phillipson insists her aim is to “break the link between background and success”, and to ensure every child has the same level of opportunity, regardless of their parents’ means.

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Council to review child protection case that triggered Leeds unrest

‘Serious disorder’ in Harehills began after children from Roma family taken into care

Leeds city council is undertaking an urgent review of the child protection case that triggered unrest in the city on Thursday night.

A police car was flipped on its side and a bus burned out in what police described as “serious disorder” in the Harehills area of the city, which began when children from a Roma family were taken into care.

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‘It’s put so many families in poverty’: people on the impact of the two-child benefit cap

As Labour backbenchers call for Keir Starmer to scrap the cap, families reveal their struggles as a result of the two-child limit

Keir Starmer has launched a cross-government taskforce to tackle child poverty, but backbench Labour MPs are calling for the government to go further and scrap the two-child benefit cap. Here people reveal how the limit affects their families.

Alicia* is a mother of four children in Newcastle, and is separated from their father. She does everything she can to avoid going to collect a parcel from a food bank. She will often buy a big sack of potatoes and cook them in different ways throughout the week – jacket potatoes, fried chips, wedges – so her kids get variation. She often skips breakfast and lunch herself.

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UK adolescents get two-thirds of daily calories from UPFs, says survey

Concerns over ultra-processed foods and effect on health have led some countries to introduce new labelling

Adolescents in the UK get nearly two-thirds of their daily calories from ultra-processed foods, or UPFs, with consumption highest among those from deprived backgrounds, researchers say.

The findings emerged from an analysis of food diaries kept from 2008 to 2019 by nearly 3,000 participants aged 11 to 18 as part of the UK National Diet and Nutrition Survey.

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Wes Streeting expected to tell parliament why he backs puberty blockers ban

Health secretary understood to be ‘minded’ to make ban permanent as Labour MPs criticise move to retain Tory policy

Wes Streeting is expected to tell MPs his reasons for supporting a ban on puberty blockers being prescribed to children for gender-based reasons, amid discontent in his own party.

After growing criticism among some Labour MPs, the health secretary used social media to defend his backing of an emergency ban on the drugs’ use, imposed by his Conservative predecessor Victoria Atkins, which is being challenged in the high court.

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War is lead cause behind huge drop in global vaccinations, UN warns

Vaccine misinformation has added to crisis of collapsed healthcare and poor nutrition, Unicef and WHO report

Conflicts have hampered efforts to vaccinate children across the world, health leaders have warned, as new figures showed about 14.5 million children had not received a single immunisation dose.

More than half of the children live in countries where armed conflicts or other humanitarian crises had created fragile and vulnerable situations, according to data from the UN children’s agency, Unicef, and the World Health Organization.

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Ampleforth inquiry finds alleged serious abuse against pupils in last 10 years

Allegations about monks and staff at North Yorkshire private school were shared with Charity Commission

An inquiry into the running of a prestigious private school said it uncovered a string of “serious abuse allegations” committed against pupils by monks and staff within the last decade.

The Charity Commission’s report found “significant weaknesses” in the safeguarding, governance and management of the two trusts responsible for running Ampleforth College, a Catholic private school in North Yorkshire founded more than 200 years ago by Benedictine monks and Ampleforth Abbey.

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Lucrative building contracts for Exclusive Brethren schools awarded to businesses run by church members

Donations to school building funds are tax deductible, with Brethren-owned businesses across three states the beneficiaries

Schools set up by the Exclusive Brethren sect have spent millions of dollars with businesses owned by church members on major building projects, including to a company majority-owned by the powerful Hales family, a Guardian Australia investigation has found.

The Brethren’s OneSchool Global (OSG) schools are registered charities in Australia and exempt from income tax. The schools also have building funds endorsed for deductible gift recipient status.

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One-year-old child survives two days on side of busy highway in Louisiana

Truck driver rescued baby near where the child’s four-year-old brother was found dead; the mother is now in custody

A Texas truck driver is being praised for rescuing a one-year-old boy who was seen crawling along a busy highway after surviving on his own for two days amid weather from Hurricane Beryl.

Reginald Walton, a driver for DHL Supply Chain, spotted the infant near a section of Interstate 10 in Calcasieu parish, Louisiana, near the state’s south-western border.

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Pakistani breast milk bank closes after Islamic clerics withdraw approval

Doctors deplore decision and point to country’s high neonatal mortality rate as bank, which opened in June, forced to close without taking a single deposit

When he heard a hospital in Karachi was setting up a milk bank for babies, the news was a “huge relief” to Mohammad Munawwar.

With his wife very sick and their premature son Ayan in hospital, the 52-year-old father had had to collect milk five or six times a day from different female relatives who were breastfeeding their own babies.

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Babbling scouse youngster shows babies can have accents, say scientists

Newborns are tuned in to the ups and downs of speech, and even a cry mimics language heard while in the womb

The upward intonation, the guttural “ck” and even the cheeky comeback to win the argument: at just 19 months old, baby Orla has mastered the crucial elements of speaking like a scouser.

Impressively, the toddler who featured in a viral video this week appears to have done so without the need for actual words.

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‘A lot of stereotypes to break’: Children’s Inquiry musical explores life in care in Britain

Children’s experiences form basis of play that weaves 150 years of care system history into narrative

When theatre-makers Matt Woodhead and Helen Monks gathered with a small group of children in a theatre in Essex five years ago, the plan was simple: discuss the care system.

Woodhead and Monks are co-directors of Lung Theatre, a company that has made a name for itself by tackling weighty subjects, such as the Chilcot inquiry, housing evictions and, most recently, the spate of self-inflicted deaths at Woodhill HMP, that are often investigative verbatim pieces.

The Children’s Inquiry runs 8 July to 3 August at the Southwark Playhouse

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Photos of Australian children used in dataset to train AI, human rights group says

Human Rights Watch found links to 190 photos of kids that were scraped off internet without families’ consent

Photos of Australian children have been included in the dataset used by several AI image-generating tools without the knowledge or consent of them or their families, research by Human Rights Watch (HRW) has found.

An analysis of less than 0.0001% of the 5.85bn images contained in the Laion-5B dataset, used by services such as Stable Diffusion creator Stability AI and Midjourney, found 190 photos of Australian children scraped from the internet.

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