• Stash those toboggans, turn off the telly, the kids are going back to school at last. Just make sure they don't get pushed over by the ambulance-chasers at the school gates eager to sue your local authority on a no-win no-fee basis.
• Watch out on Wednesday for our full and interactive secondary school league tables. National Challenge supremo David Woods is bound to be poring through them, hoping his strategies have paid off.
• Universities, meanwhile, are full of gloomy first-years who, according to research at Leicester University, are anxious about going back to the still unfamiliar university environment after a Christmas break back home. And if they're girls, they're even more likely to be moping. Perhaps if they'd got their essays done…
Report card
The world of higher education has more to worry about than miserable undergraduates. With budgets slashed and talk of cuts, closures and shorter degrees – and amid furious claims from the Russell Group that it's being brought to its knees – academics appear to be turning on one another. To howls of protest, Durham's vice-chancellor, Chris Higgins, has set out his vision of funding based on a hierarchy of universities, with the most dosh going to research-led institutions like his own. His counterpart at Bucks New University, Ruth Farwell, retorts:
"It would be a mistake to encourage the development of an HE sector riddled with even more snobbery than it already has, by basing its future structure on an old-fashioned model resembling grammar schools and secondary moderns."
So we turn to the US for a heartwarming story from Harvard. The elite university is training skilled, successful people approaching retirement to re-enter the workplace to do socially worthwhile things in the fields of education, health, the environment or economic development. Beats the hell out of tea-dancing.
Quote of the week
"Actually, they like pizza. And they watch television. And one has an Xbox!"
Children from a mostly white school in Bradford meet those from a mostly Muslim school for the first time
On the margins
Send home the clowns German scholars believe they're "universally recognised as symbols of happiness", but studies here and in America have shown kids are less impressed. Children's wards have been warned to keep their decor clown-free, as "even the oldest children" find clowns scary.
What you said
Insider perspective on Arran Fernandez, the 14-year-old maths whizz accepted by Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, from rosiev, who was there until recently:
"I graduated from Fitz in July, and there is a lot of chat from past and current students about this kid. Maybe at one of the bigger, more traditional colleges this wouldn't have been such a big deal. But Fitz is one of the youngest, and is one of the most sport, music and and socially orientated of all the Cambridge establishments. The feeling is that this is just another gimmick by the Fitz establishment to try and boost the academic reputation of what is seen as a 'cool' college, as opposed to Emma or Kings, which are much more competitive.
Fourteen isn't so young to be studying what he is, if he is talented enough. But I think it is a shame to waste what could be a brilliant university experience. And it's not just about drinking and partying either (although for most people that's a cricial part, lets be honest). In Cam especially, there is soooo much on offer that I don't think a 14-year-old would have the emotional maturity to really get the most out of: the art scene, the calibre of sporting achievement, the amazing union and so on. I can't see the people I know at Fitz taking too kindly to some 14-year-old prodigy, or his parents."
Stories of the day
Packed lunch Why do parents put junk food in school lunchboxes?
Power play Why colleges are backing the nuclear industry
Tomorrow
See how your school has done in the secondary school league tables for England
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