Children should be allowed to delay the start of their compulsory schooling until they are at least six, a third of all primary school teachers say.

Schools are threatening legal action against the Government over spending cuts that could rob up to 50,000 teenagers of their sixth-form places in September.

The Government is drawing up plans to head off an unemployment crisis among the 400,000 graduates who will leave university this summer in the middle of a recession.

One of Britain's leading experts on school testing and assessment delivers a scathing attack on national curriculum tests for 11-year-olds today.

The government last night gave a blunt warning to teachers ahead of a vote tomorrow that boycotting national curriculum tests for 600,000 11-year-olds would be illegal. The intervention raised the stakes in the row over the tests with members of the National Union of Teachers, who plan to back a boycott of tests in maths, English and science at their conference in Cardiff today. Aides to the Schools Secretary Ed Balls said it would be unlawful for headteachers not to deliver the tests.

The "toxic" intervention of naming and shaming struggling schools is creating more problems for them than it solves. It leads to teacher resignations soaring, heads being sacked and staff taking more time off due to stress-related illness, according to two separate studies published by the National Union of Teachers (NUT) today.