From today's UK papers

The Independent

The national curriculum should be halved and a "reserve army" of parents and professionals brought into schools to bring back creative education and end the government's testing mania, the Demos think-tank said yesterday.

A university professor and his assistant were jailed yesterday for plotting to defraud the North Staffordshire Hospital Trust and Keele University of thousands of pounds.

Daily Telegraph

The government announced yesterday that it was setting up an agency to merge the Employment Service and the Benefits Agency as part of its drive to obtain full employment.

The Guardian

In a move that gives new meaning to the phrase "public-private partnership", the publicly funded Science Museum has built a private pottery studio for the use of the wife of the new director, Lindsay Sharp, on museum premises.

Public bodies buy Indonesian paper from pristine forests, despite commitments to protect the environment.

Blinkered academics are narrowing access to key subject areas.

A new alliance with Princeton is helping Oxford shape up to the times and offering the prospect of a joint degree.

Does the London Institute have its eye on Wimbledon School of Art?

Enlightened schemes to help illegal immigrants are just part of California's pioneering vision of higher education for the disadvantaged.

Financial Times

The chancellor Gordon Brown has extended his grip on industrial policy by putting reviews of science funding and services for small business at the heart of the next three-year spending round.

The Times

Britain's most experienced cancer doctors are so bad at communicating that almost 50 per cent of their patients do not receive vital information about their condition, Cancer Research Campaign researchers said yesterday.

The vice-chairman of Warburg Pincus, the venture capital firm, is using $10 million of his own money to set up a research programme at Cambridge University to look at instability in capital markets.

Miscellany

Oxford University will today offer bursaries to all undergraduates whose parents earn less than £20,000 a year, in an attempt to repair the damage done by the Laura Spence affair. ( Times , Guardian , Independent )

Tony Blair will meet trade union leaders at Downing Street tomorrow to allay fears that plans for more private-sector capital and management in Britain's schools and hospitals will undermine public services. ( Guardian , Independent )