Contact Tracey, 0161 728 2000. £20 per child, please bring a packed lunch.

Emergency childcare cover available at a Education Matters. 0161 728 2000

Do you need emergency child care for next Wednesday? Book a place at Education Matters! Call Tracey 0161 728 2000. A safe, stimulating and fun environment!

Leila Suharwardy (16) from Parrenthorn High School, Prestwich is on the road to success! Leila was delighted to achieve an A* in her GCSE Maths mock paper. Leila works hard and is very disciplined. Well done Leila. Another successful student at Education Matters!

Teachers are challenging an attempt to ban them from wearing flip-flops, facial piercings, jeans and other casual items of dress to work. West Virginia’s largest school district, Kanawha County, wants to introduce a dress code which teachers are opposing.

These students look uncomfortable as they study - but the aim is to stop them getting short-sighted. Metal bars have been installed on desks at 19 primary schools in the city of Wuhan in Central Hubel province to force pupils to sit at a safe distance from their work.

Headteachers from the schools claim that it helps the students to develop good reading habits.

Maybe they will introduce hanging cages to lock naughty students in. A medieval practise a senior member of my local wine bar would certainly approve!

Up to 60 Shanghai maths teachers are to be brought to England to raise standards, in an exchange arranged by the Department for Education.

They will provide masterclasses in 30 "maths hubs", which are planned as a network of centres of excellence.

Shanghai's pupils have the highest maths results in international tests.

The announcement comes as a campaign is launched to raise adult maths skills, with warnings that poor numeracy is costing the UK economy £20bn per year.

The National Numeracy Challenge aims to improve numeracy levels for a million people.

It is providing an online self-assessment test - with help for those lacking in confidence in maths.

The proposals to bring 60 English-speaking maths teachers from Shanghai is an attempt to learn from a city that has been the top performer in the OECD's Pisa tests.

The OECD says that children of poor families in Shanghai are on average better at maths than middle class children in the UK.

The Shanghai teachers, expected to arrive from the autumn, will help share their teaching methods, support pupils who are struggling and help to train other teachers.

They will be based in "maths hubs" - and bidding to become such a specialist centre will open on Wednesday.

The maths hubs will be partnerships of schools, which will work with maths experts and share best practice with other schools in their area.

Children in Edinburgh may get a far shorter Christmas break in 2016 and 2017, according to the council's plan for school holidays.

But Edinburgh Council dismissed claims it was planning to slash the length of the Christmas holidays permanently.

Provisional holiday dates, seen by BBC Scotland, suggest youngsters will still get a break of about two and a half weeks next year,

But in 2016 and 2017, the holiday may be a week shorter than that.

A consultation on proposed holiday dates runs until the end of this month.

Similar pattern

Under the proposals, the last day of term in 2015 would be Friday 18 December and children would return to school on Wednesday 6 January - two and a half weeks in total.

But in session 2016-17 the holiday would run from Friday 23 December to Wednesday 4 January - about a week and a half.

Then in 2017-18 the holiday dates would be Friday 22 December to Thursday 4 January.

The council said how holidays were set depended on the day Christmas falls on, the date of Easter and local holidays.

Newspaper reports had suggested the council was planning to purposefully shorten the Christmas holiday and increase the length of the summer holiday to compensate.

School holidays are set locally by each council but often follow a similar pattern across Scotland.