The tens of thousands of students and schoolchildren who took to the streets of cities around the UK yesterday were protesting not just against the rise in university tuition fees but also the scrapping of the Education Maintenance Allowance for disadvantaged school pupils – an issue that's increasingly coming to the fore.
Guardian live-blogger Adam Gabbatt says:
"Some estimates placed the number of protesters nationwide yesterday at up to 130,000 students. Many were schoolchildren, including some as young as 13 and 14. While the most protests passed off without incident, there were isolated incidents of violence and skirmishes with police. Most of these were in central London, although there were also clashes in Manchester."
This morning, several protests are continuing – and being reported in Adam's live blog. They include occupations at UCL, Cardiff and Edinburgh.
There was an amazing series of tweets from @pennyred, the Twitter name of journalist Laurie Penny beginning at around 1pm yesterday:
"Running down whitehall through the traffic. Schoolkids on the buses are screaming. TORY SCUM! Pedestrians staring."
"This is the new children's crusade. There are no leaders. Epic and tragic."
"At the entrance of westminster, met by solid wall of police vans, cops, horses in armour."
"Just got hit in back of head by cop."
"Pushed through falling barrier by cop. Left leg fucked. Will carry on reporting if poss. All a bit crazy."
"The cops have blocked us off at the back. This is a kettling now. It's gonna get nasty."
"Kids streaming through double line cops, yelling 'let us through! We have the right to protest!' Police kidney punching a child."
"Cops look like they're getting ready to charge. Batons on shoulders. Kids screaming and running."
"Rush from the back. More kids getting hit. Fires fed by student diaries."
Laurie Penny then wrote a comment piece for the Guardian that begins:
"Outside Downing Street, in front of a line of riot police, I am sitting beside a makeshift campfire. It's cold, and the schoolchildren who have skipped classes gather around as a student with a three-string guitar strikes up the chords to Tracy Chapman's Talkin' Bout a Revolution. The kids start to sing, sweet and off-key, an apocalyptic choir knotted around a small bright circle of warmth and energy."
While the Guardian is stressing the largely peaceful nature of the protests, others are predictably revelling in the violence.
The Sun, under the headline Here Fee Go Again, launches straight in with this:
"Yobs attacked cops with metal crash barriers and trashed a police van as a second protest against rising university tuition fees turned violent yesterday."
The Mail has found itself a new angle – it's all about the riot girls:
It's supersize headline reads: "Rage of the girl rioters: Britain's students take to the streets again – and this time women are leading the charge."
Here's a flavour:
"Rioting girls became the disturbing new face of violent protest yesterday.
"They threatened to overturn a police riot squad van as they smashed windows, looted riot shields, uniforms and helmets and daubed the sides with graffiti.
"Police fled the van as the young demonstrators against university tuition fees yelled obscenities only yards from Downing Street."
The BBC reports a warning from vice-chancellors (namely Steve Smith) of the "devastating impact on universities if politicians fail to agree on government plans to raise tuition fees". Smith's view is that unless students are made to pay up, universities will have to cut drastically the number of places they offer.
Meanwhile there was that other education story
The one about Gove making the most sweeping changes to schools in a generation in yesterday's white paper.
He's going to give headteachers the powers to make decisions about their own schools – as long as they decide to dress the kids up in blazers and ties and teach them chemistry and French. And sort them into houses and put prefects in charge. And get teachers to search their pupils for knives and guns. And recruit soldiers as teachers. Otherwise, entirely up to them really. How liberated they must feel.
Warwick Mansell takes Gove to task for foisting academy status on to schools.
"Something extraordinary is happening in education. Plans, announced in a white paper being billed by the coalition as decentralising, actually introduce a mechanism that breaks new ground in the power it hands to the secretary of state.
"Michael Gove has pledged to take tough action to intervene in cases where schools – both primary and secondary – are deemed to be underperforming.
"Schools found to have GCSE or national test results below centrally set minimum expectations, which are failing to improve and where Ofsted has concerns, will be converted by the government into academies, says the white paper."
And Comment is Free is running a debate between a teacher and former soldier about the idea of smoothing the path from the battleground to the classroom.
A Guardian editorial accuses the white paper of being "as busy as a demented bee".
"In all, it is an ambitious hotchpotch, in which good ideas, such as bits of the new approach to training and the improved sanctions against bad teachers, sit alongside daft ones, such as the further downgrading of sport and the nostalgia for houses, prefects and blazers."
The Telegraph, on other hand, declares: "Michael Gove knows the true importance of education". He is "a passionate advocate of better schools and should be allowed to see the job through".
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