More than 1,000 primaries have signed up to an initiative to get children reading for pleasure. The First Minister’s Reading Challenge, which encourages youngsters to enjoy books, has so far been rolled out in 1,277 primary schools. Children can read from a selection of 100 books chosen by a panel of teachers, librarians, booksellers and parents, or from other books or texts that they are interested in. Prizes will be awarded for schools and pupils who provide inspiring accounts of their reading.

Councils have been urged to protect the services they “cherish” and resist the removal of education from local authority control. The call was made by David O’Neill, president of the umbrella local government organisation Cosla, at the body’s annual conference last week. He warned that the school governance review, announced by the government last month, could lead to the removal of education from council control, saying: “They may call it erosion - I call it removal.”

Efforts to tackle obesity in Scottish children have stagnated with virtually no progress over the past decade, new figures show. A report by Cancer Research UK found that 15 per cent of the 60,000 pupils who began primary school in 2014-15 were overweight - just one percentage point lower than in 2005-06. Over the past 10 years a total of 83,000 children have started primary school either overweight or obese.

Nominations are now open for the UK Language Teacher of the Year Awards. Schools have until October 21 to put forward language teachers in primary and secondary whom they feel particularly inspire their pupils or support colleagues by sharing expertise and ideas. The aim of the awards, run by the Association for Language Learning, is to support and promote language teaching and to raise the profile of it as a career. The presentation of the awards will take place on Saturday 25 March at the Language World 2017 conference in Nottingham (for further details see here).

@Emma_Seith