Talking of inclusion, congratulations to the Local Government Association, which proudly boasted a line-up of 16 top-flight speakers and chairmen at its annual education conference in Liverpool. In a strange quirk of fate, all of them turned out to be men. Not many black faces either. Bill Richardson, chairman of the Mathematics Association, assures us that this is indeed remarkable: “Consider this: the chance of tossing a coin 16 times and coming up heads every time are roughly 15 in a million,” he said.