Not pleasant - but genuine

Education in Northumberland is today facing its biggest shake-up for decades. Northumberland County Council is planning to move away from its traditional three-tier education system as part of a £340m revamp of the area's education system.

That will mean middle school closures and a complicated raft of proposed changes for those schools which remain.

The word "proposed" is an important one because this document sets out a range of options for the way education in different parts of Northumberland will be organised in the future.

And the county's Director of Education Brian Edwards says he wants to engage parents fully in the process.

That is to be welcomed along with the fact that this plan - unlike those which preceded Mr Edwards' arrival - addresses education provision in Northumberland in its totality.

There will be casualties. There will be arguments. There will be debate. And there will be opposition to some of the measures in some of the areas.

That is only as it should be with a project which is calling for the views of 48,000 parents on such a major issue. What is not in question, we believe, is that Northumberland's many education issues have to be tackled. Doing nothing is simply not an option. It is not a pleasant process but the plan does represent a genuine attempt to tackle problems in the whole education system and lay down a sustainable framework for the future.

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Key question still unanswered

In the eight months since the Hutton Inquiry was launched no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq. No-one should lose site of that fact as they ponder the 740 pages that make up his learned lordship's considered findings.

The Prime Minister can celebrate not only being largely exonerated in the report but also the way the Government machine used the inquiry process to shift the political debate away from the actual rights and wrongs of going to war in the first place.

Hutton has only dealt with a small part of the much larger question of whether there was a moral case to go to war.

We are astonished to note Lord Hutton has concluded that the intelligence presented to Parliament and the public - and which Mr Blair used to win a knife-edge Commons vote on Iraq - was genuine.

If the intelligence was genuine then where are the weapons they referred to? If they did not exist then how could our intelligence agencies be so convinced and yet so wrong?

As fellow journalists, we cannot defend the way in which Andrew Gilligan presented his original story. But we will defend the right of the BBC and our profession as a whole to raise questions which still, today, remain unanswered.

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