Happy New Year to all our readers! We look forward to seeing you at this month’s BETT show.

The government’s pre-Budget report was released last month and gives us an idea of the thinking as regarding school funding going forward. Given the ongoing recession, I believe we can be overall quite pleased that Labour has pledged to continue to support schools with an annual increase of around 0.7 per cent through to 2013. There is also good news to be found for those families earning less than £16,190 a year. Their children will now be eligible for free school meals. This pledge should affect half a million children and will go some way to addressing the related problems of child poverty and obesity.