I have exciting news! I've started a new venture :D As you may have noticed I've been asking lots of questions about #parenting I'm creating an app to make parents lives easier. How many emails/messages do you get about your kids each week? I get too many to count!

I have exciting news! I've started a new venture :D As you may have noticed I've been asking lots of questions about #parenting I'm creating an app to make parents lives easier. How many emails/messages do you get about your kids each week? I get too many to count!

I'm doing a bit of research on how families plan meals and would love your input! My question is: How does your busy family life impact your eating habits? Add a comment to say why you chosen the option you did and how many kids you have.

A parent has got in touch with me to ask for help. Her child goes to a school which was taking over by an academy trust two years ago, and the school have brought in a strict regime. Young people are punished for equipment problems like the wrong sized ruler or not having a transparent pencil case, or for putting a coat on the back of their chair. Punishments quickly escalate from detention to isolation, which lasts for a 24-hour period. Being in detention means missing the school transport home, and parents are given very little warning. Whilst in isolation pupils are not allowed to go to the canteen and get hot food, instead they are given a cold sandwich. For some pupils, that might be the only hot meal they would get that day. Parents have been organising and have collected 500 signatures on a petition as many are unhappy, but the head teacher will not agree to meet with them. As it is an academy school, the LA can do nothing. They don’t know what to do. They know that their children need something better, but no one is listening. They contact me because they don’t know who else to turn to. I am hearing too many stories like this. This type of high control regime will lead to school-related distress for many pupils. It will lead to many of them disliking school and finding it a stressful place. It will then lead to behaviour and attendance problems for some of those pupils – which leads to fines for their parents. It might also work for some, but that doesn’t justify the effect on the others. Is anyone tracking the long-term outcomes of these high control approaches, not just on exam results but on young people’s wellbeing and future lives? It might appear that it’s ‘turning the school around’ with silent corridors and perfect uniform, but from what I see, the cost is high. Sometimes invisible, but high. I see and hear about the impact every day, but whenever I talk about it I’m told to be quiet as I’m not a teacher. I can’t keep quiet because the stakes are just too high. We’re damaging the mental health of the next generation, and no one is listening.

I've been pretty quiet on here recently. One of the reasons is that I've been working on creating my own company. Exciting!! But I now need some help from parents of school-aged children (5-16yo) to fill in a survey for my user research. Link & more below.

New. Please report "sorry we are experiencing unusually high call volumes" messages. I want to test if some firms have this for EVERY call. If you call a bank, broadband, mobile, credit card, energy, water, sewerage firm, pls take 30s to report it via moneysavingexpert.com/report… In some cases it may be a breach of the consumer duty.