Gillian Shephard Secretary of State for Education made much of the estimated 1 million surplus places held by

Gillian Shephard, Secretary of State for Education, made much of the estimated 1 million surplus places held by local education authorities, and£700m she estimates is held by schools in balances as she defended the 1995-96 financial settlement for LEAs.Responding to a Labour- initiated debate, she struck a very different tone from her leaked memoradum to a Cabinet colleague, David Hunt, which warned that without another £90m to fund the coming pay recommendation for teachers, between 7,000 and 10,000 posts could go.The Chancellor, however, has said not a penny more, and yesterday Mrs Shephard’s only reference to the memo was that it was “of a certain age”.David Blunkett, Labour’s education spokesman, wondered whether Mrs Shephard was “an unwilling pawn in a game which sees toughness as being more important than investment in our children’s future”. And two Conservative MPs called for “capping” to be lifted to allow councils to decide their spending in accordance with “perceived local need”.But Mrs Shephard said that despite annual predictions of threats to teachers’ jobs, their numbers had remained stable at about 390,000 for the last four years. “As pupil numbers move up, as they have done over the last few years, it is possible to tighten some staffing ratios without threatening standards – as the recent improved examination results show.”Mrs Shephard is coming to rely on a sentence sure to enrage parents and teachers in the state sector: “There is no research existing in this country which shows that marginal increases in class sizes harm standards.” She has added the word “marginal” since her Minister of State, Eric Forth, first made the claim.Labour’s motion asserting that the settlement would “cause class sizes to shoot up” and “lead to the loss of thousands of teaching posts” to the detriment of standards was defeated 295-260 – despite the quotes being the words of Mrs Shephard.. Kenneth Clarke plans to put out to tender the drafting of part of next year’s Finance Bill, taking privatisation deeper into the heart of Whitehall. The Chancellor also made clear yesterday that he expects growing numbers of Civil Service agencies to opt for private ownership and “the opportunity for growth” as private sector organisations.
In a speech portraying the Conservatives as the true modernisers of the machinery of government, he redefined the role of departments as “purchasers” of services from competing public and private suppliers – the model he introduced into the NHS, community care and to some extent education.His most immediately dramatic announcement, however, in a speech to the European Policy Forum, was that he is giving “serious thought” to inviting independent barristers and City law firms to draft parts of next year’s Budget-implementing Finance Bill.After criticism that the speed and volume of modern legislation was producing poor law, Mr Clarke acknowledged that “Finance Bills are not regarded as a model of perfection by judges, practitioners or British businessmen and we must not be afraid to try to find new ways to improve them”.Government Bills have been drafted entirely by the 25-strong Parliamentary Counsel, but Mr Clarke, while saying his proposal would be a pilot, said: “Barristers with many years’ experience in the courts of technical subjects could be better placed than generalists to cope with the highly specialist problems that arise in areas such as financial services, tax law or insolvency law”.His larger theme was the management transformation in Whitehall, where he said departments must increasingly act as purchasers, concentrating on quality and value rather than cost control. That put agencies on notice that departments “may look for other ways of providing the service for which it is responsible”.Many agencies provided services available in the public sector.

Given the constraints on publicly owned bodies developing their business, there was every reason to encourage them to opt for private ownership.Market testing, privatisation, contracting out and decentralised pay bargaining would produce a smaller civil service with a larger interchange with the private sector.. The door to the laboratory is not only locked but sealed with red wax, as were the apartments of purge victims taken away in the middle of the night by Stalin’s secret police. The man who seals the room every time he leaves it, to make sure no on e interferes with his work in his absence, is Vladislav Kozeltsev, one of the Russian biochemists responsible for maintaining Lenin’s pickled body. Last week he took the Independent to see the corpse behind the door. But it was not the founder of the Soviet Union, for Dr Kozeltsev has a new client who is benefiting from the secret technology developed to keep the world’s dead Communists looking youthful. She is a 2,400-year-old ice maiden from Siberia, whose preserved corpse was recently discovered by archaeologists excavating in the Altai mountains, near the Chinese border.
“The Lady,” as she has been nicknamed, kept her looks over the centuries because water trickled into her tomb and froze her in a block of ice.

When the archaeologists first uncovered her, her skin was as white as the day she died and covered with tattoosof deer and snow leopards. But they poured hot water over her to melt the ice and the skin darkened in the atmosphere. Dr Kozeltsev, of Moscow’s Centre for Biological Structures, has been working to return the skin to its original colour and reveal the tattoos. Soon “The Lady” will be ready to go on show to the public.The excavation, led by Natalya Polosmak, of the Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, took place in the summer of 1993. On a dig in 1949, archaeologists found a male mummy with similar tattoos in one of the many burial mounds that litter the “Pastures of Heaven”, the high steppes of the Altai region. But at a place called Ukok, a few hundred yards from the fence separating Russia from China, Ms Polosmak and her team from Novosibirsk found a tattooed woman, in far better condition than the man, who is now in the Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.Russian border guards had tipped off the group to dig at Ukok, which means “the end of everything,” but still the archaeologists nearly missed the tomb There was a later grave above it, which had been looted.